How Chakra Healing Therapy Was Born

by Glen Park, author of Chakra Healing Therapy

It was the fall of 1979 and I was visiting California, having been fortunate enough to receive a small arts council grant enabling me to explore women’s theater in the States. I had just left the fringe theater group that I had toured with for eight years in the UK. I felt burned out. I had decided to change careers and planned, upon returning from the United States, to train as a teacher of the Alexander Technique with Don Burton, who was a wonderful trainer. I loved this body-oriented work, having had lessons for several years that helped me overcome a recurring problem of sciatica.

In San Francisco, the New Age movement was burgeoning, well ahead of developments in the UK. I was staying with a friend of a friend, who encouraged me to have a psychic reading, which felt a bit like taking a trip to the moon, inexperienced as I was in anything New Age. But I was curious and went along, introducing myself as someone with no experience in psychism and a certain amount of skepticism. I can remember only one thing about the reading: As she began to look at my aura and chakras, the psychic told me that, much to her surprise, considering my skepticism, she could “see” that I was extremely psychic. She told me that because I had no idea of this ability, it had become a liability. I was vulnerable to picking up negative energy from people and places, which was making me ill, and she advised me to train in psychic development so that I could learn how to protect myself.

Several pinches of salt later, I returned to the UK and began my teacher training. The Alexander Technique is a method of retraining ourselves in everyday movements of life, such as sitting, standing, and walking, in a way that promotes health and efficiency. It also helps improve the highly specific movements of specialists such as athletes, musicians, dentists, hairdressers, and many more, for whom habitual and repetitive movements can cause problems. In addition, teachers of the technique work very sensitively with their hands on the body, both during movement and while a student is lying at rest on a therapy table. This work brings about release and balance in the musculature, giving students the experience of a different way of being and moving. Alexander Technique teachers are both teachers and hands-on practitioners working directly on the body.

Practitioners who work with touch know how impossible it is to separate the mind from the body. We constantly experience the effect that muscular release has upon the mind, generating feelings, thoughts, and memories for our clients. Alexander Technique trainee teachers receive a huge amount of gentle, releasing hands-on bodywork, while simultaneously working consciously with the way they think about their balance and movement. This includes mindful awareness and intentional directions to the body. They use themselves as a laboratory, applying the principles of the Alexander Technique to themselves before working with other people. As a result, a trainee emerges from this full-time training, which generally lasts three years, significantly changed in mind and body. In fact, during my training, I began to realize that I was having psychic experiences. I began seeing auras around people and picking up the thoughts and feelings of others. Some of these experiences were pleasant, but some were quite disturbing, and I was reminded of the words of the Californian psychic. I decided to take her advice and undertake some training so that I could have a better understanding and control of these paranormal experiences.

So, alongside my training in the Alexander Technique, I trained in psychic development with Ivy Northage in England, learning to see auras more clearly and to protect myself from the negative energies of other people. I also began to learn about the chakras, centers of energy and consciousness located in the spine and head, and how to open and close them at the psychic level.

On one occasion during my Alexander Technique training, we were honored by the visit of a Tibetan lama, one of the most respected monks and teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the UK. He watched the work we were doing in our training course and described it as “High Tantra.” This was praise indeed, as it suggested that this bodywork was comparable to the ancient spiritual purification practices of Tantric yoga. Many teachers of the Alexander Technique will say that their training opened them to a spiritual awakening. This certainly was the case for me.

Toward the end of my training, I visited San Francisco again. I was keen to make contact with the Californian psychic reader in order to find out from her where I could learn more about the psychic training she had received. She put me in touch with her teacher, Michael Symonds, who very generously invited me to spend a week training with him. That week sowed the seeds of my book, Chakra Healing Therapy, and changed the direction of my life.

