Expertise Exchange

Chakra stuff that seems empirically true to me:

*The pelvic floor (first chakra) is connected to the emotional sense of safety. You instinctively tighten it when nervous and relax it when secure.

Learning to feel and move your pelvic floor is useful; the correct way to push in childbirth is to tense your abs but relax your pelvic floor, and having practiced this a lot beforehand was helpful for me since it's counterintuitive for most people.

*Your abs (roughly third chakra) are obviously connected to willpower and strength, since you use them for all full-body challenging exercises. There's a similar tight connection between *feeling* willful and tightening those muscles as there is between feeling safe and loosening the pelvic floor.

*I suspect that there's a "softening" thing you can do with your lower belly/hips (second chakra) that has a similar emotional connection to feelings of vulnerability. I'm less confident about this, though; I am "bad at" second chakra in some sense. (Pregnancy made it clear to me that I'm worse than average at feeling sensations in my uterus.)

In general, I believe that muscles and emotions are pretty tightly linked. There are times when the only way to move a muscle in a particular tricky way is to evoke an emotion, and there are times when the only way to evoke an emotion is to move (or clench or unclench) in a particular way.

This blog post is the best attempt at a gears model here I've seen so far. I occasionally think and work in terms of chakras (mine or someone else's) and find it useful, and don't mind saying so in public. Lots of people have weird beliefs here but that doesn't mean there isn't a thing in the territory that's being pointed to. I expect reading about chakras to not be particularly helpful relative to experiential exercises.

I believe they are based on the experience of conscious proprioception and using the body correctly - feeling/sensing the state of balance and positioning of our anatomy when body and mind are connected.

I've not looked into the details (names, associations etc.) but that's not stopped me publishing my rationale on chakras [LW · GW]. (with links to a couple of interesting articles.)

Tiago Forte, of Forte Labs, has an interesting post titled A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum. It describes his experience day by day, and may be of intrigue to you. On Twitter he is generally open to engaging with strangers.