Transcript
Speaker: Hi, I'm Alan Finger. Welcome to the Genius of Nothing podcast. Nothing is no particular thing.
Speaker: It's all things at once. Genius.
Speaker: Welcome everyone to the Genius of Nothing podcast. I'm Katrina Repka in London and here with Sebastian Forsman in Stockholm.
Speaker: Hello. And Alan Finger in Florida. Nice to be with you all. And today we were going to talk about the chakras, which I always think is one of the, well, it's it's what drew me in to Ishta, really. I wrote a book about it with you, Al, when I was very green. um I was still, I did it in exchange for my first teacher training. So I was not really aware of any of it. But one of the things that I found was that you made it so practical.
Speaker: And when I came into yoga, I did think it was a little bit that the esoteric concepts were a little bit more difficult to grasp but and kind of new agey in a way that i found off putting.
Speaker: But after you and I spoke about them It seemed like such a practical, um grounded way of talking about these energetic centers.
Speaker: And I'm still aware that we can't see them if we cut ourselves open and dissect things the physical body, but there is a lot of um interesting parallels between the physical body, the emotional body, the, you know, the mental space.
Speaker: So maybe you want to just start talking a little bit about the chakras. And I know there are many chakras, but we could start with the first seven, the main ones that we use in the Ishta practice.
Speaker: Yeah, so the seven main chakras that are in us are really the chakras that were the represent the energies that were born from and that we live by.
Speaker: And what that means is the five lower chakras are represent what are called the pancha mahabhutas, the five pancha, maha, great,
Speaker: oh Butas elements and what that means the great elements are they've broken down these are the five things that all the Elemental chart as we know it all the elements fit in to those five qualities all all matter atoms need space That's the first thing then there's air gases There's fire and heat for metabolism.
Speaker: There's water, liquids. There's solids and earth. So those five things, earth, water, fire, and space, simply put, are the five things that all elements that make up our entire universe come from or they're part of, which develop into the five mahabhutas.
Speaker: So each one of those five mahabhutas in in a human being is represented. The earth is the densest. It sits at the end of when we are created. There's a line of energy that makes up in the embryonic development, the top of the head,
Speaker: to the tailbone, to the actually between genital anus, that's called the root. And that line of energies in embryonic development is the primitive streak, it's a streak of energy which gives the cells the top and the bottom, front and back and left and right side.
Speaker: And along that line forms the chakras. So the brain is the first chakra that sort of got everything in it.
Speaker: Then the agna chakra, the or the third eye point, which is in the middle of your brain, sets up as the governing center that's going to govern all the five mahabhutas, the five chakras that core create matter, and matter creates all of our senses.
Speaker: So you've got space in the throat, air, gases in the chest, fire and metabolism in the navel region, and water in the crease line, sacral area, and earth right down in the tailbone and sacrum.
Speaker: And it's kind of interesting because but you can see how Space is a hard one to get, but we all occupy space, and that's your throat. But is where you breathe and you get air and gases start to form into you with your lungs.
Speaker: Fire is in your navel where the heat in your body comes from because the the acids of your body come from the stomach and intestine, et cetera.
Speaker: Those organs and liver make acids. Acids is fire, water, because we can't have a fire in us. That's your navel chakra. Water where the bladder is, and earth is kind of where the bowel is.
Speaker: So these five elements that make up everything make up our body too, make up our organs from those governing centers of chakras.
Speaker: So think at this point it'd be good to just run through the chakras, the seven chakras that we mainly talk about and just go through them, some of the qualities of them, even if you heard them before, always good with a quick little run through.
Speaker: So here we go. We start at the bottom where we have our muladhara chakra. This is our base chakra, basically. This is our roots, our foundation, food, security, money, everything.
Speaker: family and building on that we come up to svadhisthana chakra and the navel and here we start to see the formings of creativity sexuality sva in sanskrit gets translated to roughly one's own so we kind of start to understand that here's this is where we kind of form our ego and this is also where we form our likes and dislikes The third chakra is the manipura chakra. This is the solar plexus chakra.
