Chakra Chart for Practitioners: The 7 Centers and How Sessions Use It

Print any chakra chart from the internet and you will get the same seven colored discs stacked on a meditating figure, red at the base, violet at the crown. That image is about fifty years old. The names on it are about 450 years old. The idea behind it is older still. A practitioner needs to know all three ages, because clients ask, and because the chart's real job in a session is more modest than the posters suggest: it tells your hands where to go next.

This article gives the chart itself, with what each center is traditionally associated with, then explains where the modern version came from and what a Reiki or magnetism practitioner actually does with it. For what happens in a Reiki session from the client's side, see our plain-language description of a Reiki session; for the wider toolkit, see our overview of energy healing techniques.

What are the seven chakras, in one table?

The seven major centers sit on the body's midline, from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Our Reiki manual locates them as follows, and the associations in the last column are the ones most Western practitioners work with today.

Two details from our manuals that most charts leave out. First, the manual asks students to consider six further centers above the head and one below the feet; these are used in grounding and closing, not in the main sequence. Second, the manual teaches that the front face of each center relates to the emotions and the back face to the person's will. That is why the magnetism manual has students working with one hand above the client and one hand under the table, on a rolling stool to protect the back, until the two sides feel, in its words, stable, settled and balanced.

Where did the seven-color chakra system come from?

From a 20th-century Western synthesis, not from an ancient text. The Sanskrit tantric sources describe many different chakra systems, with five, six, seven, nine or more centers depending on the school and the practice. The seven-center scheme most charts use descends from the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, a text of 1577, which reached English readers through Arthur Avalon's The Serpent Power in 1919. That text gives each center a lotus with a set number of petals (4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 2 and 1,000), a seed syllable and a deity. It does not give the rainbow.

The rainbow arrived in 1977, when Christopher Hills published Nuclear Evolution and mapped the seven visible spectrum colors onto the seven centers in order. Earlier Western authors, including the Theosophist Charles Leadbeater in The Chakras (1927), had described colors, but not the neat red-to-violet ladder. The endocrine-gland pairings (root to adrenals, throat to thyroid, and so on) are also 20th-century additions. None of this makes the chart useless. It makes it a modern practitioner's tool with old names on it, which is what you should tell a client who asks.

How does a Reiki session use the chart?

As a hand-position sequence and as a body scan. Traditional Usui Reiki teaches twelve or more hand positions covering the head, torso and back; the seven centers are the spine of that sequence. A practitioner works through them in order, holding each for roughly three to five minutes, and notes what they feel under their hands: warmth, cold, tingling, nothing. Our manual is specific that the practitioner clears their mind while doing this, in its words, 'think of nothing, free yourself from the mental so the energy can circulate through you.'

The balancing pairs our manual teaches

• Root and third eye (1 and 6): one hand on each, to bring attention down out of an overactive head, as the manual puts it, 'in view of the intensity of the thoughts'.
• Sacral and throat (2 and 5): to link what a person wants with their ability to say it.
• Solar plexus and heart (3 and 4): to take decisions, in the manual's phrase, 'with the understanding of the heart'.
• Sacral and third eye (2 and 6): used to settle rumination and resentment.
• Closing stretch: the client stretches, toes toward the floor and arms raised, to finish.

Those pairings are a training convention. They give a new practitioner a repeatable sequence to practise on classmates, which is the entire point of a chart in a cohort of ten. Whether the 'understanding of the heart' phrase describes anything physical is a separate question, and our instructors say so on day one.

How does a magnetism session use it differently?

Magnetism practitioners use the chart as a survey before and after the passes, not as the main event. The magnetism manual's final protocol begins with a 'tour' of the aura, the warm and cold zones, and the chakras, to establish a baseline, then runs the sweeping passes, then re-checks the same centers at the end. The chakra section itself opens with three long descending passes, then one hand on the front of the root center and one behind it, moving up center by center, and closes with three more passes on the front of the body.

The two traditions share the map and differ on what to do with it, which is one reason students who plan to stack modalities find the chart worth learning well once. Our description of magnetism as a hands-on practice covers the passes in detail.

What does 'a blocked chakra' actually mean in a session?

It means the practitioner felt something different under their hands at that position and wrote it down. Nothing more. Our manual adds a timing convention that clients often ask about: a center needs three days to change frequency and the full set needs 21 days, which is the tradition's way of saying do not expect anything at all from one session and do not rebook a client three times in a week.

The words matter. 'I noticed a cool patch over the solar plexus' is an observation. 'Your solar plexus is blocked because of a digestive problem' is a diagnosis, and you are not licensed to make one. We train students to record felt impressions in the session journal in the first form and never the second, and to refer out when a client describes symptoms. Our guide to the scope of practice for non-licensed practitioners spells out the line.

How do practitioners learn the chart well enough to work from it?

By hands-on repetition on real people, in the sequence, with an instructor correcting placement. Reading a chart takes ten minutes. Feeling the difference between the solar plexus and the heart position on a nervous stranger takes weeks. In our Reiki cohorts, students run the full seven-position sequence on each other from the first classroom day, with an instructor correcting placement.

1. 1

   Learn the locations on yourself

   Place your own hands on each of the seven positions, using the manual's landmarks (coccyx, below the navel, above the navel, sternum, windpipe, between the brows, crown). Ten minutes a day for a week.

2. 2

   Run the sequence on a classmate

   Seven positions, three minutes each, in order from root to crown, then crown to root. Say nothing. Afterwards each of you writes what you felt before comparing.

3. 3

   Add the pairs

   Practise the four balancing pairs from our manual until you can do them without looking at the chart.

4. 4

   Log it

   Every practice session goes into the journal: date, duration, positions used, what you noticed, and what the receiver reported.

If you want to learn the chart with your hands rather than from a poster, our in-person Reiki program covers the seven positions, the balancing pairs and the session journal across 5 classroom days (35 teaching hours), for $1,500. Students who go on to the full energy healing certification spend a dedicated module on the chakra system.

What is the chart not?

It is not anatomy, not a diagnostic instrument, not an ancient Indian medical text, and not the same in every tradition. It is a shared vocabulary that lets a practitioner and a client talk about where attention goes and how the body feels, and a sequence that lets a school teach a repeatable session to ten people at once. Used that way, and described that way to clients, it earns its place on the wall.