All About Balancing Your Chakras

The Sanskrit word for chakra translates to “wheel.” Chakras are wheels of energy located throughout your body—actually, in a beautiful alignment down its center starting at the spine’s base and reaching the top of the head. Chakras provide energy to us and correspond to the prana, or life force, inside of us. It’s important that chakras have neither too much energy or too little—that they aren’t spinning too quickly or too slowly. If they do, then something is wrong, and you will feel it—either emotionally or physically as your health suffers.

There are many ways to balance chakras, thankfully—and maybe this is because the world is so interconnected and offers solutions in many places.

  • What each chakra does
  • Pendulum Theory for balancing chakras
  • Other ways to balance your chakras

The 7 Chakras

There are actually way more than seven chakras, but people tend to emphasize the seven main ones. They are:

1. Root Chakra

  • Location: base of spine
  • Color: red
  • Function: feeling grounded, survival

2. Sacral Chakra

  • Location: navel
  • Color: orange
  • Function: emotions such as desire, pleasure, sexuality, and creativity

3. Solar Plexus

  • Location: upper abdomen
  • Color: yellow
  • Function: emotions related to your personal power, sense of ambition, laughter, joy, and anger; calls this chakra “the seat of your emotional life”

4. Heart Chakra

  • Location: heart
  • Color: green
  • Function: ability to love and have compassion, peace, and harmony; the house of the soul

5. Throat Chakra

  • Location: throat
  • Color: blue/turquoise
  • Function: inner and outer hearing, synthesizing ideas, transformation, purification

6. Third Eye Chakra

  • Location: center of forehead
  • Color: Indigo
  • Function: questioning, perception, knowledge; associated with intuition and wisdom

7. Crown Chakra

  • Location: top of head
  • Color: violet
  • Function: no surprise, this chakra is the highest one, and the most important; this chakra is responsible for our connection to spirituality and ability to feel bliss

Just from this brief review, you can see how am imbalanced chakra would cause a lot of emotional and psychological problems. And we haven’t even touched on physical ailments that result from imbalance.

Your chakras are aligned down the center of your body.

Pendulum Theory

Chakra pendulums are beautiful pieces of wood, crystal, metal, or stone on a chain, but as Andye Murphy says in her article, they are basically “a weight hanging from a fixed point.” In this simplicity is immense power, as theoretically, pendulums can detect the state of your chakras.

Your relationship with your pendulum is a delicate thing, though, since it will be your lifelong friend and the diviner of your inward state. First, you will need to choose a pendulum; this is a significant moment. Murphy recommends observing pendulums in-person. She says to look before touching and to wait until you feel drawn to one before making a decision.

Once you’re ready to use your pendulum, understand that it requires patience. Understanding and reading a pendulum’s reaction takes effort and practice. However, the beauty in this insightful process is well worth your patience.

First, lie on your back and hold your pendulum 4 to 6 inches above the chakra you are detecting. Once the pendulum moves, watch its movement closely. Here is the consensus on how to interpret its movement according to

  • Clockwise: your chakra is balanced and open—this is very good!
  • Counter-clockwise: you could be dealing with blocked energy or pent-up emotions that correspond with that chakra
  • Elliptical swing: your feminine and masculine energy are not in balance; one is overpowering the other
  • Other signs of this include extreme coldness, depression, low mental energy, sluggish digestion, and a blocked left nasal for imbalanced feminine energy
  • Excessive body heat, quick temper, itching, dry skin and throat, excessive appetite and/or physical and sexual energy, and a blocked right nostril for imbalanced masculine energy
  • Erratic swing: either your beliefs have drastically altered lately or you are enduring some spiritual turmoil

Check on the state of each of your seven chakras, making certain that you watch the pendulum’s movement with an open mind, free of bias. It is a tool of diagnosis, so let it do its work. Watching it respond to your inward state can be a peaceful process, actually—like stepping out of the turmoil of your own mind and only watching to see what the pendulum says.

Balancing Your Chakras

So what should you do if a chakra is out of balance? There are many ways to balance your chakras—one of which includes only asking your chakras to come into harmony after using a pendulum—but here are other common ways:

1. Meditation

You can try guided meditation if you’re unsure of where to start. There are plenty of apps and YouTube videos available to assist with this. Interestingly, there are many variations of and exercises for meditation such as Basic Breathing Meditation (a good one to start with for a beginner), Violet Flame Meditation, Inner Vision Meditation, and Unifying Phrase Meditation.

The two basic ways to meditate to balance your chakras are a meditation that emphasizes the cause of the problem and meditation that emphasizes the effects. This guide on Well-Being Alignment provides different exercises and types of meditation within these two categories.

2. Practice yoga

Some people believe that yoga was designed for the purpose of balancing our chakras. Here is a helpful infographic of different yoga poses that assist different chakras. This is also why it’s important to practice yoga on a regular basis, as it emphasizes the balance and mindfulness that could prevent a chakra imbalance.

3. Massage

Massaging different areas of the body according to the imbalanced chakra is a common technique. For example, if the Solar Plexus Chakra were imbalanced, you would apply oils to your abdomen and massage in a clockwise direction. Mindvalley provides more information on the corresponding body parts for each chakra.  

4. Essential Oils

If you’ve never tried essential oils, you should. Not only do they introduce you to a whole new range and depth of scents that surpass any synthetic fragrance you’ve bought, but different oils correspond to different chakras. You can buy a diffuser or try other techniques like massage, simply inhaling (carry a little vial in your bag), or using them in a bath.

Overall, even though using a pendulum can detect a chakra imbalance, it’s important that you are self-aware enough to recognize when you feel that something is wrong with your internal state. There are many symptoms—both psychological and physical—that point to chakra imbalances so that these, in combination with a pendulum’s help, will alert you to take a step back and identify the problem.