The seven chakras — an overview
This is the map the rest of the course runs on. Seven centres up the body, each with a location, a colour, a note, a mantra and a day of the week. Course Two takes them one at a time in full detail. This lesson gives you the whole picture at once, so that everything afterwards has somewhere to land.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to name all seven chakras in order with their notes and colours, and you will have started a seven-day practice cycle.
What is a chakra?
In this tradition, a chakra is a centre of energy located along the line of the spine, from the perineum to the crown of the head. Seven of them, stacked, each governing a region of the body and an area of experience.
A word about what they are not. Chakras are not organs. You will not find one in an anatomy textbook, and no scan will show you a blocked sacral chakra. They are a model — a way of organising the body, the emotions and the mind into a structure you can actually work with.
That is not a criticism. Maps are useful precisely because they are simpler than the ground. When Sunita's notebook says the throat chakra governs the neck, mouth, ears and shoulders and also governs telling the truth, it is grouping a physical region with a psychological one — and anyone who has felt their throat tighten before a difficult conversation knows why those two got grouped together.
Work with the map because it is useful. That is a much steadier foundation than believing it because you were told to.
The seven chakras
| Chakra | Location | Colour | Note | Mantra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Root Muladhara |
Base of spine | Red | C · 131 Hz | Lam |
| Sacral Swadhisthana |
Pelvis | Orange | D · 148 Hz | Vam |
| Solar Plexus Manipura |
Navel | Yellow | E · 165 Hz | Rum |
| Heart Anahata |
Chest | Green | F · 175 Hz | Yum |
| Throat Vishuddha |
Throat | Sky blue | G · 198 Hz | Hum |
| Third Eye Ajna |
Between the brows | Indigo | A · 220 Hz | Om |
| Crown Sahasrara |
Top of the head | Violet | B · 250 Hz | Aung |
The colours run in the order of a rainbow, bottom to top. That is not a coincidence and it is the easiest way to remember them — red at the ground, violet at the sky.
The six statements — and the silence
Sunita's notebook gives each chakra a short phrase that captures what it governs:
| Chakra | Statement | Governs |
|---|---|---|
| Root | I am | Safety, security, survival |
| Sacral | I feel | Will, pleasure, desire |
| Solar Plexus | I do | Confidence, identity, self-esteem |
| Heart | I love | Unconditional love, art, sharing |
| Throat | I speak | Purity, expression, communication |
| Third Eye | I see | Perception, clarity, command |
| Crown | — | Silence, bliss, enlightenment |
Notice that the crown has no statement. Six chakras speak. The seventh does not. The notebook records only three words for it — silence, bliss, enlightenment — and leaves the sentence unwritten.
That is a deliberate feature of the tradition rather than a gap in the notes, and it is worth sitting with. Everything below the crown is something you are, feel, do, love, say or see. The crown is where those stop.
One chakra for each day of the week
The tradition assigns each chakra a day, beginning at the root on Sunday and finishing at the crown on Saturday.
| Day | Chakra | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | Root | C |
| Monday | Sacral | D |
| Tuesday | Solar Plexus | E |
| Wednesday | Heart | F |
| Thursday | Throat | G |
| Friday | Third Eye | A |
| Saturday | Crown | B |
This is more practical than it looks. It gives you a structure — a seven-day cycle where each day has one focus — and it stops the beginner's habit of working on whichever chakra feels most interesting and ignoring the rest.
Practice: your first seven-day cycle
Start tomorrow, on whatever day tomorrow is, and use whichever bowl you own. You are not trying to match notes yet — that comes later.
- Look up the day's chakra in the table above.
- Sit quietly and place a hand over that part of your body.
- Play your bowl — three strikes with full silences, then a minute of rimming.
- Keep the day's colour in mind while you listen. Red for the root, orange for the sacral, and so on.
- Afterwards, write one line. Not an analysis — one line about what you noticed.
Seven days, seven lines. At the end you will have something no reading can give you: your own record of which centres are easy for you to feel and which are not. Practitioners refer back to that for years.
If you would like a longer structure, our 30-day routine calendar extends the same idea across a month.
Common mistakes
- Treating the map as anatomy. Chakras are a model of experience, not organs. Anyone claiming to diagnose illness from them has left the tradition and entered something else.
- Hunting for blockages. Beginners decide they have a blocked heart chakra and work on nothing else for a year. Run the whole cycle. The map works as a system.
- Confusing throat and third eye colours. Sky blue at the throat, indigo — dark blue — between the brows. This catches almost everyone.
- Skipping the root. It is the least glamorous and the most important. Sunita's notebook calls it the foundation, and everything above it rests on it.
- Memorising instead of practising. You will learn this table far faster by playing through the week than by staring at it.
How do you know you got it right?
You can recite the seven chakras in order with their colours and notes, without looking. And you can say which chakra today belongs to.
If you want to test yourself properly, our chakra quiz will ask you a few questions and suggest which note suits what you are working on at the moment, and the full chakra and note reference is worth bookmarking as a lookup page.
When you eventually want to work with all seven, a graded chakra set is what Courses Two and Three assume — but there is no hurry, and the rest of Course One needs only the bowl you already have.
Something to sit with
Read down the six statements again — I am, I feel, I do, I love, I speak, I see. Which of those six sentences is currently the hardest one for you to say and mean?
That is where your practice wants to go, and you did not need anyone to diagnose it for you.