Chakra Healing

Cakras in tantric and yoga texts

Geoffrey Samuel, an anthropologist, describes the Buddhist and Hindu Tantras as using a conception of body and mind built on a subtle body with centres (cakra), channels (nadi) and flows of energy (prana). He presents the terminology as part of techniques for working with the nervous system and the whole person, and notes that this differs greatly from conventional Western thinking about body and mind. The model belongs to specific contemplative traditions and was not developed as a medical description.

Daniel Simpson, writing for a general readership, places the earliest reference in the tenth-century Kubjikamata Tantra, which describes a base (adhara) at the anus, with mula (root) added as a prefix later. He reports that later texts, including the Netra Tantra and the fifteenth-century Shiva Samhita, give differing schemes, and that some texts list more than a dozen centres and others fewer than five.

Some popular and practitioner writing dates chakra teaching to the Vedas. Of the sources reviewed for this draft, the one that gives a date for the earliest reference, Simpson, names the tenth century CE, and none supports a Vedic dating. Whether earlier textual traces exist is a question for specialist historians of tantra.

Translation into English and the Theosophical Society

Kurt Leland writes that H. P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society transmitted chakra teachings to the West from 1879. He dates Sir John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power, published under the name Arthur Avalon, to 1919 and calls it the first scholarly publication in English of a version of the system. It translates a Sanskrit text on six centres, the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, together with the Pādukā-pañcaka.

C. W. Leadbeater's The Chakras (1927) describes seven principal centres. He states that he observed them through developed clairvoyant sight, a claim of personal perception and not a tested finding, and he says his illustrations were the first attempt to show them as they appear to those who can see them. Leland says the book stayed in print for nearly ninety years and altered earlier teaching substantially.

Assembly of the modern seven-chakra scheme

Leland argues that the colour-coded Western scheme is a twentieth-century composite. He notes that the original texts give the chakras colours but no rainbow, credits colour therapists of the 1920s and 1930s with the rainbow sequence, and reports that a 1928 book first linked chakras to endocrine glands. In his account, Ken Dychtwald brought colours and qualities together in 1977, and he concludes that the system called ancient in the West is about forty years old as a system.

Simpson makes a similar point for a general readership, observing that the rainbow colours and the links to gemstones, planets, tarot suits and archangels found in some New Age accounts are not grounded in the traditional Sanskrit sources.

Three uses of one word

The word chakra covers at least three things. In the Sanskrit texts, cakras are points in a contemplative map of the body that differ by text and tradition. The modern seven-chakra scheme, with fixed colours, glands and psychological themes, took shape mainly in the twentieth-century West. Chakra healing and chakra balancing are modern practice labels for working with that scheme, and the sources reviewed here do not give a formal definition or a standard method for either.

The seven-centre scheme familiar today runs six centres along the spine with a crown centre above them, which Simpson describes as a combination of traditional and more recent elements. Similar vocabulary across the three uses should not be taken as evidence that they are the same practice.

Related labels in research

Trials use other names for chakra-based methods. One uses the Healing Touch technique Chakra Connection, another Pranic Healing, which its authors describe as normalising biofield energy centres called chakras, and another Nada Yoga meditation assessed by readings for seven chakras. A scoping review groups such methods under biofield therapies, a category that includes Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch.

Formats described in studies

The sources reviewed describe no standard session. In one trial, a 20-minute Healing Touch Chakra Connection was compared with a Healing Touch video. A pilot taught nurses level-one Healing Touch and a self-chakra connection technique, which they practised for 21 days. Pranic Healing sessions in a urology trial ran twice weekly for five weeks, and healers recorded the energy they perceived in each chakra. A crossover pilot used 45 minutes of Nada Yoga meditation against supine rest.

Assessment, training and oversight

Practitioners in these studies assessed chakra state by perception: in the Pranic Healing trial the healers reported improved energy balance and perceived energy, and Leadbeater likewise based his account on claimed clairvoyant observation. These are practitioner reports and have no independent measurement behind them in the sources reviewed.

The sources reviewed did not address training, certification or regulation of chakra practitioners in any country, so no requirements are described here. Requirements for related titles such as nurse, yoga teacher or healer differ by country and were not checked.

Uses within the traditions

In the Tantras, according to Samuel, the subtle-body terminology belongs to techniques for learning new modes of operating with the nervous system and body-mind as a whole. Simpson argues that chakras are visualisation templates and not physical entities, and that they exist in practice only as they are imagined. Leadbeater warned of serious peril in awakening the higher aspects of the force before purity of life and thought.

