I take the liberty to get back to your earlier article about chakras where you mention that you have “recently started work on the next chakra down, the sex organ chakra, but there have been no results so far – and I don’t presume that there necessarily ever will be!”.

What I tried with great success is to follow Stephen Mace’s advice, asking my HGA to provide me with the proper ‘words of power’ (through automatic writing) to activate my chakras at will. I now just have to recite a few barbaric names to get them all pulsing with light and energy.

Even in the Indian tantric traditions, there is no single model. The Kaulas worship the Devi as Tripura in the root chakras, but other sects, like the early Nath Sampradaya consider that best is to first open the crown chakra to ‘suck’ the kundalini from above. In Satyananda Sarasvati’s Bihar School of Yoga, we normally start with Ajna chakra, since this energy center is said to control all other chakras. It is mainly a matter of choice, but it seems that they naturally open as described in your article.

Best,

Alex

I also used to think chakras were new-age inconsistent nonsense, until they came to me by their own and claimed their right. First was “activation” of Ajna chakra, a pulsating censation, sometimes unnerving, that faded easily when I changed my attention. In a certain point of my life, I could switch the sensation “on” and “off” by merely paying attention to it. But I’ve never found any usefulness in this, and I’ve stopped caring about it.

Then, I remember two ayahuasca sessions that touched my chakras. The first was also my first “peia” (ayahuasqueiro’s term for “bad trip”), and it was characterized by a terrifying feeling of loneliness and groundlessness. I only got to the “center of the cyclone” later, doing bioenergetic exercises in a reichian therapy, where I had a flashback and met the sensation again: the nitid perception of how we’re all lost, all lonely, and all afraid to love. There was this hard/stoney feeling on my heart chakra, and it was “melting” and releasing this realization-of-loneliness sensation in my system. The melting process was vexatory, because it was based on surrendering – dropping down the weapons and opening to everything. It seems to me that you’ve experienced a very similar sensation.

Then, a few months later, on my following ayahuasca trip, I’ve “met” some sort of “spiritual doctors” (that, in my experience, are always there on ayahuasca sessions), and they began working chakra-by-chakra parting from the crown. Theyr work went only to the throat chakra, and in every one of them I could “feel” they “spinning”, and some “impurities” being released, and some ideas associated with those “impurities” (like the lack of sincere communication, in the case of the throat chakra). I have my theories about how ayahuasca works, but this is another topic entirely.

Then, during my first vipassana seatings, I’ve experienced an “opening” of the Crown chakra, a lot more intense than the previous experiences (with the possible exception of the heart chakra experience), like I’ve discovered a new (and empty) “body-space” above my head. It lasted the entire vipassana session and was very pleasant.

I think my experiences match your models, ordered differently, surely, but very similar. I think ayahuasca “jumped some steps” in this whole cleansing/opening process, and peraphs you can force the entire chakra-cleaning/opening stuff to happen outside the insight cycle through bioenergetic / tantric / chemognostic technics. (:

You’re right that it is a mystery (to me, anyway) as to why we feel chakra sensations in association with spiritual practice! My strongest chakra sensations are at root and crown – they happen a lot, even when I’m not meditating. I used to feel chakra sensations a lot in my solar plexus region and the middle of my chest as well, but I don’t feel those as often as I used to. My “third eye” only ever seems to get sensations when I’m pretty deep into an altered level of consciousness (and I can actually get to a deeper level by concentrating on my third eye.) As for *why* those sensations happen, however – I certainly don’t know! I really like your theory about how it might be associated with emotional engagement with the work, that really strikes a chord with me.

People do indeed salivate when they taste a real lemon. But the reasons for this are pretty obvious. What would be the reason for sensations in the thymus gland when we surrender our sense of self? It’s a mystery!

@raoul: Third-eye activation seems to me especially strongly related to attainment of the fourth concentration jhana. You might like to read up on descriptions of this, if you haven’t checked already whether that’s what you’re hitting!

Awesome.

Developing yor crown chakra must be the next step on the Road to enlightenment.

I would suggest you continue with your Kundalini exercises until you activate the root chakra.

When the time is right the surge of pure Earth energy will run up and down your spine activating all the chakras simultaniously, fussing with the Divine Light from above.

Then I think you’ll enjoy the full benifts of crown activation. All of the time.

To me, the link between subjective feelings in the chakras and milestones of practice might be cultural expectation. Even people that don’t know very much about chakras may still know that feelings in them are associated with milestones of practice.

Of course, there’s another possibility, if the ideo-dynamic lemon-salivation parallel were continued. People don’t only salivate when the *imagine* biting a lemon, they also salivate when they actually do the deed.