Life includes all it encounters. What you experience in every moment of your living matters.

Cultures and religions worldwide can often divide life experiences into positive and negative entities. Yet the life force includes all of them which includes:

• death
• grief
• illness
• winter
• withdrawal
• rest
• success
• failure
• ageing
• joy
• and more…..

Life Force can be viewed as an organising principle. It is the movement towards something that feels more alive.

It is a way of paying attention to what is happening right now and the conditions that allow life to move, respond, repair, connect, express, let go and flourish.

Sometimes Life Force appears as:

• desire
• creativity
• anger
• pleasure
• rest
• grief
• capacity to say no
• self respect to withdraw from what is harming us

We are often taught to distrust these movements.

• Children are often taught to override their signals.

• Women are socially conditioned to suppress anger.

• Workers are taught to ignore exhaustion.

• People who are different are often taught to make themselves acceptable to the dominant group’s norms, and to hide what makes them unique.

• Carers can be taught that love means endless availability and duty.

We become skilled at adjusting ourselves to what the world demands. And in doing so, we can slowly lose contact with the movements of life within us.

So the question becomes: What supports life?

The Chakra System as a Map Within a Larger Philosophy

I regard the chakra system as a map within a larger philosophy rather than just being a standalone philosophy

It offers a way, a lens, of exploring lived experience and the conditions through which human life force is experienced and expressed.

1. Muladhara – The root – asks about foundation.

• Do I have ground beneath me?

2. Svadhisthana – The sacral – asks about flow and relationship.

• Can I feel?
• Can I connect?
• Can I experience movement and desire?

3. Manipura – The solar plexus – asks about agency.

• Can I act?
• Can I know what is mine?
• Can I take up space?

4. Anahata -The heart – asks about relationship without self-abandonment.

• Can I remain connected and remain myself?

5. Visuddhi – The throat – asks about expression.

• Can what is inside me enter the world through my expression?
• Can I share my reality without abandoning myself?

6. Ajna – The third eye – asks about perception and inner life.

• Can I see clearly?
• Can I reflect, imagine and make meaning?

7. Sahasrara – The crown – asks about orientation.

• What larger field of meaning am I part of?

These are fundamental human questions relevant to life. They invite a deeper quality of engagement with self, other and the worlds that are inhabited, beyond the surface one that is so regularly encouraged.

And they are affected by the conditions of our lives.

• It is difficult to speak freely in a world that punishes your difference.

• It is difficult to feel safe when your material foundations are insecure.

• It is difficult to rest when your responsibilities never end.

• It is difficult to experience agency when your choices are continually constrained.

The map cannot be separated from the territory. And the territory includes the world in which we live.