Chakras: Manipura Chakra

By Stuart Sovatsky

Chakras: Manipura Chakra

Manipura chakra, the solar plexus center, is where the fire element presides. The whole gamut of heated emotions of jealousy, anger, vanity, belly laughter, and willful assertiveness is based here. Manipura is associated with the navel, and feelings of dependency and autonomy relate to it, as well as the psychological ideal of "emotional honesty."

As the most elevated of the three physical body chakras, this is the site of existential struggles to believe in "higher realities." The loss of one's "groundedness" can also happen in manipura via the "flight to the light," or "flakiness" phenomenon, whereby a thin veneer of spiritual development is mistaken for a more mature attainment. Ken Wilber has referred to this foible as the "pre-transpersonal fallacy." To achieve spiritual growth, one needs to have gutsiness, juice, and "stomach" as well as heart and soul. Perhaps Amelia Earhart, Fritz Perls, and C. Everett Koop are manipura types.

In tantric sublimation, manipura holds critical importance, for it is the actual site of transmutation where bindu, the seed force from svadhisthana, is sublimated by the heat of this solar center into ojas, a nonphysical constituent in the radiance of consciousness. The beauty of this radiance also allures kundalini to rise from muladhara.