Michael taught that the chakras embody a model of consciousness that involves the whole body and extends beyond the body into the aura. He was a gifted clairvoyant who could “see” that each chakra had three subtle levels of depth: the psychological, the psychic, and the spiritual (and I have added the non-subtle physical level of the body in my book). He was particularly interested in the psychological level, and he often collaborated with psychotherapists who would send him clients for a reading, especially clients who were having trouble recalling events from their childhood. Michael would evaluate the chakras and then discuss what he saw in the programming of each chakra, and what in the early life of the client could have created this programming. His prompts would open up memories for clients that they could take back to their therapist for further consideration.

In the short week that I studied with him, I learned how to give chakra readings using Michael’s map of the psyche. He invited volunteers, often graduates of his training, to join us so that I could give them a reading. Because I had been training in psychic development for over a year, I was a quick learner. When I returned to the UK to finish my training in the Alexander Technique, I offered a few chakra readings to fellow students and friends and was astonished at how useful they found them. But my main focus was to become a teacher of the Alexander Technique, which I loved. I wanted to offer the hands-on skills that I had learned to as many people as possible, and I found the work very rewarding. I was helping people learn how to use their bodies well, to overcome back pain and other physical problems, and to become more in touch with their bodies as they became mindful of how they were using themselves. This approach generally promoted health and happiness.

But sometimes I found that the changes my students experienced went deeper than the purely physical level. Muscular releases might cause a person to cry or have some other emotional release, or it might help them get in touch with a deep memory that needed consideration and healing. Wilhelm Reich, a psychotherapist and student of Sigmund Freud, described the muscular tightening patterns of the body as “body armor.” As these muscular patterns release with hands-on work, the emotional armor that they support breaks down. I found that my Alexander Technique training did not address these psychological phenomena adequately, but if I looked at the issues from the perspective of the chakras, I was able to support my students in understanding and integrating emotions and memories that were arising. I began to offer my students chakra work when it seemed appropriate to the way they were responding to my hands-on work. Because the chakras are located physically in the body as well as in the subtle planes, I found that I could continue working with my hands while also addressing the psychological issues that were being raised by the muscular releases. I was able to tell my students which chakras were flowing well and which needed energetic and therapeutic support. Sometimes I would work silently, and at other times my student and I would talk about the psychological issues associated with a particular chakra, while at the same time I would give energetic healing to the chakra with my hands. This work complemented my Alexander Technique work beautifully.

It seemed to me that the chakra work was building bridges between “talk therapy” and “body therapy.” Touch is so fundamental to human life, starting with the earliest stages of life both inside and outside the womb, and healing touch can go to places that talking cannot reach on its own. Not that traditional therapy is not also vital; in fact, when a client needed a lot of therapeutic support, I would advise them to see a counselor or psychotherapist, in conjunction with doing the bodywork with me.

The years passed and my chakra work began to take on a life of its own. Now a significant number of my clients were coming to me for work with the chakras, and I began teaching other Alexander Technique teachers how to work with the chakras, and “chakra healing therapy” was born. Working with the chakras as an embodied developmental map of consciousness can help throw light on the multifaceted nature of our individual interior experience. Chakra therapists show their clients how to become aware of the different chakras within the body and their psychological functions, as parts of a multilevel map of the psyche. With this awareness, clients learn how to mentally support healing and integration of different aspects of themselves. This work is combined with hands-on healing of the chakras, which gives clients the experience of a more balanced and integrated system, both mentally and physically, which in time they can maintain for themselves.

Now, having worked with the chakras for more than thirty years, I have a deeper understanding of the chakras. I have often been astonished and very moved by the way in which hands-on work, combined with an understanding of the chakras, can give people insight into their problems, tools for working with them, and the potential for deep inner healing. Their experiences became my research project, and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with them all. Chakra Healing Therapy evolved as a response to the request of many clients and colleagues to collate years of experiential learning and put it into one volume in order to tell the story of the chakras and how we can work with them to support our own personal and spiritual growth.

The book is about the intelligence that speaks through the body, which, as we learn its language, helps us understand ourselves better. I would like to think that it is part of a journey into understanding the human psyche and its relationship to the body. This understanding can enable us to live happier and more fulfilled lives, and I hope that my book can make a small contribution to realizing that vision.