Chakra Spreads and Decks To Use With the Chakra System (Podcast Ep. 22 Blog)
In this blog, I will discuss chakra spreads and walk you through descriptions of the 7 main chakras as well as a few decks I use to work with the chakra system. Then I will share a chakra inspired custom spread.
In various traditions across centuries and cultures, chakras have been viewed in numerous ways. Most of the descriptions I will be using are based on the New Age viewpoint which considers chakras as wheels of energy or life energy also called qi that flows along pathways in the center of the body and maintain balance spiritually, emotionally, and physically. In this tradition the chakras are described as energy centers right outside the body aligned in an ascending column from the base of the spine to the top of the head.
New Age practices often associate each chakra with a certain color, characteristics, emotional states, bodily functions, states of consciousness, and physical ailments when blocked. Chakras expand and awaken as we grow. When energy gets blocked in the body this is when we experience an imbalance in our energy field. This affects the chakra system related to that issue. Meditation, intention setting, crystals, and energy healing can help bring alignment to those blocked chakras.
I want to give a description of each of the 7 main chakras, providing the basic characteristics of each along with their location in the body, organs they govern, the colors and crystals associated with each, and how to identify when that chakra is balanced or imbalanced. Then I will talk about how to use the tarot to read on your chakra system and how to identify chakra blockages as well as sharing the tarot and oracle decks I use that are chakra themed. I will start with the base chakra that sits and the base of the spine and then we will work up through the body in order until we reach the 7th chakra at the top of the head. For each chakra I will be including a corresponding card from the Chakra Reading Cards (shown above) and a corresponding crystal from the Crystal Spirits Oracle. Both decks are discussed in length in this blog.
ROOT CHAKRA
Base Chakra (1st): The base chakra is called the root chakra also known as the 1st chakra, and it deals with security, money, balance, material needs, physical health, trust, and feeling grounded. It is rooted in your family, old beliefs, values, and self-worth. It is related to our primary needs in life and survival.
Emotions: primal raw emotions of passion, rage, fear, and joy.
Chakra Location: Perineum, base of spine
Organs: adrenal glands, colon, kidneys, skeleton/bones, sexual organs
Color: Red
Crystals: Hematite, red jasper, garnet, black obsidian, black tourmaline, and petrified wood
Balanced: When you are connected and grounded in your root chakra, you feel safe and secure in yourself and in life. This allows you to create and to express yourself and to live in an empowered and aligned way with abundance.
Imbalanced: When you are disconnected from the root chakra, you experience feelings of being unsupported and unsafe, and an inability to thrive. You might feel lost and lightheaded.
To balance your root chakra work with or wear the color red, eat red foods and root vegetables, eat red spices like chili powder and cayenne, meditate, work on healing old wounds and releasing outdated family beliefs, set boundaries, work on grounding, walk barefoot in the grass, spend time in nature, and work on trust issues.
SACRAL CHAKRA
Sacral Chakra (2nd): The Sacral Chakra is the 2nd Chakra and deals with creativity, creative expression, and unique personal expression. It is linked to beliefs around sensuality and sexuality. It represents our connections and relationships to our loved ones, intimacy, and the need to be loved and accepted. It is connected to our creativity and passion as well as our appetite, addictions, desires, and karmic patterns.
Emotions: Self-acceptance, desire to be accepted, and unique expression.
Location: Lower abdomen
Organs: intestines, abdominal organs, spleen, lower back, male and female reproductive organs (ovaries and uterus). Both the root and the sacral chakra are associated with the adrenal system, which regulates fight-or-flight hormones like cortisol, aka “the stress hormone.”
Color: Orange
Crystals: Carnelian, Orange Calcite, or any orange-colored crystals
Balanced: When balanced you experience a deep sense of creative expression, fulfillment, self-love, and a healthy self-esteem.
Imbalanced/Blocked: When there is an imbalance here you may have a feeling of never being good enough.
To help balance out your Sacral Chakra eat orange foods such as oranges, carrots, sweet potatoes, peaches, and pumpkin and add in sensual foods like chocolate and chocolate covered strawberries. Explore your creativity, sensuality, and sexuality. Also work on flexibility, inspiration and self-acceptance.