Speaker: This is where we harness a lot of our power, confidence and purpose in life. And the fourth chakra, Anahata chakra, the heart chakra. This is where we can connect to ah or feel really unconditional love.
Speaker: The fifth chakra is Vishuddha chakra. This chakra is where we can relate to our ability to communicate, to feel pure energy and connect to higher states of mind.
Speaker: Vishuddha, translated from Sanskrit, actually means pure or purification. The sixth chakra is the third eye chakra, Ajna chakra. This is really the command center, air traffic control, basically.
Speaker: And the seventh chakra is the sasrara chakra, the crown chakra, symbolized by a thousand-petaled lotus, which really illustrates eternity and the connection to the divine.
Speaker: you And these things govern us because we are made from there. The subtle energetic forces like electromagnetic fields... And lots of people in the um yoga world talk about opening the chakras. But always when I've talked about it with you, it's more like we want to balance the chakras to be most harmonious.
Speaker: Can you just talk about that for sec? Sure. That's very interesting because the chakra is described as a lotus flower. And why is because there's a certain amount of nadis, energy, main energy lines that come out of each chakra.
Speaker: And they start mapping our body. Nadis are very similar, which people can understand more, as to, in Chinese medicine, the meridians.
Speaker: So there's four major nadis that come out in the base chakra, six in the swadhisthana, 10 in the navel, 12 in the heart, and 16 in the throat, two in the ajna, the third eye point, and 1,000 the brain.
Speaker: And it's interesting because they describe the no the chakra has the number of petals because when the when the when your energy is going down and into life, the lotus is as a such closed, so the flower is closed.
Speaker: If you open the flower, just like a lotus, it means it's come out of the mud, which the lotus does at night, ah during the day, and it blossoms and sits above muddy water.
Speaker: So the chakras symbolically, when we're in the plane of Maya and living, the illusionary plane that our mind creates, then the flowers close the lotus. So we want to open the lotuses.
Speaker: So people sort of said, oh, you want to open your chakras. It's really, you when you're in life, your chakras, you close them, but you open them to feel where you're born from.
Speaker: in life, they're closed. So every day you want to open your chakras, so you open up to the inspirational all knowledge of the universe, the unbound intelligence.
Speaker: the quantum intelligence. And then when you close, you come back into life. And you close them and now they're filled with light and life. And now we move into life.
Speaker: So people have got don't quite have the whole understanding which I've just expressed. So they tend to say things like open the chakras. And maybe it's helpful just to explain with that that the line from the crown to the base is also nadis.
Speaker: There are nadis that the chakras run along with. so Yeah, because the first line when we when they in creation is called Brahmanadi, that primitive streak, which makes these different chakras along it.
Speaker: Then once that's established, the Brahmanadi, it creates Another nadi, which is the main nadi, which we're going to need in life, our brain and spinal column.
Speaker: So that nadi, which creates brain and spine is called Shashumna nadi, channel. So you've got fine silvery thread of energy, electromagnetic field, which gives birth to the shashumna, your brain and spine.
Speaker: And then it gives birth to the nervous system, the neural tubes, the crest cells create the nervous system, and which are all the nadis that manifest into your body.
Speaker: So you've got these two major nadis within your being. You've got the central thread and you've got the one that governs your brain and spine, sashumna.
Speaker: So in life, the chakras are there and they work in con between sashumna nadhi and the brahmanadi.
Speaker: Where the chakras close, works through brain and spine. Mm-hmm. When the chakras open, you're opening them up along Brahmanadi.
Speaker: So we could also just mention that there's about 72,000 nadis. I don't really know how they came up with the 72,000. just think there's a lot of nadis. And these nadis is like an intricate network.
Speaker: And of those, there's about 114 major junction points where nadis meet. But of course, you have also the seven chakras, which all nadis kind of originate from.
Speaker: can also mention that nadi actually means flow or channel translated from Sanskrit. So this is really where prana kind of flows through in the body. And as long as the nadi is clear and open and not blocked.
