Many spiritual healers and mediums believe that you should close your chakras when you ‘aren’t working’. Personally I think this is misleading as we are all meant to be using our chakras all the time. Chakras aren’t just reserved for people leading a ‘spiritual’ life! However chakras can certainly be too open or too closed and you may want to consciously open them more fully when you are healing or in meditation and then close them down to a more modest size for everyday life.

If you are in good health your chakras will all be responsive. Imagine a sea anemone. Most of the time it is relaxed, openly taking in nourishment, but it will quickly withdraw into itself when it senses a threat and when the danger has passed it opens out again. Ideally your chakras will open and close just as naturally. Unfortunately chakras are not always this responsive and they can sometimes get stuck in an overactive or tightly closed pattern.

Chakras are most often stuck open and overactive when someone has become addicted to the type of energy corresponding with that chakra area. Chakras can be kept tightly shut and underactive, or clogged up, when someone has experienced too much grief or pain in the corresponding area of their life. Closing down is a self protective response and a way of avoiding the issue rather than processing it; the associated energetic debris will need to clear before it can work healthily again.

A chakra that is stuck open or shut will have an impact on the corresponding area of that person’s experience of life. If a chakra is stuck wide open the person may be overwhelmed with too much information of that nature flooding into their system. If a chakra is stuck shut there will be too little.

One energetic pattern to be particularly aware of is the ‘top heavy’ pattern, where the crown and third eye chakras are overactive and wide open, but the lower chakras are closed and grounding is weak or non-existent. With the closing of the lower chakras there can be a disassociation from reality. In the healing world someone who is constantly tripping into the psychic realms without being well grounded and balanced in their lower chakras is often termed a ‘space cadet’ because their perceptions are all ‘out there’ but of little Earthly use. In extreme cases such a person can even appear to be quite insane, seeing and hearing psychic phenomena in an uncontrolled, overwhelming and indiscriminate way.

Simply channelling energy into an already overactive chakra will usually make things worse. The dominant chakras need calming down, underactive ones may need to be cleared or opened up. Sometimes it takes several balancing sessions before there is a noticeable shift in these patterns as the client can knowingly or unwittingly return their chakras to the pattern they have grown accustomed to.

Opening and Closing the Chakras
Sensitive people and those who suffer interrupted sleep may like to try closing their chakras at bedtime, but need to remember to open them again in the morning otherwise they will lack energy. Work from the base chakra upwards to open and crown chakra downwards to close. This is a simple visualisation:

• Visualise each of your chakras as flowers that can open and close. You can add the typical colour of the chakra to your visualisation, so a red flower for the base, orange for the sacral, yellow for the solar plexus, green or pink for the heart, blue for the throat, indigo for the brow and violet, white or gold for the crown. Don't force these colours, you may perceive other shades.
• Picture each chakra as having petals that can be opened like a flower drinking in the sunshine and closed down again into a protective bud

This is an excerpt from my new book: Touchstones Manual for the Crystal Therapist, coming very soon! Please sign up to the newsletter on the New Age site for ordering information as soon as it is available.