SOLAR PLEXUS
Solar Plexus Chakra (3rd): The Solar Plexus is the 3rd chakra and deals with personal identity, personal power, willpower, and the motivated drive to bring your beliefs, values, and personal creative expression to fruition. This is our main power center. Your gut instinct is housed here. This is how you develop your intuition and instinct and learn to trust yourself. It represents our free will and is where we draw the energy for our personal power, confidence, courage, and strength.
Emotions: This is emotionally linked to our self-esteem and self-confidence. It stores fears and judgement about the world, others, and yourself.
Location: Located above the navel
Organs: Pancreas, digestive organs, liver, and kidneys.
Color: Yellow
Crystals: Tiger’s eye, golden quartz, pyrite, honey calcite, citrine, and yellow calcite.
Balanced: When balanced we are aligned with our power and in tune with self-mastery and personal commitment. Self-respect will be strong, and we will feel we are worthy and feel empowered.
Imbalanced/Blocked: You could encounter issues related to healthy personal boundaries, feeling fearful about expressing self, struggle with low self-esteem, and feel powerless. You may also have low energy and experience digestive issues.
To balance wear yellow, eat yellow foods like squash, lemons, turmeric, and add in grains, flax seed, nuts, and sunflower seeds. Identify how you have been giving your power away and reclaim your power and your standing in the world. Work on improving self-discipline and focus. And set goals aligned with your life purpose so you can start feeling accomplished.
HEART CHAKRA
Heart chakra (4th): The Heart Chakra is the 4th chakra and encompasses all matters related to the heart and love and radiates divine love out into the world. It signifies unconditional love of self and others. Here we nurture our inner child and learn compassion and acceptance. This is where your upper and lower chakras meet to guide you, so it is your internal compass.
Emotions: Deals with feelings related to relationships, inner peace, and healing wounds by letting go of past hurts. The heart chakra allows us to express our joy and happiness. Here you will feel your soul’s true desires, passion, and purpose.
Location: Center of chest, your heart’s center
Organs: Heart and lungs; circulation and respiratory functions
Color: Green and Pink
Crystals: Rose quartz, emerald, jade, aventurine, green calcite, malachite
Balanced: When balanced we will feel connection to others, abundance, gratitude, joy, love, and compassion.
Imbalanced/Blocked: When imbalanced we may cling to others, control or suffocate relationships or friendships. When separated from those we love, we can turn to anger and jealousy, and we can try to protect yourself by avoiding those we are having emotional issues with.
To balance eat green leafy vegetables like spinach, kale, broccoli, cilantro, and green tea. Add playfulness into your life through whatever interests or activities bring you joy and happiness. Acts of kindness for others can help you increase your compassion and empathy, opening your heart further. Forgiveness is key to balancing the heart chakra, so working on letting go of past grudges or healing old wounds will help tremendously
THROAT CHAKRA
Throat chakra (5th): The Throat chakra is the 5th chakra and holds the key to speaking one’s divine truth. It reflects our need to communicate with others and be received and understood as we express ourselves in the world. The throat chakra is all about communication, manifestation, self-protection, and wisdom. This is where you speak truth to power.
Emotions: The heart chakra stores the emotions and feelings behind the words unspoken. Voicing your truth and emotions releases trapped energy.
Location: Throat
Organ: Thyroid
Color: Blue
Crystal: Blue lace agate, aqua marine, lapis lazuli, and blue kyanite
Balanced: When balanced we are able to express ourselves with honesty, integrity, and joy. We can express our truth clearly, and we can listen to others. We can express our soul’s purpose and find our powerful voice.
Imbalanced: When our throat chakra is under or overactive we may feel frustrated, silenced, or misunderstood. In that situation you may find yourself speaking in an unclear or aggressive manner or becoming shy and unassertive. This could manifest into a cold, sore throat, or laryngitis.
To balance drink plenty of liquids like water, juices, and herbal teas. Find your voice, then speak your truth, express what has been unsaid, and connect to your soul purpose.