Speaker: And can I just ask, because sometimes when you see a visual depiction of the chakras or a man sitting in lotus so overlaid with the nadis and the chakras, the the you have this, like those balls where you put your finger on and then violet light radiates within the ball. Sometimes you get the image of they're trying to depict 72,000, but they extend even beyond the physical body, like into what I guess we'd call the auric field. So they're not really things, again, like veins, which you can see, but they're actually energetic.
Speaker: And I think of them as like a big river going to a smaller river, going to a stream and then extending out. But would you say that the nadis do extend beyond the physical body or are they contained in the physical body?
Speaker: Yes, they are electromagnetic fields that create the matter, the physical body. And so they start from a source and then move out and out and out.
Speaker: And yes, our eyes cannot see them because it's something our vision and our senses aren't designed to perceive.
Speaker: So, yeah, we don't perceive that they're going that there's energy going outside of us because we can't see it You can kind of see it if you do dristi and still your mind.
Speaker: You can see a shimmer around the body that's created by all of those nadis, of the energy fields that move out of you. But they are there. So the nadis really come out and connect to your aura or to your auric field.
Speaker: They vibrate into and create your auric field. and I think one of the ways, though, sorry, that when we do after meditation and we bring the hands together and then move them apart, you definitely feel the electromagnetic field in between the hands when you're quiet and still. You can really sense that.
Speaker: Even I can sense that. so That's great, Katrina. Phew, great. So because Katrina is always very wants to feel something. So, you know, when you put two magnets together and if they're the if the it's the correct lineup of the electro plus and minus, they pull together. And if you turn them the wrong way, you can feel that puffy feeling magnetic energy.
Speaker: So that's what you're feeling between your hands. It's electromagnetic energy that That feeling is there, and that you can feel with your senses one of the more easier things to sense.
Speaker: And it's actually something I do quite a lot of times during the day because it's it's such an amazing trick. It's like a double espresso and just really wakes you up because when you take your hands together and you kind of almost touch, they're not really touching, but almost touching and then put them in apart and you do that a couple of times, you will feel, you will start to feel that kind of you know energy, that magnetism.
Speaker: And then when you put them up to your eyes, it's like a jolt, like you like a little lightning right into your mind. You're like, woo, you wake up. And yeah, it's like a little hack. You kind of hack your mind and gets get a lot of energy. Yeah, brings the energy.
Speaker: Your palms are also... where prana and tejas, electromagnetic energy, moves through very powerfully. Soul of the feet, palms, and eyes, if your mind is still, and breath.
Speaker: Those are the things where electroemact energy can flow through. The palms, we all know. So if you try and soothe someone or a child hurts itself, you'll go with your palm onto them and and your palm says, You try and comfort them because you're sending and you even go, why do you do that?
Speaker: Because that's kind of like a sound that's, makes your brain wave go still that you can move pranic energy. It's quite interesting that Christ was crucified in those points as well, those power points. Oh, in his hands, yeah, he like that, and his feet. Yeah, and the feet.
Speaker: Not that I'm religious, but I look at paintings. Yeah, I mean, know from pictures I've seen, I wasn't there. Oh, you weren't?
Speaker: Now, for anybody who listens to this and thinks that chakras is, you know, a little bit in the class with unicorns, there there is actually some some studies and them things that are being done with the chakras. There's actually a professor, he's called Josef Lazio, I think. He's an assistant professor of clinical psychology at, I think it's Cornell Medical College.
Speaker: And he's linked the modern map of the central nervous system, the CNS, to... actually more upon the chakra system um and that you can see kind of similarities between them.
Speaker: The chakras to be crossed almost cross referenced with the map of the central nervous system, the crown chakra with the neural cortex and third eye with a prefrontal cortex, the throat chakra with the limbic system.
Speaker: the heart chakra with the midbrain and so on. So it is actually some interesting research being done with this. Although we will never really, you can never find a chakra. We can never like see them or scan or find them really.
Speaker: but there's some interesting research that is being done in the field. Yeah, I'm sure that eventually they will, and there are people who are finding electromagnetic fields in those areas which are stronger.
Speaker: And I'm sure as the science grows more and more and they learn more how to tune to these fields, because electromagnetic fields are what create matter.
