Indian yoga and New Age spirituality both put a lot of focus on the "chakras," which are a set of seven energy wheels located along the human spinal cord at various points. Chakras are believed to be closely connected with both spiritual well-being and medical health, but the existence of the chakras has not been established scientifically.
Chakra Skepticism
Because no medical or scientific research has ever established that the chakras exist, many people are skeptical about chakra-based systems of meditation or healing. If a spiritual teacher tells you that you have a problem with your chakra system, or that you need to put more focus on one chakra or another, the validity of this diagnosis would seem to depend on the objective validity of the chakra concept. If there are no chakras, then they cannot possibly be responsible for your health or well-being, and no therapy based on the chakras can be expected to work except possibly through the placebo effect. However, the issue is not as simple as this straightforward approach would make it seem.
Possible Explanations
Because of the seeming contradiction between the chakra system and Western science, some people have attempted to reconcile the two by providing a medical correlation between the chakras and specific body systems. For example, a particular chakra might be assigned to the pineal gland and another to the thymus, or the chakras might be associated with the nerve clusters in the spinal cord. The problem with this approach, from a scientific standpoint, is that each chakra is traditionally associated with specific psychological and spiritual qualities or problems. Unless the organs or nerve clusters can be scientifically proven to have the same associations, the chakra system still cannot be shown to have any validity.
Chakras as Metaphors
According to psychiatrist Dr. John Nelson, there is another way to think about the chakra system. If the chakras are not thought of as physical energy centers, but as metaphors for stages of psychiatric development and spiritual maturity, the chakra system can be seen as a sophisticated psychiatric model. For example, a person whose psychological maturity is stuck at the level of the third chakra will be self-centered, ambitious and egotistic, but a person who has progressed to the fourth chakra will be capable of unconditional love.
Mind and Body
A strict separation between mind and body is a typical concept in Western philosophy, but such a distinction was never really developed in Eastern philosophy. Because of this fact, the yogis that originally created the chakra system would not have thought of the chakras as being psychological metaphors, because their worldview did not contain a hard distinction between the psychiatric and the physical. Modern scientists who are accustomed to this distinction can still find validity in the chakra system by approaching it as a psychological model rather than an anatomical one. From this perspective, it is plausible that chakra-based meditations and therapies can contribute to a person's overall health and well-being.
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