THIRD EYE CHAKRA
Third Eye Chakra (6th): The Third Eye Chakra is the 6th chakra and is related to the ability to see with clarity and be intuitively aware. It opens our psychic abilities and enables us to see the truth in all situations. It enhances our intuition, imagination, visualization, and insight.
Emotions: A feeling a calm and clarity
Chakra Location: Forehead, at the brow between the eyes.
Organs: Pituitary gland, pineal gland, and endocrine issues.
Color: Purple (Violet, Indigo)
Crystal: Amethyst, fluorite, and labradorite
Balanced: When balanced, you are intuitively aware of universal wisdom. You understand messages presented to you in signs like repeating numbers like 11:11, meaningful lyrics in songs, dream imagery, and symbols that hold significance for you. Your psychic gifts will awaken such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. You will have clarity when it comes to spiritual truths. Epiphanies coming from the Crown Chakra can be fleshed out here in the 3rd Eye.
Imbalanced: When blocked you have difficulty connecting to your higher vision, and your intuition could feel off.
To balance your Third Eye eat blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and grape juices and work with amethyst crystals to open your intuitive center. Turn off noisy and distracting devices and meditate to help expand consciousness and to clear the mind to receive intuitive messages.
CROWN CHAKRA
Crown Chakra (7th): The Crown Chakra is the 7th chakra and is where we feel connected to the higher realms, and where we access inspired ideas. It brings us knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and spiritual connection.
Emotions: Feelings of disassociation on one end of the continuum or feel peace on the other end of the spectrum, interconnectedness, wholeness, clarity, and union with your higher self
Chakra Location: At the top or crown of the head
Organs: Pineal gland
Color: Lilac, white, or clear
Crystal: Selenite, clear quartz, white calcite, howlite, and amethyst
Balanced: When your crown is open, you feel safe, assured in your purpose and open to the universal support that surrounds you. This allows you to see beyond yourself and access the collective consciousness. Awakenings and epiphanies start here and flow down into the lower chakras. The crown chakra works closely with the third eye and heart chakra.
Imbalanced: When closed or underactive, you may feel unworthy or believe you are insignificant, feeling disassociated, unsupported, and directionless. You may experience a spiritual crisis.
To balance the Crown chakra some people fast or work on detoxing the body to increase clarity and spiritual connection. You can work with incense and smudging herbs. Meditate with your clear quartz and selenite to increase clarity and connection.
SOUND HEALING
You can also influence the chakras through sound. There are sound healing bowls also called singing bowls which produce a specific tone. You can select a singing bowl based on a specific chakra that you know you need the most work on. I have two – one for the solar plexus and one for the throat chakra. They are also great for clearing energy when you can’t use things like incense or smudging sticks like me due to allergies and asthma.
Binaural beats and tuning forks can also help align the chakras based on the frequency of the tones. You can find free binaural videos on youtube for balancing any chakra you need, or just select a video that works on balancing the entire chakra system in one sitting. Meditation and Yoga poses are also a great way to open up certain chakras.
CHAKRA TAROT AND ORACLE DECKS
I currently have two chakra themed decks. I have the Chakra Reading Cards and the Chakra Wisdom Tarot, and I also use the Crystal Spirits Oracle for chakra work.
The Chakra Readings Cards by Rachelle Harman (shown above) are an oracle based deck with 36 cards divided into 9 chakras so each chakra has 4 cards dedicated to them. Rachelle uses the 7 main chakras already covered in this blog plus the Soul Star chakra above the Crown chakra and the Earth Star chakra, which lies several inches below our feet and is connected to mother earth.
