Chakras: What They Are, the 7 Chakras in Order and Their Meanings

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 23, 2026Oct 23, 2026 · How we write

Chakras are points along the spine that medieval tantric yoga uses as places to rest attention in meditation. The best-known description, a Sanskrit text of 1577, gives six of them plus a lotus of a thousand petals above the head, each with an element and a seed sound. Rainbow colors and life themes were added in the West.

What are chakras?

The word cakra means “wheel” in Sanskrit. In tantric yoga it names a set of centers along a channel inside the spine, the suṣumnā, which the 1577 text describes as running from the base of the body to the head with lotuses “strung on” it (vv. 1–2). Each lotus has a fixed number of petals with letters of the alphabet on them, a geometric shape for an element, a seed syllable, and a pair of deities. A practitioner builds these pictures in the mind one after another, from the bottom up.

That is the older meaning: a map for meditation and for the rise of kundalini, the power the text says sleeps at the base of the spine. The newer meaning comes from 20th-century Western books, which turned each center into a theme of ordinary life (safety, pleasure, will, love, voice, insight, meaning) and gave it a rainbow color. Most searches today mean the second, so we cover both and label each.

The 7 chakras in order

Quick chart first: the seven yogic chakras by number, bottom to top, with the modern colour, the symbol the old text gives each one, and where it sits. The fifth chakra is the throat and the seventh (7th) is the crown; Anahata is also spelled anahat, closer to how it is said in Hindi. For the triangles, circles and stars behind these symbols, see sacred geometry.

The next table is the classical description in full. The text is the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, “Description of the Six Centers”, written by the Bengali teacher Purnananda as one chapter of a longer work completed in 1577. Arthur Avalon, the pen name of the judge John Woodroffe, translated it in The Serpent Power (1919), and almost every chakra chart since then leans on that translation.

The second table is what Western writers attached to the same seven centers. None of these columns is in the 1577 text.

Read side by side, the two tables rarely agree. The heart is red in the text, gold for Leadbeater and green on the rainbow. The throat is smoky purple, then silvery blue, then plain blue. The gland column also varies from book to book: different authors give the sixth and seventh centers to the pituitary and the pineal in opposite order.

How many chakras are there?

It depends on the text. The title “Six Centers” is literal: Purnananda describes six lotuses along the spine and then, separately, the thousand-petaled lotus above them. Counting that one gives the familiar seven. Older tantric texts, Hindu and Buddhist, describe systems of four, five, six or more centers; scholars such as Gavin Flood and David Gordon White date the chakra system to medieval tantra, roughly from the 8th century, and not to the Vedas. The word cakra is old, but the Vedas do not teach chakras as inner centers, which is a mistake several popular guides repeat.

Modern teachers sometimes give larger numbers, such as 114 or more, or add centers above the head and below the feet. These come from individual schools. The classical text has none of them.

Where the seven chakras came from: a short timeline

• About 8th to 16th century. Tantric texts describe inner centers in varying numbers.
• 1577. Purnananda’s Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa describes six centers and the lotus above them, verse by verse. Some catalogues give 1526 for related work; 1577 is the date usually given for the larger book.
• 1919. Woodroffe publishes the English translation. Western readers now have petals, elements and seed sounds.
• 1927. The Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater publishes The Chakras, describing the centers from his own clairvoyant impressions, with his own colors, and swaps the second center for one at the spleen.
• 1930s on. Color therapists start pairing the seven centers with the seven colors of the rainbow, in spectrum order, according to the historian Kurt Leland. Pairings with glands appear from the 1920s.
• 1977. The full Western package, rainbow colors plus a psychological theme for each center, first appears together in print, also by Leland’s account.

Leland traced this history in his book Rainbow Body (2016) and a 2017 article in the Theosophical Society’s Quest magazine. We rely on his account for the dates after 1927 and have not found an independent historian who checked them.

Chakra colors and the rainbow

The seven chakra colors in modern charts are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, bottom to top. That sequence is the spectrum, laid over the body in the 20th century. The text has its own colors, and they do not form a rainbow: crimson petals around a yellow square, vermilion and white, a rain-cloud lotus with a red triangle, a red heart lotus around a smoky hexagon, a smoky purple throat lotus with a white circle, and two lotuses at the top that are both white. If you use the rainbow in a meditation, treat it as a convenient modern code. The same rainbow was later merged with aura colors, which have their own history in a 1902 Theosophical color key. Charts that also give each center a frequency in hertz are newer still; our page on 432 Hz traces where those numbers come from.

Are chakras real? What science says

No structure matching a chakra has been found in the body. The attempts to locate them physically are Western: comparisons with nerve plexuses began in the late 19th century, comparisons with glands in the 1920s, and a 2017 dissection study of six bodies compared the site of the root chakra with a nerve plexus in the pelvis, a comparison, not evidence that a chakra exists. Cleveland Clinic sums up the medical view. Western science does not recognize chakras, but they may be a useful metaphor.