Speaker: We know that in the Big Bang, There's electromagnetic energy in the little ball that bursts in from that scientists have claimed. There's electromagnetic energy, gravity, yeah and the very the essential forces that create the strong and weak ah nuclear forces that create the atom world.
Speaker: But in ah in an individual, Al, you have described the creation of an individual out of nothingness. But then you've also talked about how to be able to really understand the chakras.
Speaker: It's profound to look at them when someone's dying, when you see the elements breaking apart. you Because when you're obviously given life, you don't have that connection.
Speaker: Consciousness. Yeah. Yeah, but when you witness somebody dying and you see the life force go and then the elements changing, that's a way of really understanding the way energy is.
Speaker: So at death, which is another thing that Katrina experienced, at death with her late husband, if your mind...
Speaker: if you put your mind into dristi, meaning you let your vision just fall on the body of the person that's just died, and you use the palm with the electromagnetic energy to feel, you can really feel the energy moving upward. There's a flow of it that moves up into ajna through the akashas, the spaces, into the top of the head and out of one.
Speaker: And Katrina was doing the practice that I shared with her to help someone move on. You were on the phone when I was doing it. Oh, I was there. You're right. That's right. I was with you. was like the middle of the night in London and you were on the phone. Yeah, sorry.
Speaker: I forgot because i've done and know I've done a lot of that. and But of course, I did it with Katrina. And Katrina, express what you felt and saw. Well, I think that you can't describe it because, again, it's beyond the mind and it's beyond words. But I do think that being present in that moment was an education beyond, or the education that you get from that, the understanding of energy, the understanding of the way things break apart, the way things come together, the way subtle forces are working on us.
Speaker: that was an experience that gave me a lot of insight. And coming through that, the way I look at things is never going to be the same.
Speaker: And I feel much more at ease with death and dying in a way that I felt I wasn't before um and less fearful of it um and more able to recognize the transition point and the space between life and death in in some ways. Amazing, beautiful.
Speaker: It's so rewarding. It is. But you said that the your dad used to try to take you to witness people die. in in south ah In Johannesburg, South Africa, the cemeteries were at a place called West Park.
Speaker: I used to joke with him because he said, okay, we have to go off to a funeral, so-and-so pass, and I want you to feel the body and feel the energy.
Speaker: and And it became a joke. I used to say, any West Park stuff for us today, Dad?
Speaker: You actually did the same thing to me and New York with your brother. Yes, I was my brother. then made Sebastian come to his illness and death. and And my father, started really with the biggest time because when my grandfather was dying, but my father was there till about 11 o'clock.
Speaker: He said, okay, I'm going to go home now. It's obviously he's about to go. His heart, his breath, everything was showing it, his blood pressure. But he said, so if he passes before the morning, then I want you to do what I've you know what i've taught you, how to take the body out from a but from ah being.
Speaker: And of course, my grandfather went at about 2.10 in the morning. And my dad was only going to when he is going to wake up when he normally woke up for meditation at 4.30 and come to the house before him and meditate there.
Speaker: So anyway, he was that didn't happen. And I had to do it at 2 in the morning. And it was exactly the same experience that for me that Katrina had.
Speaker: And you feel the energy and I felt it and was remarkable. And I took my grandfather on. And then i called my dad and, of course, he came immediately over.
Speaker: And we did it again. and But i i was there at the moment of death and moved through it. Why did you do it again? Second time. Why did you do it a second time? Just to make sure. He wanted just to do it himself.
Speaker: ah Make sure he had a son. Make sure he was done correctly. You know, his sex son, he wanted to be sure. Oh, that's fantastic. That's great. Oh.
Speaker: So before Katrina was talking about how you can see the elements really break down or come apart at death. But when we're born, we can see those same elements and how they come together. Not as clearly, but you start as you grow up, you kind of see how they start mixing in and create the personality you are and how they start to govern us as we go through different ages.
Speaker: And they yeah start from the base chakra, mularei chakra. and So each chakra each chakra has a quality. The earth gives birth to the sense of smell and also to the whole foundation, the earth of our being.
