Our chakras move the life force that keeps us alive. A chakra isn't a thing — it's a flow. The Sanskrit word translates loosely as "wheel," but it may be more accurate to picture a chakra as a small whirlpool: a place where life force energy gathers, spins, transforms, and moves on. When our chakras are flowing freely, we feel it — as vitality, as clarity, as the particular ease of being fully present in our own lives.

Our chakra system is where our energy and physical selves intersect and interact. Our chakras are how the body arranges the movement of energy within our specific embodiment. They direct our life force in different patterns, depending on where we are evolving, expanding and ascending. How that energy flows attunes us to a particular range of experiences and possibilities. And those experiences and the paths we choose, in turn, influence and affect the way life force moves through us. Think of our chakra system as an intimate and ongoing conversation with the universe, and with everything around us. When that conversation is open and unobstructed, life tends to feel like it's meeting us — ideas arrive, connections form, the body feels at home in itself