Chakras? Really? -Yoga Husbandry Entry #4

Have you ever heard of the Chakras?  Energy centres we have inside of our bodies, little spots that seem to hold some power over how we think and feel.  If you haven’t, don’t worry, it’s a hippy thing, or dare I say it’s a yoga husband thing.

If you read that sentence above and thought to yourself that it’s garbage, I hear you, I know that feeling, I still have it from time to time.  Yet as a Yoga Husband I have come to realize that these Charkras, man, there’s something to them.  I was talked at about chakras in yogic situations and always felt a little ashamed that I couldn’t speak up for myself, to call bullshit.  I would just listen, seemingly intrigued and go along with it to make the other half of the conversation feel welcome.  All the while inside rolling my eyes, looking away and generally being completely skeptical of the little balls of coloured energy hidden inside my pelvis.

I held on this way at dinner parties and whatever yogi outing I was involved in, I wasn’t giving in to this hullabalo, then one day I was asked to a meditation class.  Remember Dustin, from my last entry?  My super spiritual man friend who changed the way I relate to my own thoughts?  Well he was leading this meditation class, so I felt intrigued and a little compelled to go.  It wasn’t just any ordinary meditation class either, it was an Osho active meditation.

If you have no fucking clue what an Osho meditation is, or who Osho is, or that Osho was even a name, that’s fine.  I didn’t know what was happening either, this was another prime example of take your husband to class day.

I learned once I got there that the class was themed around the Chakras.  Great…  We would be focusing on the chakras in the meditation and working on opening them up and feeling their power…. This was going to be awkward.  Again I nodded politely, acted enthused, but was confused and irritated that my afternoon off was going to be spent in a dark room with strangers pretending to feel something.

Dustin had us sit at first, he explained a little more about who Osho was and what made some of his meditation techniques different than other teachers.  Osho was an Indian teacher and spiritual leader who, almost stereotypically, has a cult like following.  I’ve come to learn his teachings are pretty valid and I like the way he viewed the world, but still very cult like.  He has an ashram in India where people go stay as long as they want, meditate all day and night, have naked hangs in the pools, fuck each other at will or do whatever you want.  Dustin spent a couple of months there and it changed him immensely.  I believe it, the place sounds wild and frightening.

The first meditation we got into is a humming meditation.  Yup humming.  Essentially you just hum.  For no reason.  Just sit and hum for 20 minutes.  Super weird, super hard to get into.  I was resistant, but had really no way out of it at this point so I surrendered and hummed.  The weirdest thing started to happen… I stopped worrying about what the people around me were thinking or if they were judging my humming the way I was judging theirs at first.  The self conscious me kind of melted away after a few minutes of being ridiculous and being submerged in the room now being filled with sound.  My lips tickled and I didn’t care, I just kept humming.  Freeing in some strange way, Osho you sneaky bastard.

Next was gibberish.  Exactly was it sounds like, you try your best to stand there with your eyes closed and speak gibberish to yourself, aloud.  Humming was one thing, but making up words and trying to speak made up sentences…my dumb-dar was beeping and I wanted to leave.  Again, I was a good yoga husband and stayed however uncomfortable I was, I stayed for the babes.  We gibberished away, we mumbled and talked shit and made up words for 30 minutes.  At first my ears were open and I wanted to laugh at the weirdo’s around me, I wanted to sit in the back corner and make fun of this situation I found myself in.  Yet I yammered away in some made up language that seemed to come out somewhere between Spanish and German, for 30 damn minutes.

Once again I see Osho’s point here, get out of your head and just flow, let the “words” flow out of your mouth and get your thinking mind out of the way.  It works and it feels pretty wild once the useless embarrassment wore off.  Once you are stuck in a room full of idiots all doing the same thing, no one is an idiot and you find out pretty quick that everything is going to be fine.  I felt my mind start to feel open and child like while I had a nothing conversation with no one.   Touche Osho.

The last meditation we tackled was a shaking meditation.  Shaking.  Did you read that?  When Dustin said we were about to do his favourite, the shaking meditation I actually LOL’d.  No one else did though, I thought he was kidding.  I had visions in my head that we team up and we shake each other like little babies, without the murder part.  I could tell by the look my laugh received that I was about to learn something.

