Spiritual Practice
The solar plexus chakra governs confidence, will, boundaries, sits at the stomach, digestion, diaphragm, and is coloured yellow. What it is reached for, the practice attached to it, and an honest account of how old the seven-chakra model actually is.
Confidence, will, boundaries. In the seven-chakra system this is the 3th of seven centres running from the base of the spine to the top of the head, and each is assigned an area of experience and a colour.
It is located at the stomach, digestion, diaphragm, and the colour attached to it is yellow. The colours run in spectrum order from red at the base to violet at the crown, which is worth knowing because that ordering is a twentieth-century Western addition rather than part of the original system.
The circumstances usually described: you cannot say no, or you have been going along with things for months. That is the practical version of what a blocked solar plexus chakra is supposed to feel like, stripped of the energetic language.
And the practice: saying no once, deliberately, to something small. Core work. Breathing into the belly rather than the chest. Notice that every one of those is a reasonable thing to do in that situation regardless of whether chakras exist, which is close to the whole of the honest case for the system.
| Governs | Confidence, will, boundaries |
| Location | Stomach, digestion, diaphragm |
| Colour | Yellow |
| Reached for when | You cannot say no, or you have been going along with things for months |
| Usual practice | Saying no once, deliberately, to something small. Core work. Breathing into the belly rather than the chest |
Worth being accurate about, because the usual account is wrong in a specific and interesting way. Chakras appear in Indian tantric and yogic texts from around the eighth century onward, as part of a system of subtle anatomy used in meditation practice. That much is genuinely old.
The version almost everybody in the West uses, with exactly seven centres in rainbow order, is not. Different texts describe four, five, six, nine, twelve or more, in different places, with different attributes and no colour scheme. The seven-and-rainbow model was assembled in the early twentieth century, largely through a 1919 translation by Arthur Avalon and then through theosophical writing that followed it.
So the practice is old and the diagram on the poster is about a hundred years old. Both of those are worth knowing, and almost no page selling you a chakra course will tell you the second one.
It does not, historically. Chakras come out of Indian tantric practice and Western astrology comes out of Hellenistic Greece, and the two were put side by side relatively recently by writers who liked both. Anybody giving you a firm mapping of planets to chakras is presenting a modern invention as a tradition.
In the system it governs confidence, will, boundaries, and it is located at the stomach, digestion, diaphragm.
The circumstances usually described are you cannot say no, or you have been going along with things for months. There is no measurement for it; it is a description you either recognise or do not.
Yellow, in the modern Western version. The colour scheme is about a century old rather than part of the original system.
There is no anatomical structure corresponding to one. The practice is an old framework for attending to different parts of experience, and that is a different claim from a physical one.
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Spiritual PracticeThe root chakra governs safety, money, belonging, sits at the legs, feet, base of the spine, and is coloured red. What it is reached for, the practice attached to it, and an honest account of how old the seven-chakra model actually is.
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