How to Heal Your Chakras with Forgiveness

It offers a deeper path to wholeness

I was on Kauai, the Garden Island, on retreat with my teacher. We were working on my heart chakra, to release an intense fear of persecution from a past life in which I had been betrayed by my community. Suddenly, a massive swelling of fear erupted between my second and third chakras and plopped out. The relief was instantaneous.

Some months later, just outside Sedona, surrounded by miles of desert, I screamed at God at the top of my lungs, “Why do you keep sending me back?” The day before, a shamanic practitioner had performed a soul journeying ceremony with me where I burst into tears, the familiar sense of “not belonging here” flowing through my chest and finding its escape through liquid rivers down my cheeks.

These two episodes, from years ago, were key points in my healing journey. One of my deepest psychic wounds was a fear of being rejected, even exiled, for my non-mainstream spiritual beliefs. What these two moments and many others that followed have taught me is that there is another approach to healing the chakras.

A Different View of the Chakras

You may have read other articles on the chakras, those brightly colored orbs of energy that correspond to different points on the body (or at least some images like the one to the left in a yoga studio). Some of you might even think there’s not much new for you to learn.

If so, you’re probably familiar with their description as colorful lotus flowers, each with a specific number of “petals.” You may already know the usual list of techniques for clearing them — meditation, working with colors and crystals, breathing techniques, or yoga poses.

I endorse those approaches, but there’s another method that offers a deeper level of healing.

As the traditional model tells us, each chakra relates to an area of human life:

• The root chakra relates to safety and security, such as having your body’s basic needs met.
• The sacral chakra relates to creativity, sexuality, and relationships.
• The solar plexus chakra relates to willpower, identity, and your sense of self.
• The heart chakra relates to your capacity to give and receive love.
• The throat chakra is the seat of expression — your capacity to voice your needs and share your thoughts.
• The third eye is the seat of your imagination, intuition, and intellectual inspiration.
• The crown chakra relates to your connection to your soul, a higher power, and consciousness itself.

That model presents them as discrete spheres, each linked to the next one, in succession, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. My own experience confirms yet slightly modifies this organization. In truth, there are lines of connection between one or more chakras relating to specific traumatic events, limiting beliefs, emotional patterns, and past life karma. They are also best thought of as a circle, as a symbol of oneness and wholeness, rather than a line, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Betrayal by a loved one, for example, won’t affect just the heart chakra. A thread might be woven through the sacral chakra and the heart chakra. If that betrayal affects your material well-being, like being kicked out of your home and having no job, the emotional pain is likely also linked to your root chakra. Your sense of self might also be harmed, causing the thread to wind through your solar plexus. If you find you can’t speak about it because you are so ashamed or hurt, your throat chakra might also be impacted.

What this means is that you have to start looking at the beliefs, thoughts, and emotions you have around a particular event, trigger, trauma, pattern, etc., and how they relate to multiple areas of your life. Much of it depends on the stories you told yourself in response to these events. Some of this will be unconscious, but with effort and discipline, you can unearth them and bring them to the surface.

In my case, the past-life wound that instilled a sense of deep fear of persecution for spiritual beliefs was threaded through multiple chakras. It had a major connection to my heart because it was tied to a sense of completion rejection by my community — a kind of abandonment — and if I did, I would face a kind of rejection that might harm my ability to make a living (root chakra). It meant that I sometimes didn’t feel I could connect properly with others (sacral chakra) and that I would never belong or could be my true self (solar plexus). It also meant that I was angry at being sent back here again (crown chakra).

Healing these wounds can rely on multiple methods such as mantra and energy work. But one of the most powerful paths of healing, I came to see, was being able to explore through introspection and forgiveness those lines of connection.

The Power of Forgiveness

How does forgiveness work with the chakras? As I elaborate in greater detail here, forgiveness is your power to rewrite the past by replacing your old story of victimhood with a new story, imbuing those events with a new understanding and meaning that is far more empowering.

It starts, of course, by feeling whatever emotion is arising, allowing it to fill you. Before you attempt any kind of inquiry, just allow the emotion to speak to you, in its own language — the language of sensation.

That alone is deeply healing. Then you can turn to inquiry, turning inward to the story beneath the feeling. This is a form of introspection, built on meditation and inner knowing, as you listen to understand what is occurring within you. Here, you’re asking to see the story associated with the emotion.

The healing and power of forgiveness comes when you can see and release the story you’re telling yourself. That story might take the form of a limiting belief like, If I tell the truth of my spirituality, I will be persecuted.

By far the simplest method is to forgive yourself for believing what you did and to forgive others for their words and deeds that helped instill that belief in you. In my case, working with this past pain, it might have taken the form, I forgive all people for persecuting me for my spiritual beliefs. I would repeat that over and over. Sometimes that might even take the form of a prayer, God/Divine Light, please help me forgive all people who persecuted me for my spiritual beliefs, and help me forgive myself for holding this belief.

Forgiveness is not some empty incantation, nor simply an effort to turn the page and leave the past behind. Rather, it is a portal into the past, so that it can be transformed and integrated into the present. Use the words of forgiveness as you explore the deep feelings associated with the story and the participants in it whom you are seeking to forgive.

How To Use Forgiveness with the Chakras

Returning to this fear of persecution, I was blessed to work with many healers and to have a direct connection to the divine, via a kundalini awakening, that allowed for profound chakra work.

But this did not entirely eliminate the need to work intellectually, with my mind, to forgive and release the beliefs that I harbored around this profound fear. I had to unwind it by looking at how I held beliefs connected to the different domains of the chakras.

When seeing it through the chakras, as I mentioned above, nearly every chakra had a thread related to this painful belief wound through it.

It wasn’t enough to focus on the heart chakra or feel that fear of persecution whenever it would arise in me. That process had to continue by looking at the beliefs connected to each chakra and seeing them as threads of a larger puzzle. What story was I telling myself about being on this path and making money? Building friendships? Sharing my experiences publicly?

Each thread led to another chakra. At each point, I had to look at the story and forgive myself and the others who had implanted this belief in me.

Forgiveness does not replace all of the other techniques for working with the chakras but builds on them. Meditation can help you feel deeply the different emotions that you might have around a deep thread winding its way through your chakra system. Using colors, yoga, and pranayama can help move that energy. But seeing the interconnections between the chakras and your beliefs can lead you to go deeper, and uproot additional beliefs, than if you treat the chakras as isolated spheres and work to cleanse them individually.

When you discover a limiting belief about yourself in one area, explore how that might also show up in another chakra and what form that belief might take. Make a list of all the beliefs you might have in connection to this energy, using the chakras as a framework for that exploration. You might be surprised to discover the tapestry that has been woven in your mind. With forgiveness, you get to weave a new, more empowered one.