Do you have the feeling you’re just ‘going with the flow’. But in doing so you are wondering what it’s all for? Or that something could be missing or lacking? This could be a sign of your consciousness trying to check in with your chakra system. In conversation with Lina Mookerjee, registered member (Senior Accredited) of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), we explore how tuning into your chakra system can be a way to harness and regain control of your life force.
What is the chakra system?
The daughter of a Hindu Brahmin, Lina was born into the faith. The chakra system, a philosophy that originates in Hinduism, was a significant part of the milieu of everyday life. But it was Lina’s foray into electrical engineering; the connection of lifeforce, energy, wires and cables, transportation of electricity, generating stations and making things work, where the connection to the chakra system and the human body really clicked. Since then, Lina has been actively working on the chakra system in all aspects of her work; in yoga teaching/training, as a psychotherapist working with individual clients including within menopause and palliative care processes, and in her own life.
Lina tells me there are 7 main energy centres within the chakra system. Each chakra can be considered as a way of exploring oneself through the different gateways of consciousness, they are the layers of what makes ‘being human’, and as fully functioning and as whole as we can be.
Through her 26 years of practice work with clients and students, she has noticed that there is a key theme, a frequency for each, like tuning into different radio stations in different frequencies, and yet they are all connected and interdependent in their functioning:
- Safety: What do we draw, in terms of the earth, and our physicality, what do we need to feel safe in the world?
- Emotionality: Our consciousness of duality in the world, our capacity to be fluid.
- Sense of ‘I’: Who am I?
- Heart: It’s all about balance. How you manage your spirituality and your physicality.
- Speaking truth: Developed once you know how to purify yourself.
- Making sense of the world: Questioning our prejudices, our blind spots and lenses and how we see the world.
- Connecting the greater cosmos: The capacity of going into silence and being with yourself.
“It is a fantastic matrixal map of consciousness. It is akin to a set of schematic wiring diagrams we would use in industry of how things work in circuits. That is how I work, systematically. It is a systematic matrixal maps of living. It’s how we live on a physical level, psychological level, spiritual level, it all wires up. How are we wired up and using our life force, that is what the chakra system is.”
Incongruence in our internal network
But if you don’t have the map, how do you know how you are wired? How do you know how you operate? How can we take responsibility, if we don’t know how it works?
Lina tells me that if you get a sense of incongruence, a feeling of internal conflict, it’s not because you are cursed or superstitious, or that you are wrong. Rather, it’s a signal of internal tension. What you experience and know within yourself is unique to you, and yet it’s at odds with how you live by conforming to norms and consensus without even realising it. Literally, your head, heart, and body are at odds, and “it is the bastardisation of intuitive knowing. Women are naturally intuitive, more so than men, it’s our wiring. Who knows your body wisdom better than you? But how many of us are told to trust or even to understand the messaging our body is conveying, including our own intuition? When the narrative is often ‘don’t be so sensitive’, ‘don’t be so stupid’, ‘get on with it…be strong’.”
One of the major keys to unlocking this is in questioning the narrative, Lina advises: Where did you learn that? What lens were we looking through? What is the judgement – where is the disparagement coming from? The second, is the willingness to be self-aware and the third is staying with the discomfort when awareness contradicts the beliefs and truths that you’ve used in your life, Lina continues.
One thing is for certain, Lina tells me, is the influence of 6000 years on patriarchal ideology that has influenced and impacted so many of the social, health, relational, financial, political, religious and economic systems we live in. “The underlying patriarchal drive is man’s desire for power and control over nature”, she says, explaining that this stemmed from a fundamental envy of women’s ability to create and give birth to life. According to Lina, this power is why “anything linked to women and their innate power became the very targets used to disempower through shaming and humiliation”. She adds that these targets include spiritual connections to nature, intuitive abilities, sexuality, and bodily processes. The fact women operate in cycles, in kairos (subjective) time, that has, for centuries, been perceived as ‘dirty’ and ‘messy’, these narratives are demonising our power. To overcome this we need to be aware of the external noise, to recognise and remove ‘the other’ from the narrative. “Once you get the sense of how you are wired, how you become the engineer of your own body, it’s liberating.”
The value in tuning into the chakra system
It is about accessing and understanding what is your operating system and how to work it, in a grounded and systematic way. It is about working with awareness and recognising that our experiences are multilayered. Importantly, it is about being aware of the major influences that affect how we live, including early life, and conditioning (operate in a certain way, live by certain rules). It is also about how mystical and mythical thinking can confuse our lived experience. Ultimately, working to increase self-awareness by using the chakra system as a navigational map is about putting power, and responsibility, back into the lap of the user.
You can learn to recognise what the external noise and factors are, whose voices and perspectives have been influencing your narrative, and understand what your life force is and how you want to use it; to understand how you truly feel and how you want to use these experiences for yourself.
