Understanding your chakras and how sound heals them

Start here

What chakras actually are

Chakra is Sanskrit for wheel or disk. In the yogic tradition the chakras are seven energy centres running up the midline of the body, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head, each governing a different territory of your physical, emotional and spiritual life.

The model says energy — prana, life force — moves up and down through these centres, and that each one sits near a cluster of organs and endocrine glands it influences. When energy moves freely, you feel steady, clear and like yourself. When a centre becomes blocked, depleted or overactive, the tradition says it shows up twice: as something physical in that region of the body, and as a recognisable emotional pattern.

Two honest notes before we go further. The chakras are not anatomical structures — you will not find them on a scan, and Western medicine does not recognise them. And I am not going to tell you that a blocked chakra causes disease, because that is both unproven and unkind to people who are genuinely unwell.

What the chakra system is genuinely good at is being a map. A precise, centuries-old language for where you hold things and what they feel like.

Used that way, it is remarkably useful. Almost everyone recognises themselves somewhere in the seven, and it gives you a place to start.

The mechanism

Why sound works on them

Sound healing pairs with the chakra system so naturally because both are built on the same idea: everything has a frequency, and frequency can be influenced.

Two principles do the work. Resonance — a structure responds strongly to the frequencies it naturally vibrates at. Entrainment — when two rhythms meet, the steadier one gradually pulls the other into sync. Your brain and heart are both rhythm-keeping organs, which is why sustained harmonic sound reliably settles them.

In practice, crystal and Himalayan bowls, gongs, tuning forks and the voice are used to hold specific tones at specific centres. The measurable part is what that does to your nervous system: harmonic sound moves the brain out of busy beta into alpha and theta, the parasympathetic range where the body repairs. Music and sound have been shown to lower cortisol and calm the stress response (Thoma et al., 2013), and singing bowl meditation specifically has been shown to reduce tension, anxiety and low mood after a single session (Goldsby et al., 2017).

The full mechanism is in the science of a sound bath. For a beginner's overview, start with what is sound healing.

The map

The seven chakras, one by one

Each entry below gives you the location, the solfeggio frequency traditionally paired with it, what it governs, and — most usefully — what people actually notice when it is underactive or overactive.

• Root · Muladhara396 HzBase of the spine

  Governs: safety, stability, grounding, survival, belonging, your relationship with money and home. Physically associated with the legs, feet, base of the spine and immune function.

  Underactive feels like: anxiety with no clear cause, feeling unsafe or unsettled, disconnected from your body, exhausted, unable to get traction. Often lower back pain, digestive sluggishness and fatigue.

  Overactive feels like: rigidity, hoarding, fixation on money and security, resistance to any change.

  What helps: barefoot on the ground, root vegetables, red, weight-bearing movement, 396 Hz, and anything that reminds the body it is held.

• Sacral · Svadhisthana417 HzBelow the navel

  Governs: creativity, pleasure, emotion, sexuality, flow and your capacity to want things. Associated with the reproductive organs, kidneys, bladder and hips.

  Underactive feels like: emotional numbness, creative block, low libido, difficulty enjoying anything, feeling flat. Often hip and lower back tightness.

  Overactive feels like: emotional volatility, impulsiveness, using pleasure to avoid feeling.

  What helps: anything that moves the hips, water, creative work with no outcome attached, 417 Hz.

• Solar plexus · Manipura528 HzUpper abdomen

  Governs: personal power, self-worth, confidence, will, boundaries. Associated with digestion, the liver, pancreas and gallbladder.

  Underactive feels like: low confidence, difficulty deciding, people-pleasing, no boundaries, a knot in the stomach before hard conversations. Often digestive trouble and chronic fatigue.

  Overactive feels like: control, perfectionism, anger, needing to be right.

  What helps: doing the thing you said you would do, breathwork into the belly, sunlight, 528 Hz.

• Heart · Anahata639 HzCentre of the chest

  Governs: love, compassion, connection, grief, forgiveness and your ability to receive as well as give. Associated with the heart, lungs and chest.

