Dear trendy “new age” type people.
Please, if you are going to insist on talking about chakras, can you please refer to them by their actual names, not their English names? (The same for yoga poses!) And can you please delve deeper into understanding them within their original historical and spiritual context? There is so much more to chakras than what you might read in a book about crystal healing. Please look for texts written by Hindu writers and/or spiritual gurus, they have so much more information, and you don’t end up with a watered down and commercialised understanding.
It really irritates me that spirituality has become so commercialised and has taken so much of the beauty out of the original cultural contexts.
Spirituality is not a look, it’s not the latest Instagram trend, it’s not something you need to do to have people admire you. A spiritual person is a beautiful person, but don’t do it just to look good. It’s about finding you. A spiritual person is a beautiful person because they know themselves.
I’m not saying that you can’t talk about them or believe in them or work with them. I’m just asking please to respect the culture that the concept of chakras has come from. (Chakra’s actually exist in many spiritual traditions under different names, even European cultures- but the word chakras and the mainstream knowledge of these spiritual centres is derived from Hindu religious texts.)
Capitalism insists on tricking you into believing you need things to find yourself, and it feeds off spiritual “trends” on social media these days. It continues to delude you into thinking that spirituality is now a “look” and you have to have the right type of items or things to actually be spiritual. Which is a load of complete bullshit, and it is caused by our ego. And capitalism feeds off the ego and uses it to brainwash you into being a consumer.
And the worst part of this is that it takes random practices here and there from various cultures, makes them look trendy and cool, and tricks you into believing that buying tools to do these practices will make you happy. This then means that the original meaning of the beliefs, practices, tools or rituals are then lost due to the spread of misinformation.
While I have no authority to tell you what you can and cannot do, I wish to inspire you to instead delve deeper, broaden your knowledge, read more and more, practice more and more, and make your practices about your true self and not your ego. And let’s work together to preserve the original contexts of cultural practices. It is not bad to be curious and want to learn more about other cultures. What is bad is taking the practices of another culture and misusing them for a trend, or spreading misinformation about them to make yourself feel superior. If you are going to insist on doing something, please learn to do it right.
True Chakra names:
Solar Plexus chakra-Manipura
Sacral chakra-Svadhisthana
Good texts to read about Chakras/energy healing and Hindu philosophy:
Bhagavad Gita- Hindu scripture
I have also read the below of only two Gurus- if anyone out there knows other books please share.
Autobiography of a Yogi- Paramahansa Yogananda
Healing affirmations- Paramahansa Yogananda
The Divine Romance- Paramahansa Yogananda
Man’s eternal quest- Paramahansa Yogananda
The One Within the many: the stories and messages from the life of Meher Baba- Bill Le Page
The everything and the nothing- Meher Baba
Infinite intelligence- Meher Baba
origamiaround
2087
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