This summer I did something I’ve avoided for a long time: I picked up Wheels of Life by Anodea Judith and committed to studying the chakras. I’ve spoken about them in trainings, and they’ve occasionally made their way into my classes, but I’ve always kept them at arm’s length. At my core, I’m a farm kid. I grew up running through the bush, knees scraped, hair tangled, learning from the land around me. Words like transcendence, clairvoyance, and liberation always felt out of step with that grounded way of living. To be honest, they felt a little too woo-woo.
But this summer I tried something different. I set down my judgments and decided to read the book like I would a piece of fiction. I stopped worrying about whether the language lined up with my beliefs and paid more attention to how the ideas landed in my body. What I noticed surprised me: the words often get in the way. If I softened enough to feel rather than analyze, the teachings stopped feeling far-fetched. They became lived instead of imagined.
“I stopped worrying about whether the language lined up with my beliefs and paid more attention to how the ideas landed in my body.”
The chakra that shifted me the most was the throat, Vishuddha. I’d always thought of it as simply “speaking your truth.” But this summer I kept coming back to sound itself. Cymatics, the study of vibration, shows us how sound gives shape to matter. Imagine a metal plate sprinkled with sand. As sound moves across it, the grains shift and gather into delicate patterns, like mandalas drawn by invisible hands. Vibration organizes. It creates form out of what was scattered. And isn’t that what we feel in life too? Some people rub us the wrong way, while with others we slip easily into rhythm and connection.
The throat chakra, I realized, is less about pushing our voice outward and more about noticing how it resonates. Just like sand reorganizes under sound, our words and tone shape the invisible patterns of our relationships. Every word has weight. The way we speak ripples into the space around us, either building harmony or tension. Even in silence, we are communicating something.
“The way we speak ripples into the space around us, either building harmony or tension. Even in silence, we are communicating something.”
This lesson brought me back to the foundation of my teaching. Yoga has never just been about postures or breathing exercises. It is about how we live. How we take care of ourselves, how we show up for the people around us, and how we choose to meet the world each day. The chakras reminded me that these systems aren’t abstract—they are invitations to listen more closely. To sense the vibrations within us, and to notice how they carry into the world.
That is where yoga feels most alive for me. Not in grand ideas of transcendence, but in the small, daily choices: how we speak, how we listen, how we care.
As the season turns, I’m feeling called to continue exploring yoga’s stories and symbols. This fall I’ll be offering an eight-class series on gods, goddesses, and deities in yoga. Just as the chakras asked us to listen inwardly, these figures invite us to reflect on qualities like courage, compassion, and creativity, and how they live within us.
With love,
Darci
Founder, Amitié