Modern claims and studied uses

Modern writers link each chakra with an endocrine gland, an emotion or a life theme. Leland traces the endocrine link to 1928. Authors of one Ayurvedic faculty study propose that each chakra corresponds to a plexus and that impaired function of a chakra may hinder normal physiology, a view stated by the authors and not a tested result.

Uses that have been studied include stress in university students and in nurses, urinary symptoms and sleep in men with an enlarged prostate who were also taking medication, and imaging readings in healthy volunteers. Each study addressed one method and one outcome set.

Controlled trials of chakra-based methods

In a randomised trial in university students, a 20-minute Healing Touch Chakra Connection was compared with a Healing Touch video. Self-assessed stress fell and blood pressure fell more in the intervention group, but cortisol and interleukin-6 did not differ between groups, and people with higher baseline stress improved more in either group. The abstract does not give the sample size.

In a single-blind trial, 76 men with lower urinary tract symptoms were randomised to medication alone or medication plus Pranic Healing. Symptom scores improved in both groups, with a larger reduction in incomplete emptying and intermittency, and better sleep, in the Pranic Healing group; 66 men (30 and 36) appear in the reported group comparison. The comparator was not a sham, the outcomes were largely self-reported, and the authors list affiliations with a Pranic Healing foundation.

Measurement, anatomy and uncontrolled studies

A crossover pilot of 15 healthy volunteers reported higher imaging-derived energy readings for four of the seven chakras and for the average after Nada Yoga meditation than after supine rest. The study measured immediate changes in a technique whose validity as a measure of chakras the sources reviewed do not establish.

A dissection study of six cadavers proposed that the inferior hypogastric plexus resembles one chakra, and its authors say more studies are needed. A pilot in nurses reported a 3.8-point mean fall in perceived stress, but with 22 of 58 completing both surveys and no control group, the change was not statistically significant.

Related energy-healing evidence and searches run

A 2025 scoping review of biofield therapies counted 353 studies, 255 of them randomised trials, and reported in the abstracts that 172 gave positive results for all outcomes, 95 mixed, 71 non-significant and 3 negative. Its authors describe the findings as inconclusive and it did not appraise certainty. A Cochrane review of Reiki for anxiety and depression found three small trials and insufficient evidence either way.

PubMed searches run on 5 October 2026 for chakra in titles and abstracts combined with trial or review terms found no systematic review of chakra healing or balancing. Other databases were not searched, so a review may exist elsewhere.

Status of the underlying concepts

The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states that there is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the energy field assumed in Reiki. That page concerns Reiki, not chakras, but it shows how a federal agency describes energy-field claims. Within the humanities, Simpson treats chakras as visualisation templates, while the authors of the dissection study propose an anatomical counterpart. These are different kinds of claim, and none of the sources reviewed tests the chakra scheme as such.

Design limits of the studies

The chakra-based studies found are small, short and varied. Comparators were a video, medication alone or rest, not a sham method, so expectation and attention cannot be separated from any specific effect. Several outcomes were self-rated or based on a healer's perception, one pilot lost most of its participants, and one trial's authors work for the body that promotes the method. These features limit what can be concluded from the reported differences.

Reported harms and gaps

The Cochrane review of Reiki found that none of the included trials reported on harms for the subgroups reviewed, and the NCCIH page says Reiki has not been shown to have harmful effects. The abstracts of the chakra-based trials read for this draft do not report adverse-event findings, and a lack of reports does not show that none occurred.

Unsupervised practice and mental health

A case report describes a 19-year-old student who practised hatha yoga and kundalini asana unsupervised for three months and, after two months, felt energy moving up her spine through the chakras. She later developed hallucinations, delusions and catatonic symptoms, was hospitalised and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and improved with treatment. The authors concluded that unsupervised practice may raise the risk of psychosis. One case cannot show how often this occurs or whether the practice caused it, and it involved self-directed yoga, not a chakra healing session.

Hallucinations, severe sleep disturbance, confusion or thoughts of self-harm need prompt assessment by a doctor or mental-health service, or emergency services if urgent. Leadbeater also warned of the dangers of forcing the awakening of these centres.

Place alongside other care

The urology trial tested Pranic Healing added to medication, and the sources reviewed give no basis for using chakra work in place of assessment or treatment. The NCCIH page on Reiki states that its information is not intended to substitute for the advice of a health care provider. Persistent, new or worsening symptoms warrant conventional medical assessment whatever other practice a person uses.