The new age certainties that keep you stuck
“My root chakra is closed.” “There's too much negative energy around me right now.” “I'm not spiritually ready for that yet.”
You have probably heard one of these phrases, and may have used one yourself. Beyond the vocabulary, I question their function: these explanations can postpone a concrete change, without this necessarily being the intention of the person using them.
What you are being sold
The spiritual wellness market has an answer for absolutely everything. Chronic fatigue, anxiety, romantic failure, creative block, recurring migraine — there is always a chakra involved somewhere, and always a solution next to it (candle, crystal, energy healing at €80 a session).
- “My chakra is blocked” — translation: something is wrong, and it is nobody's fault, least of all mine.
- “There's negative energy around me” — translation: the people who bother me have an energy problem, I don't have a relationship problem.
- “I'm not spiritually ready yet” — translation: I'm postponing the effort to some mystical moment that will never arrive by itself.
What these three sentences have in common: they move the cause of the problem outside you. Towards a chakra, towards someone else's energy, towards a cosmic timing. Never towards what you do or don't do.
What the tradition really says
Open the Yoga Sūtras. Look for the passage where Patañjali explains how to identify your blocked chakra. You won't find it — the word “chakra” itself barely appears in the text as we read it today, and certainly not with the meaning it has in a crystal-healing shop.
What the text describes instead is work. The Yamas and the Niyamas — the first two limbs, the ones we cheerfully skip to rush towards the postures — speak only of concrete behaviour: how you treat others, how you treat yourself. No room for “it's not my fault, it's my energy”.
The central idea of the text, from its second sentence, is to learn to calm the fluctuations of the mind. Not to explain them by an outside force. To calm them, actively, through practice — repeated, patient, often uncomfortable.
What a true master said about it
In an interview conducted by François Gautier in June 2013, B.K.S. Iyengar criticised the commercialisation of yoga. The complete French interview is available from Esprit Yoga. The quotation below is translated from that French text.
“Everything commercial perverts the beauty of yoga; all these people simply want to make money.”
He was no gentler with the idea of a quick awakening open to everyone. He explained that there are four levels of effort — weak, medium, sincere, intense — and that only those who reach intensity arrive at the goal. One lifetime, he specified, is generally not enough.
Compare that to the promise of a chakra unblocking in a 45-minute session. It is not just a difference of degree. It is a complete contradiction about what the practice is meant to be.
Why it matters to you, concretely
As long as you believe your root chakra is closed, you don't need to look at why you avoid commitment. As long as you believe there is negative energy around you, you don't need to look at your part in the conflict. As long as you wait to be “spiritually ready”, you never need to start today.
These beliefs are not just historically inaccurate. They are comfortable. And that is precisely why they sell well — not because they work, but because they relieve, for a few minutes, the discomfort of having to act.
The tradition does not offer you that relief. It offers you work. Ahiṃsā (non-violence) doesn't tell you to wait for your energy to align before you stop mistreating yourself — it tells you to do it now, in this precise movement, with this precise breath.
This doesn't mean that what you feel isn't real — fatigue, anxiety, the feeling of being stuck are very real. It just means that the explanation you are being sold for it is probably not the right one, and that the real answer takes more effort than a scented candle.
Marjorie Mathieu — IFSU studio
← Back to the Notebooks