The practices people do with chakras are another matter, because those can be measured. Slow breathing with a long exhale and steady attention have been studied directly. In a 2023 Stanford trial, five minutes a day of breathing with a long out-breath improved mood more over a month than the same time spent in mindfulness meditation. That says nothing about chakras, but the breathing part of a chakra meditation clearly does something on its own.

Blocked chakras and how to balance them

Words like “blocked”, “closed”, “overactive” and “aligned” are not in the 1577 text. They come from 20th-century energy healing, where each center is a dial that can be set too low or too high. Lists of blocked chakra symptoms then mix two things: life difficulties (feeling unsafe, numb, stuck, lonely, unheard, confused, adrift) and body complaints (back pain, digestion, the heart, the thyroid, headaches).

• Life difficulties are worth naming exactly. “Blocked throat chakra” is vaguer than “I didn’t say what I meant to my boss on Tuesday.” The second can be worked on.
• Body complaints belong with a doctor. No chakra practice can tell you what causes chest pain, stomach trouble or headaches.

In practice, “balancing the chakras” means paying attention to the body from bottom to top, breathing slowly, and looking honestly at whichever theme is pulling at you. The self-check at the top picks one theme; each chakra page then has a short self-check of its own and a practice.

Yoga poses for the chakras

The 1577 text pairs no pose with any chakra. Matching yoga postures (asanas) to the centers is a modern teaching habit, and teachers pick each position by where the center sits in the body. Each chakra page explains the choice and its cautions; in short:

• Root: mountain pose (Tadasana) and tree pose (Vrksasana), with attention on the feet.
• Sacral: goddess pose and cobbler’s pose (Baddha Konasana), which open the hips.
• Solar plexus: boat pose (Navasana) and gentle twists.
• Heart: cobra (Bhujangasana) and bridge (Setu Bandhasana), which lift the chest.
• Throat: fish pose (Matsyasana) and cat-cow; shoulder stand only with a teacher.
• Third eye: child’s pose (Balasana), forehead resting on the floor or a block.
• Crown: easy seated pose (Sukhasana), and corpse pose (Savasana) to finish.

No study has shown that any of these positions acts on a chakra. They are ordinary yoga with ordinary benefits and limits: skip whatever hurts, and check with a doctor first if you have back or neck trouble.

A 7-minute chakra meditation

Prefer a version without images, by breath and body, with a 7 or 14 minute timer? See our chakra meditation.

This chakra meditation spends one minute on each center, from the root up, using the image the old text gives that center and a slow breath. Press Start and follow the highlighted line, or read the steps and keep your own time. No breath holding and no effort to “raise” anything; the practice is attention only. If you like to give the hands something to do, any of the simple hand mudras will keep them still.

If anything unpleasant comes up, such as strong fear, pressure in the head or a sense of unreality, open your eyes, put your feet flat and look around the room. You can stop at any minute. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health cites a 2020 review of 83 studies in which about 8 percent of participants had a negative effect from meditation, most often anxiety or low mood. If those effects stay, talk to a doctor.

Guides to each chakra

Each page has the verse-by-verse description, what Western books added, a 6-question self-check and a practice with a timer.

1. Root chakra (Muladhara). Earth, a yellow square and LAM; in Western books, safety and the body.
2. Sacral chakra (Svadhisthana). Water and a white half-moon; the verse about it promises freedom from craving.
3. Solar plexus chakra (Manipura). Fire at the navel; the “solar plexus” label is a Western nerve comparison.
4. Heart chakra (Anahata). Air and the “unstruck” sound; red in the text, golden for Leadbeater, green only on the rainbow.
5. Throat chakra (Vishuddha). Space and the sound HAM; why the thyroid link has no evidence behind it.
6. Third eye chakra (Ajna). The seat of the mind, with no element; what the pineal gland really does.
7. Crown chakra (Sahasrara). The thousand-petaled lotus that the text places above the six, not among them.

What we don’t promise. We don’t claim that chakras are physical organs or that anyone can see whether yours are open. The self-check is seven questions about your last two weeks. It does not measure a chakra or your health. A meditation can leave you calmer for a while; it does not treat anxiety, depression, pain or any illness. If something has been wrong for weeks, start with a doctor or a therapist.

How the self-check counts

There is one question per center, worded around the theme Western books give it. “Rarely” is 0 points, “Sometimes” 1, “Often” 2. A center is suggested only if you answered “Often” for it. If two or three centers have an “Often”, you see all of them; if four or more do, the result says the themes are level and points you to the root, where the tradition starts.

We ran the rule on every possible set of answers, all 2,187 of them, when this page was built. Each center comes out alone on top in 2.9% of answer sets (the seven are symmetric, so none is favored), 56.3% end with two or three centers level, 17.3% have four or more level, and 5.9% have no “Often” at all. The note under the bars depends on the total out of 14: 0–3 points (5.2% of answer sets), 4–10 (89.7%) or 11–14 (5.2%), and the last one suggests talking to a professional if it has lasted.

Seven questions are few. A single answer moves the result. That is deliberate: the check points you to a page and does not profile you. Nothing you answer is stored or sent.