These cards are very colorful and categorized to help give you ideas on specific techniques to use to work through blockages with your chakras. For example, if you pull the truth card in this deck that would indicate that you need to work on your throat chakra by speaking your truth in the world either through public speaking, verbally establishing boundaries with those that have taken advantage of you, or writing out previously unexpressed truths. If you pull the family card this clearly states that you have issues with your root chakra and need to heal old family wounds, forgive family betrayals, work on releasing outdated family beliefs or find a way to reconnect and clear the air with family to feel more secure. It is also a sign to work on releasing ancestral karma. This is a great deck to just pull one card to identify which chakra is currently blocked, and the card you pull will identify the activity you could use to balance that chakra. OR you could pull a card for each chakra for a full spread. This deck has beautiful healing energy and is a great way to learn more about each chakra.
The Crystal Spirits Oracle (shown above) by Collette Baron-Reid is a great deck to use to identify crystals you would benefit from working with. It’s also a great way to learn the properties of each crystal because the guidebook has a lot of information dedicated for each crystal represented in the deck. Working with this 58 card deck helps pinpoint which chakras may be unbalanced since crystals are paired with certain chakras. Each crystal has distinct and unique energies and each has its own message. The cards you pull can be used for intention setting, manifestation, rituals, healing, meditations and specific chakra work. Reversal messages are great for identifying where you need improvement quickly and where you are experiencing resistance at the moment. With this crystal deck you can ask a specific question or just pull 1 card on what you need to know at that moment. Just ask “Which crystal has a message for me today?” And start shuffling!
If I do that and pull the rose quartz card, I know my heart chakra needs work. I then usually grab my rose quartz and place it on my chest while lying down or I put a smaller one in my pocket to keep on my person as I work. If I pull a crystal card for a crystal that I don’t have then I just work with the energy of that crystal psychically. You don’t have to actually have the physical crystal with you to work with its energy and healing properties. You can just sit the card out and tune into its energy.
The Chakra Wisdom Tarot (shown above) by Tori Hartman is a great tool to use for chakra work. Tori has matched each of the 78 tarot cards with a chakra. The cards are very colorful and bordered with the color of that particular chakra so it is easy to identify which chakra is the most represented in your readings. Tori also provides divination messages for each card that are associated with that particular chakra so that makes this deck very unique.
She offers chakra meditations for the cards and pairs the chakra cards with astrological components and explains how the planets relate to you and your journey if you pulled that card. I love how she suggests to view reversals as astrological planets in retrograde, which indicates a need to repeat or revisit something or to signal a return of someone from the past. Tori aligns the Aces with the root chakra in red, the 2’s with the sacral chakra in orange and 3’s with the solar plexus in yellow and on down the line. She repeats colors since there are more categories in the tarot than the 7 chakras, so she also pairs the Pages which she coins Princesses with the Heart chakra, Knights with the Throat, Queens with the 3rd Eye and Kings with the Crown. She divides the Majors up into 3 groups of 7’s, and the World card has a rainbow edge to embody all the chakras.
I want to walk you through a description of a tarot card in the guidebook that Tori created to show off the uniqueness of this deck. As I was shuffling the deck to pick a card, I asked for the card and chakra that we collectively most need to work on currently. The Princess of Wands (shown below) quickly jumped out of the deck.
This card is paired with the heart chakra, so it is a beautiful bright green color. Tori calls this the card of the “Heart’s Joy” and notes that this Princess is pondering her accomplishments before she is ready to step into her Queendom. She has a journey ahead with brand new challenges, and this is an opportunity for a new life that she has dreamed up for herself. She is filled with excitement for what is to come, and she is preparing her heart to be open to joy. Tori asks, “How good will you allow things to get in your life?” Basically, we are being told to dream as big as we can and let ourselves have that dream. For the Princess of Wands, she offers keywords of homecoming, reunion, anticipation, expansion and awakening. In the guidebook she provides a meditation with this card to go inside and tap into your joy and happiness related to your anticipation of achieving your desire and visualize what that would look and feel like if achieved. She leaves you with this thought: “Get ready to open your heart to a life change and celebrate with your new community.” The way Tori has conceptualized this deck and how she has linked it with the chakra system makes it truly unique and a perfect deck to use for chakra readings.
For chakra spreads using any tarot deck, you can pull a tarot card for each of the 7 main chakras to check in on the current status of each chakra. You could note if the card you pulled is positive or negative based on how you feel about those cards. Positive cards could indicate balance, and negative or reversed cards could indicate blockages that need attention immediately. For those blockages, I would pull a card to reveal how to balance that chakra.
