What is Chahkra reading? or healing?

Question

What is a Chahkra reading or healing, sorry if I mistyped. I am wondering what this is.

Answer 1

It's a new age energetic thing.  I'll try to give the best concise explanation I can.

Most cultures besides ours have come to the conclusion that beyond the body having a physical anatomy, there's an additional energetic structure that coexists with it.  In turn, many cultures in turn have come up with various frame works for understanding it, and affecting it.

One of the many ones was that developed in India.  Their system focuses on things like chakras (which are energetic centers in the body, somewhat like the central hubs for a pipenetwork).  The indian system is a lot more complicated, but they essentially figured out that

a) Certain chakras being activated gave people "powers"

b) If the chakras were messed up to some extent, it tended to correspond to the person being sick.

c) If you work with the chakras you can do all sorts of wonderful things like advanced meditation.

The Indian system was then popularized in the West because India was colonized by the British, so part of it was brought into our culture.  Eventually, western occultists took the practices found in hinduism, and used them to form a discipline known as theosophy.  Later on, people took theosophy and parts of evangelical Christianity and put them together to start the new age movement.

So, to paraphrase, chakra healing and reading essentially is a branch off of something the hindus have been practicing for years.  Unfortunately, it's also dramatically worse.

For what it's worth, my expertise is in the Chinese Systems (which I'm baised to view as better), but since both methods are essentially working with the same thing, once you get past the differing frameworks, most of the Chakra stuff makes sense to me.

Anyways, in all the real energetic systems, if something within someone is messed up, then the energetic field they project becomes distorted or messed up.  Chakra reading is one way of diagnosing this (although it's design has a few problems which make it somewhat unnaccurate).  Essentially, the theory they work on says that "each chakra gives off a color, and depending on the colors you see coming off a person, and how vibrant the colors are, you can tell if someone's chakra is messed up and if the person is unhealthy."

Chakra healing follows pretty logically from that.  Fix the person's chakra that's making the messed up problem and it goes away, hence healing them.

I have very little faith in this approach since

a) oftentimes the problem doesn't actually lie in the chakra

b) the method used to fix it is essentially "positive visualizations" which aren't very effective for clinical applications.

However, the whole experience definitely gives you a buzz and feels kinda cool, so it's spread like wildfire and odds are you can find someone who wants to do it.  I however would not advise using it as a serious health care practice, just leave it as something to experience a few times.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask me anything else you want to know!

Answer 2

It is a part of Asian mystical healing.

Chi (qi or ki) is purported to be the "life energy force" that flows through everything.  It supposedly flows through channels called "meridians" which can be accessed at key points in the body known as "chakras"  These are the spots that Alt "healers" may place acupuncture needles.

However, there is not a shred of evidence that any of this actually exists.  Nobody has ever detected chi, or found the meridians.

There is no evidence that disease is caused by blocking of the chi (which is the philosophy lots of different Alties subscribe to)  Furthermore, there is no evidence that Alties such as Reiki  or Therapeutic Touch practitioners can even detect the energy they claim to manipulate.

In short...it is nonsense.