Speaker: Second chakra, water, which is movement, ebb and tide. And going let Katrina and you share what those things are. In the navel is fire, which gives the more metabolism we have, the more focused we are.
Speaker: The air is touch and feeling, and is where all of our feelings and emotions collect. And the throat is communication. And the third eye point is where we is the gateway to changing from one realm to the legs, to the physical atomic realm, or to the energetic realm beyond.
Speaker: So those are your five chakras and those are the basic qualities. Katrina and Sebastian, please join in because you have lovely language you can use.
Speaker: Sebastian's more scientific and Katrina's more... psychologically feeling wise. But you, i think so in the effort to not make people overwhelmed with information, and we've had feedback from people that the podcasts can get too long.
Speaker: I think that might be another whole episode where we talk about the different qualities and the different ways of balancing the chakras, the different physical manifestations, energetic.
Speaker: But I just will say when you said I was more psychological that you actually have an aversion to that approach because you've told me that the chakras are really energetic energy beyond the mind and so when we start to kind of put on feelings and like psychology around them sometimes that's helpful but sometimes it's unhelpful because really what we're trying to do is stop all the chatter and the labeling and just get to a place where we sense energetically and and physically what is going on I love you Katrina you've come so far
Speaker: i I love you too, Al. But i' I'm sharing that because, you know, at first everybody likes to work it out. And there's some psychologist lady wrote a book that lot of people follow.
Speaker: What's her name? Anodea Judith. Yeah. anoa judith Yeah. And anyway, she apparently wrote a book and I don't read, so I'm not like to haven't read it. But I know from all my students and Sarah and Katrina and Mona that they give all these different emotional things and stuff.
Speaker: But there is somewhere in the middle ah little balance where you can say, okay, these are the kind of qualities that Mooladhara Earth has.
Speaker: water, fire, air, and just give basic qualities. And that I hear is going to be done now by us in a scene from a forthcoming attraction.
Speaker: Exactly. Because it's too much to take in one session. since Yep.
Speaker: I might just end by saying that the word chakra means wheel. So you want to elaborate on that? Wheel of energy or vortex? Vortex of energy, which is something whirling inside that manifests matter.
Speaker: so So, you know, as again, you know, the English language is insufficient doesn't have a word for chakra because Sanskrit was written about all that we talk about.
Speaker: So often, you know, we try and give it a name, a chakra wheel. well it It can be misleading because then you think, well, there's some wheel inside me or something there, you know. And even look at the description of the chakras.
Speaker: like a lotus and a shape and Sanskrit letters and an elephant and animal in different chakras and gods. and So I think we should slowly unfold this in future talks with everyone where we can talk about, right, what is the what is the what does those mean? Because those things aren't inside you.
Speaker: It's just the way things work. Are we sure about that, though? Yeah. We're sure that we don't really have a little elephant in the base of our spine. Otherwise, yes. as A surgeon, ah spinal surgeon ah europe neurosurgeon would open you up and say, okay, oh, your elephant's trunk is wrong.
Speaker: That's why they're so highly paid because you have to be like a veterinarian too. have to figure out what's wrong with the elephant's trunk. Exactly. Yeah. It would be an enlightened surgeon, I must say. I have an elephant with six trunks inside of me. There you go Yeah, but so proof we will go through that and explain energetically, more scientifically, more emotionally, what these things mean to us and get a better understanding of it And we'll try to go through some more practical techniques of how you can use them in daily life, how to open them, how to close them.
Speaker: How to whirl them around. Whirl them around, yeah. and Yes, you want to whirl them around like a cosmic magician so that you can move through life juggling your chakras. Almost like a spare Jill Harry Potter.
Speaker: Right? So that you can have what the word is, mangalam, that magical auspicious energy that governs our elemental world.
Speaker: We can tune to it and bring it into every moment of our living. and I can't wait to get into that. That's going to be awesome. Yeah, that's going to be great. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you very much. Have a super wonderful day and week. See you soon. Namaste. Namaste.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us today and have a super wonderful week. Namaste.
