Index of Yoga Asanas and Pranayama Practices
Index of Ailments Related to the Chakras
In 1999, at age twenty-eight, I learned I had thyroid cancer. Before this, the word chakra had little meaning to me. But suddenly, with this shocking diagnosis, my search for healing rapidly expanded. Perhaps through intuition or past life experience, I had a deep, driving desire to leave no stone unturned when it came to my healing.
I began to search for ways to get to the root cause of why I got cancer in the first place. I knew that if I didn’t uproot the disease at its source, I would surely get it again. And in my late twenties, that wasn’t an option since I had always planned on living to reach one hundred years old.
In my book The Wheel of Healing with Ayurveda: An Easy Guide to a Healthy Lifestyle, I outline the many different discoveries that led to my healing. Allopathic (conventional) medicine played a role, but I intuitively knew that the answers lay in alternative healing modalities. During my exploration, I sat among a pile of library books on alternative medicine and opened up to a life-changing page in Dr. Christiane Northrup’s book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. The page spoke about the chakras and exploring healing through them. I say it was life-changing because as I was modifying all aspects of my life, an examination of my chakras could now be a focal point for my research into why I got sick.
Changing my diet, increasing my exercise regimen, adding meditation, and improving my relationships all helped in my journey to healing. However, awareness of the chakras gave me an advantage over all other patients suffering from thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases.
In exploring the thyroid gland and its location in the body, and in learning about the fifth chakra, I started making connections between my current illness and the first twenty-eight years of my life. I looked back and found that most of my illnesses in childhood and young adulthood revolved around the area of the throat. When I was very young I frequently suffered from strep throat or tonsillitis, so much so that doctors repeatedly urged my mother to allow me to have surgery to remove my tonsils. My mother, who was afraid of me going under anesthesia, never agreed to have them taken out.
Then at age seventeen I got mononucleosis. My tonsils were so swollen that they touched in the middle of my throat, closing off my windpipe. I had an abscess in my throat and couldn’t breathe. It was so severe that I had to have surgery just so they could open it up to allow me to breathe again.
As I pondered those times with all the throat infections, it became clear to me that something was very wrong and literally blocked in the area of my throat. One of the things the fifth chakra is responsible for is our verbal expression. For me, the illnesses meant exploring why I couldn’t properly express myself. I had to ask the questions, “What is holding me back from speaking my truth?” and “Why do I feel I can’t speak up?”
I won’t go into too much detail, but what I learned was that the circumstances of my upbringing, combined with my being a highly sensitive child, hadn’t allowed me the safe space to verbally express myself. In adulthood I had to learn this skill. I believe that without learning this important lesson through the chakras, I would not have completely healed. Patterns that seemed to repeat themselves often throughout my life would have continued to reoccur had I not taken heed of my body’s wisdom.
Spiritual and energetic in nature, chakra healing can be a wonderful addition to help you understand the intricacies of your health, just as it did for me. In chronic or advanced stages of a disease, chakra healing can help you hasten your recovery by unblocking the areas of the body that are ailing.
Unlike believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, you don’t need to wholeheartedly embrace the belief of the chakras to reap the benefits of a chakra healing practice. Belief certainly helps and will probably get you deeper into removal of blockages, but awareness can work just the same. Many things that we don’t see — feelings, emotions, thoughts, cellphone connections, air — are real. The following true story from my spiritual journey with alternative health illustrates this point.
In 2005, I was struck with what seemed like either a killer virus or a kidney infection. I had a high fever, my body ached, and I felt sharp, stabbing pains in my kidneys. I summoned all the energy I had just to drive myself to the doctor’s office. After I explained my symptoms to the doctor, they took a panel of blood work. I was so weak that they left me to sleep in the examining room for about thirty minutes, and then sent me home. Minutes after I arrived at home, the doctor called me with my blood results. He said he was calling Fairfax Hospital and that I was to go to its emergency room immediately. He told me that my liver enzymes were so high that he feared I had some sort of severe hepatitis. Puzzled and still in extreme pain, I had my husband drive me to the emergency room.
It was a Friday night and the emergency room was extremely crowded, so I had to wait, with my fever and back pains. Not too keen on the possibility that I might have some liver disease, I decided to sit and meditate on my liver and its healing. I waited and meditated, waited and meditated, waited and meditated. For about three hours I visualized my liver with happy faces (you know those yellow emoji smiley faces?) on each cell. I visualized all my liver cells being healthy, happy, and whole. In my mind, there was nothing else I could do. When the staff finally called me in, after they saw my blood results from earlier in the day they put me on an IV immediately. I’m not sure what they were planning, but they were getting ready to perform some kind of medical intervention. However, before taking action they decided to test my blood once more. The results showed that my liver enzymes were back to a normal level. They removed the IV and sent me home. Even more stunning was that my fever and pain were gone, and I felt fine.
Did I spontaneously heal myself through my directed thoughts? I believe I did. Is it possible that something nonphysical, such as meditation and visualization, changed the physical? Again, I believe it had everything to do with my healing that day. Is it possible that the blood work was wrong and that the lab mixed up my blood with someone else’s? It’s possible but not probable. My doctor was just as baffled as I was. He saw what he saw in the labs. He saw how sick I was with acute symptoms. Yet I walked out of the hospital that day without a single symptom and with my blood just as clean as if I had never been sick.
It is my wish that you are able to embrace this very powerful way of healing. The chakras have a magical quality to them. When you begin to read about them and learn about each one, you will feel yourself getting healthier. I wish you a magical journey, my friend. Namasté.
Delving into the world of the chakras is like learning a new language. In a sense, you are. You will be learning many new words in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. But you will also be immersing yourself in a whole philosophy. In this introduction, all the new terminology might seem overwhelming, but rest assured, the concepts will be explained in great detail throughout the book. Also, you can always turn to the glossary in the back of the book to find out what a term means.
Chakras