We stood up, the music started to play, kind of synth drumming paired with bongo’s and tribal chanting.  Super loud, obnoxiously loud.  We were told to shake our limbs, shake our asses and just shake…for 30 minutes.  So I did what any self respecting man would do, I stood there awkwardly.  I looked around, even though this was a eyes close type situation, and I decided this was retarded.  That this was the line and I was leaving.  Of course I didn’t leave.  I’m too polite, which seems to be an actual blessing for the openness needed in Yoga Husbandry.  Plus my wife had set up this night out for us and I didn’t want to be a dick.  I closed my eyes.  I stopped looking around at the flailing people I didn’t know, I swayed from side to side, I wiggled my hips for awhile.  I felt like crying and yelling and freaking out (this I came to learn is the exact response I have to most things my ego wants to hold onto).

There is no fucking groove to the music either, I just started to flop my body around, you have to find your own pace and rhythm.  You have to shake until it kind of hurts, your limbs feel dead and floppy and I started to get a cramp.  I bet my face looked grimaced and contorted because I was so uncomfortable.  I wanted to stop shaking, turn to my right and shake Kaitlin.  Let her know how angry I was that she brought me here and I wanted a divorce.  I didn’t do any of that, I just shook.  Thoroughly confused, I felt great!  Osho hits again…

When the music stopped, we sat, Dustin asked around for people to share what they felt, saw or heard.  The answers were hilarious at the time; “I felt my Chakras light up.”, “I felt as though my third eye was beaming light into he cosmos” or “My crown Chakra split wide open man”.  Hilarious shit.  I sat in it, tried to feel what I could and didn’t answer Dustin.  I knew I felt something though, I could feel aliveness in my body and I felt a very clear feeling in my mind.  The meditation aspect worked, when you shake in front of strangers for half an hour something is bound to happen, you don’t come back from that.  I felt great, I felt connected to those people and I changed from the anger I felt towards Dustin when I showed up, to being grateful he shared this with me.

So where do I stand on Chakras?  This is the part that changed forever.  Once we were done speaking about our experience, we had one more 15 minute sit with our hands in front of us.  Until this point my ideas around energy were pretty scientific.  I knew for a fact our bodies contain a shit ton of it.  We run on electricity and we emit signals, waves, feelings and a field around us, how else do you know when someone is looking at you?  Or how you just get a vibe about someone or some place.  This I knew to be true.  When Dustin started to get us to hold our hands a couple of inches apart and focus our minds to the space between I knew what to expect.  I was going to feel heat and a push pull action in that space, I’d been here before.  I love this one by the way, I recommend you try it and you will no doubt feel some energy, something you cannot see, but you feel.

This was old news to me, I kind of tuned out what Dustin was saying about the power within or my connection to the universe, and I just played with the little energy ball between my hands.  When he got to the Chakra part of his talk, my ears perked a little.  Something he said had me intrigued.  The colours he spoke to had me freaking out a little bit.  When my eyes were closed and I focused on the energy in my hands, I straight up saw colours behind my eyelids.  Not an acid trip show, just subtle colours, northern light-ish style of thing.  I saw mostly orange. This meant nothing to me until Dustin spoke about the colours of the chakras and their meaning.  I won’t lie, I don’t remember why I saw orange or what that related to in my life, all I know was that at the time, whatever I was going through, this hit me in the junk.  The link between the colour I saw, the energy I felt and what was up in my life at the time was undeniable.

I kept this to myself.  For a long time.  I told Kaitlin a few weeks later with my tail between my legs.  I was certain the chakras were just humans trying to explain something that math already knew.  Energy flowed in certain paths and probably crossed at these points, but the colours having meaning?  Come-on…   So when I saw this link for myself I felt betrayed a little.  Like I had been lied to, lied to by myself, but still lied to.  Changing my mind is hard.  This experience kick started a change, it got me thinking in a slightly different way and it was, and is, scary as hell.  There is that ego thing again, things that disrupt my way of thinking are usually met with resistance and fear.

Moral of this story, don’t knock till you try it!  Chakras have some validity, and now that I know about them I see them all over the place.  Humans are not that tricky, there are reasons we attribute certain colours with certain feelings.  The chakras did not come first, they are just a pretty cool tool we have available to put some tangibility to these colours and feelings.

Will I Osho it again?  Let me put it this way, Osho seems to be like a gateway drug, if such a thing actually exists, to far weirder and more humiliating Yoga Husbandry acts to come.

 

Ben Armstrong

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