Once you recognise, for example, ‘that sounds like my mother making a judgement’, something you may have internalised, you can question that voice and ask yourself ‘what do I think of that?’ before autonomously driving with that lens. It’s about looking at all those preconditions and judgements we’ve introjected, and questioning those experiences, and not going along with what we are told, to find liberation.
You can learn to question these experiences, lessons and values to take back your power of self:
- Do I use it as defensiveness?
- Do I use it as blaming?
- Do I use it to undermine myself?
And even question our fears ‘If I am successful- what does that mean?’ – ‘am I opening myself up to be humiliated, or shamed?’, ‘How will I be perceived if people see what I am really like?’. All because we are often led to believe that I am less than I am.
When you learn to question the narrative in line with your energy channels, as no system works independently, it enables you to take responsibility for how you think and operate, Lina tells me. You can learn to recognise what responsibility looks like and where you have choice in learning throughout the multiple systems, becoming aware of them. Through learning and awareness “you can start to influence them in a healthier way”, Lina says.
The chakra system is the ground on which we sit
It is important to work in an integrated way as nothing works in isolation, every system in the body is coproducing, Lina continues. If you influence one, it will affect another. The aim is to get them in concert with each other as much as possible.
The chakra system is the gateway to internal harmony. “Through the energetic system, the overarching system, it is everything, to our physicality, our organs, circulatory system… all preceded by the energy system – it is the fabric of everything going on”, Lina says.
“The true sense of self is the tuning fork we want to get in touch with”, Lina continues. “If that has been denied and layers of soil has been laid on top, how do we know who we are? The process of any suffering is an opportunity to take the layers off, if you are ready and wanting to recognise the core sense of self that was covered. It is a big act of courage. True self had to be hidden and that’s where you question ‘can I be this?’.
The risk? Having to hide in the past, not allowed to come out fully and authentically into the world, it is affecting. All of that history has to be uncovered to gain that sense of control and action.”
I consider this: If it’s been normalised and you are used to it, you don’t challenge it because we don’t recognise it. It’s only in the searching that we can find what is truly ‘ours’. Lina says: “If we learn how to regulate – the growth can be sustainable.”
A course to hone the tuning fork
Lina has developed a course that can help you access the chakra system as a starting point for personal growth.
When explored in a safe space an opportunity is created for personal insights to come up to the surface of conscious awareness, Lina says. But, if our wants and desires are not met because the world doesn’t operate as we need it to, or social structures don’t encourage it, we can feel overwhelmed and abandon our exploration of self. Which is where personal responsibility is important and comes into effect. With personal responsibility we develop an understanding for the reasonable adjustments for things you do have control over. You understand where you have agency and what you can do with it. It means being able to manage any fallout without being overwhelmed. Like we talked about in our values and beliefs article, when we know we are being true to ourselves, because we operate in logic and in questioning, we don’t feel destabilised because it is our truth.
Lina says: “The risk is when we have positive psychology as the dominant narrative, this can distort our set of expectations that can’t be met. So the way that I run this course is about being realistic in that reality – that we can’t change every belief because we’d be expecting other people to change, we can’t do that. And that is the other thing – awareness is actually about taking a grounded perspective of what is possible and what is not. So you don’t drop and give up. You develop proactive and realistic wisdom.”
Who is a good candidate for the course?
This course is for the curious seeker who feels a little lost and is ready to explore a deeper path. If you’re open to reflection and ready to move beyond quick fixes, this course offers a supportive and systematic process to help you find your own answers and grow in wisdom, Lina tells me.
Ready to leave behind the cynicism and misconceptions about new-age practices? This isn’t a “fuzzy,” ungrounded course. Instead, it’s a systematic and practical approach that uses the chakra system as a framework for self-regulation and personal growth. Led by a qualified yoga teacher, an electrical engineer, and a registered counsellor, this course is rooted in questioning and experience, offering a grounded path to help you make your life better.
BWY Chakra Module will run Sunday PM between October and January. There is a commitment of 8 online meetings. It is a 30 hours course, 15 hours in-course and 15 hours that is supplementary.
Lina Mookerjee is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and Supervisor, CPD trainer, educator, broadcaster and writer. She is based in Silloth on Solway, Cumbria where she works with national and international clients face to face and online. Lina is a social activist speaking up for those whose voices are not represented – women in menopause and unpaid carers. She recently appeared in the iNews, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and ITV’s Tonight program sharing her story about the pain, grief and invisibility she faces as her husband’s carer. Much of her psychotherapy practice has involved working with clients presenting with anxiety, panic, complex trauma/PTSD, shame and depression. Lina is also a co-director of Praxis-PPD (Therapy, Yoga and CPD) in Nottingham and she also facilitates personal development and writers’ groups, retreats, women’s healing groups, and continues her interest in mind-body connection (particularly in relation to its effect on health and well-being) and personal-spiritual development.
Featured image: francescoridolfi.com, Canva