When pulling a full spread, you could look at repeating numbers to indicate which chakra needs work. For example, an abundance of 4’s would signal an issue with your Heart chakra which is the 4th chakra. Aces would indicate Root chakra blockages.
Or another strategy is to look at the colors represented in your spreads. Do yellows jump out at you indicating a need to focus on the Solar Plexus? This is very easy to do with colorful decks like the Light Seers Tarot where the colors really pop. If you are limited in your deck collection, the Rider Waite Smith Tarot is easy enough to work with. If I pulled cards like the Sun, The Chariot, or Strength those yellow backgrounds and prominent yellow images would immediately signal the Solar Plexus for me. The themes of those same cards happen to relate to the Solar Plexus characteristics as well. The Chariot represents willpower and drive, Strength symbolizes inner strength, fortitude, and personal power, and the Sun represents vitality and the ability to generate power. Just think of solar power here.
Also, I use the suits of the tarot to represent certain chakras. This could vary from reader to reader, so keep that in mind. I will share with you how I pair these systems up.
Pentacles represent the Root Chakra for me as they are associated with the element of earth and they represent grounding, health, wealth, and security in life.
Wands represent the Solar Plexus for me because they are associated with the element of fire, power, motivation and fuel, which I associate with the Solar Plexus.
The Cups are equated to the Heart Chakra for me because they symbolize love, relationships, creative expression, joy, and compassion.
And the Swords are equated to the Throat Chakra in my eyes because they represent truth, thoughts, and communication.
This system only covers 4 of the 7 chakras because we only have 4 suits in the tarot. So you will need to allocate some of the Major Arcana cards for the Sacral Chakra, Third Eye, and Crown Chakra. Again, this would be up to the reader to determine so it would be very individualistic.
I personally associate the High Priestess with the 3rd Eye, and in several versions of tarot decks that I own she is shown with a third eye opened prominently on the card. The Hanged Man could represent the 3rd Eye or the Crown Chakra. This is due to the enlightenment aspect of this card. The card image depicts light burning bright around his head to signify that awakening and enlightenment. The Hermit or Hierophant could represent the Crown Chakra as they access esoteric information and then teach those spiritual truths. The Empress would be a great card to signify the Sacral Chakra as she is creative, sensual, and fertile. The Devil could be another great selection to represent sexuality, lust, and temptation. Or maybe you see the Lovers as the Sacral Chakra. Spend time with the cards to determine which cards stand out to you when you concentrate on the chakra system. As always, it matters how you feel about the card associations. These are just suggestions. The beauty about the tarot is that each reader forms different associations from the images on the cards and has their own way of interpreting the messages.
*Links to all the chakra decks I discussed in this episode are included at the bottom of this blog.
HEALING THRU TAROT CUSTOM CHAKRA SPREAD
I created a 7 card spread to zero in on chakra blockages. I composed a prompt for each chakra based on the characteristics, energies, and foundations of that chakra. If you throw this spread for yourself, I would love to see the photo of your chakra spreads. Please tag me on Instagram @healingthrutarot and please use the hashtag #healingthrutarotchakraspread
My Throw of the Healing Thru Tarot Chakra Spread with the Chakra Wisdom Tarot
APRIL TAROT CHALLENGE
I am hosting a Self-Improvement Tarot Challenge on Instagram for the month of April. There is still time to join the challenge. I created prompts for each of the 30 days in April for us to pull a tarot card related to mental health and self-care. Follow the challenge using the #HTTselfimprovementtarotchallenge and feel free to tag me in your posts @healingthrutarot - Prompts are included below and you can find them on my Instagram page
Books and Decks shown in this blog or recommended are below: click on title to go to the product. Some of these are amazon affiliate links and it helps me out if you use these links. Thanks for your support.
Chakra Wisdom Tarot, The Chakra Reading Cards, Crystal Spirits Oracle
Link to Podcast Episode 22 on Anchor click here
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