This blog post is the best attempt at a gears model here I’ve seen so far. I occasionally think and work in terms of chakras (mine or someone else’s) and find it useful, and don’t mind saying so in public. Lots of people have weird beliefs here but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a thing in the territory that’s being pointed to. I expect reading about chakras to not be particularly helpful relative to experiential exercises.
The “major energy centers” the so-called “chakras,” are mostly coincident with major glands in the body, e.g. the endocrine glands.
In a answer above from Sarah she says things like:
your lower belly/hips (second chakra)
To me it seems like in one first sense a chakra is something quite small (e.g. the size of a gland) and in the second presentation it’s much larger (e.g. the size of the hip).
Do those two concepts have different Hindi names? How do they relate to each other? Why aren’t other people confused by those two different views in a way that causes things to be written about them?
Second chakra definitely does not consist of your hips. I don’t know what it does consist of, but it’s probably more like a gland / a bundle of nerves / a bundle of muscles. It’s tricky to separate these experientially because most things that would affect one of them (e.g. touching) would affect the others.
The gland thing seems weird to me. Most internet sources associate the first chakra with the adrenals, which sit on top of the kidneys and aren’t physically anywhere near the usually pictured location of the first chakra (at the base of your spine.) Most sources associate second chakra with the ovaries (which are in the right place) or testes (which aren’t, afaik, in anyone’s lower belly area.) I’d been thinking of second chakra as basically my uterus, but altering hip posture is relevant for e.g. relieving uterine pain.
Why do you consider it to be a good attempt? As far as I see the person who wrote it had no guidance and there knowledge mainly from books and thus doesn’t have any experiences of energy flow.
Both on the phenomenological level and also on the practical level given that he writes about not being able to “last longer” which requires to get the energy flowing up.
“Best” does not imply “good”! I suspect many of the particular claims are wrong but I appreciate that he made an attempt at all. He seems to be working from substantial self-experimentation but of course he is one idiosyncratic human and what works/doesn’t work for him may not be so for others.
This blog post is the best attempt at a gears model here I’ve seen so far. I occasionally think and work in terms of chakras (mine or someone else’s) and find it useful, and don’t mind saying so in public. Lots of people have weird beliefs here but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a thing in the territory that’s being pointed to. I expect reading about chakras to not be particularly helpful relative to experiential exercises.
He writes:
In a answer above from Sarah she says things like:
To me it seems like in one first sense a chakra is something quite small (e.g. the size of a gland) and in the second presentation it’s much larger (e.g. the size of the hip).
Do those two concepts have different Hindi names? How do they relate to each other? Why aren’t other people confused by those two different views in a way that causes things to be written about them?
Second chakra definitely does not consist of your hips. I don’t know what it does consist of, but it’s probably more like a gland / a bundle of nerves / a bundle of muscles. It’s tricky to separate these experientially because most things that would affect one of them (e.g. touching) would affect the others.
The gland thing seems weird to me. Most internet sources associate the first chakra with the adrenals, which sit on top of the kidneys and aren’t physically anywhere near the usually pictured location of the first chakra (at the base of your spine.) Most sources associate second chakra with the ovaries (which are in the right place) or testes (which aren’t, afaik, in anyone’s lower belly area.) I’d been thinking of second chakra as basically my uterus, but altering hip posture is relevant for e.g. relieving uterine pain.
Why do you consider it to be a good attempt? As far as I see the person who wrote it had no guidance and there knowledge mainly from books and thus doesn’t have any experiences of energy flow.
Both on the phenomenological level and also on the practical level given that he writes about not being able to “last longer” which requires to get the energy flowing up.
“Best” does not imply “good”! I suspect many of the particular claims are wrong but I appreciate that he made an attempt at all. He seems to be working from substantial self-experimentation but of course he is one idiosyncratic human and what works/doesn’t work for him may not be so for others.