If you’re familiar with energy healing, you’re probably familiar with chakra healing. Like other energy healing practices, chakra healing may help you deal with traumatic events in your life. We’ll discuss the chakras and the role they may play in emotional healing. But please note, if you have PTSD or have been traumatized by stressful or shocking events in your life, it’s important to evaluate the potential need for counseling or other treatments. While the tips in this article may help with emotional healing, please seek qualified professional help if you need it.

What Are Chakras?

The chakras are known to energy healing enthusiasts as the body’s energy centers. They run from the tailbone to the crown of your head, in front of your spine. While you can’t see them, they make up a key part of the human body’s energy field. Chakras and chakra healing has been used for thousands of years as a means of balancing the body’s energy for physical, emotional, and physical well-being. 

When you experience trauma, it can affect all 7 chakras in the body — this is why chakra healing may help you recover from bad experiences. Here is a quick description of each chakra. As you reach each one, mentally check in, sense its location, and consider how your experiences might be affecting that chakra. Consider what feels free or easy about each energy, and what feels more difficult for you right now. Our interactive chakra chart may also be helpful to you.

Root Chakra – Muladhara – Support or Base

The first of the chakras, the root chakra lies at the perineum, or the tip of your tailbone. It’s related to grounding, survival, primal energy, and safety or security. When you’ve been traumatized, you may have felt your safety or survival threatened. Fighting the despair and recovering from traumatic experiences, chakra healing may help you feel your will to survive becoming brighter and fuller.

Sacral Chakra – Svadhisthana

This second chakra is connected with sexuality, pleasure, creativity, and relationships. It lies at the womb or sacrum, and may overlap the root chakra. If you’ve experience sexual abuse or assault, it may affect this chakra to the point of locking it open or shutting it down. You may question your rights to desire or relationships, and have trouble accepting those rights until you become more balanced.

Solar Plexus – Manipura

Located near the stomach, this third chakra has to do with inner strength, self control, vitality, and assertiveness. A healthy solar plexus may help you set boundaries and voice your needs. Traumatic experiences can affect your ability to manifest your inner strength. Chakra healing of the solar plexus may help you reclaim your power and act on behalf of what you want.

Heart Chakra – Anahata

Of course, the heart chakra is in the center of your chest. It’s associated with love, along with compassion, forgiveness and self-esteem. Balance in the heart chakra is related with a feeling of being centered. If you’ve been abused as a child or by a partner, your natural sense of love may be associated with distress, shame, and painful memories. The chakra healing process may help you regain a sense of love without emotional pain, feeling more open to giving and receiving affection, trusting others, and feeling joy and gratitude.

Throat Chakra – Visuddha

It makes sense that this fifth chakra is connected with expression, communication and speech. When balanced, you may feel more free to be truthful, express your feelings in words, as well as listening to others do the same. The fear and shame you may have experienced during traumatic life events can energetically “strangle” your voice and leave you feeling incapable or unworthy of that expression. Chakra healing may help you regain the ability and desire to ring out your own truth.

Third Eye Chakra – Ajna

This is the sixth chakra, located between the eyebrows. It’s associated with intuition, vision, insight, and psychic awareness or ESP. When you’ve been traumatized, you may find yourself overly vigilant in trying to see every possible bad outcome, or perceive every threat. Your visual field may narrow or be hyper focused on one thing at a time. For example, abuse often causes us to question our intuition or perception. Recovering from that trauma may help us to be more relaxed in our vision, helping intuition and perception to come to us, rather than stressing about looking for it. When you no longer feel threatened, your field of “vision” may expand.

Crown Chakra – Sahasrara

Located above the crown of your head, this seventh chakra is your connection point with higher consciousness, higher power, or inspiration. This is your most spiritual chakra. Through traumatic experiences, your spiritual self may be damaged. You may feel disconnected from others, from deity, or from the universe. Getting better can help you reestablish your sense of connectedness, and feeling connected to a higher power can help you draw strength to cope.

Chakra Healing Exercise

Based on principles of energy healing, this Chakra healing exercise can help you check in with your entire chakra system.

First, sit or lie down and relax. Starting at your tailbone, focus on relaxing each part of your spine into a supported position. As you move up from one chakra to the next, consider areas that feel cluttered, overwhelmed, or blocked. Also think about areas where you’re doing well — places that feel more clear and flowing. 

Does energy seem to flow freely from your root chakra all the way to your crown? What about flowing the other direction, from crown to root? Where you feel any sense of discomfort or blockage, lay a gentle hand on the area and tune in further. Mentally ask any energy that doesn’t belong there to flow away. Invite areas with more positive energy to support areas that may have less. Think of imbalances flowing from the root chakra, all the way up and out your crown. Let them go.

How Are You Feeling?

Use this exercise as a chance to meditate and check in with how you’re feeling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You may be able to identify areas where trauma is affecting you. After checking in with yourself, consider using The Emotion Code® to identify and release any Trapped Emotions that could be blocking or hampering your ability to recover from bad experiences. You may feel lighter, happier, or more balanced right away.