  Underactive feels like: loneliness even around people, bitterness, guardedness, difficulty accepting help, a heaviness in the chest. Grief lives here.

  Overactive feels like: giving until there is nothing left, losing yourself in others, no boundary between their feelings and yours.

  What helps: heart-focused gratitude, being genuinely seen by one person, humming, 639 Hz.

• Throat · Vishuddha741 HzThroat

  Governs: expression, truth, communication, being able to say the thing. Associated with the thyroid, throat, neck and jaw.

  Underactive feels like: swallowing what you meant to say, a tight throat, jaw clenching, feeling unheard. Often neck tension, teeth grinding and recurring sore throats.

  Overactive feels like: talking over people, speaking to fill space rather than to say something.

  What helps: humming and vocal toning — the most direct practice there is — writing things down, 741 Hz.

• Third eye · Ajna852 HzBetween the eyebrows

  Governs: intuition, insight, perspective, imagination, knowing what you know. Associated with the eyes, sinuses and pituitary.

  Underactive feels like: brain fog, indecision, not trusting your own read on things, no sense of direction. Often headaches and eye strain.

  Overactive feels like: overthinking, living in the head, difficulty separating intuition from anxiety.

  What helps: less input, sleep in real darkness, meditation, 852 Hz.

• Crown · Sahasrara963 HzTop of the head

  Governs: connection to something larger, meaning, perspective, trust. Associated with the brain and nervous system as a whole.

  Underactive feels like: cynicism, meaninglessness, going through the motions, spiritual disconnection.

  Overactive feels like: spiritual bypassing — using the transcendent to avoid the practical, ungrounded, floaty.

  What helps: stillness with no goal, time in nature, and — importantly — grounding the root at the same time, 963 Hz.

Frequencies as taught in the Solfeggio Energy Centres method (Think and Grow Education). Note that traditions differ — some place 528 Hz at the heart rather than the solar plexus.

Reading the pattern

How to tell which one needs attention

Most people scan that list and recognise themselves in two or three. That is normal — the centres are not independent, and a pattern in one usually pulls on its neighbours.

The most common combination I see in the studio is a depleted root and an overactive third eye: living almost entirely in the head, thinking constantly, while feeling ungrounded, unsafe and exhausted in the body. That is the shape of modern chronic stress, and it is exactly where I was myself when I was sick.

The second most common is a held throat and a heavy heart — grief or resentment that never got said out loud, showing up as a tight jaw, a stiff neck and a chest that feels compressed.

If you want a starting point without booking anything: pick the one you recognised most strongly, listen to its frequency for ten minutes a day for a week, and write one line each night about what you notice. That alone tells most people more than reading another article.

Going deeper

What actually happens in a chakra and aura reading

Self-assessment gets you a long way. What it cannot do is see the thing you have normalised — the pattern you have carried so long it just feels like your personality.

That is what the Energy Field Reading exists for, and it is the session I am known for. Here is exactly what it involves, with nothing dressed up:

Working remotely? Here is how distant sessions work. Carrying something long-standing? The 10-week transformation opens with the full reading and then builds layer by layer over ten sessions.

The other half of the work

Reiki, and how it differs

People often ask us whether they want frequency healing or reiki. They are different tools and they pair well, so here is the honest comparison.

Reiki is hands-on energy work. It originated in Japan in the early twentieth century and is now one of the most widely practised complementary therapies in the world, offered in hospitals and palliative care settings alongside conventional treatment. The practitioner rests and moves their hands over the areas that are holding, and helps an overloaded system come back down. Nothing is forced, nothing is manipulated, and you stay fully clothed.

At Sound of Soma, reiki is Jack. His sessions are very quiet and very still — the word people use afterwards is usually gentle. You do not have to talk about anything you are not ready to, and plenty of people say nothing at all for the whole hour.

Which should you book? If you want to understand what is going on and get a written reading, start with the Energy Field Reading. If you are simply fried and want something gentle with no talking, start with reiki. If your body physically will not let go, start with fascia. And in practice most sessions combine two or three anyway — you do not have to decide correctly.

Reiki and sound also run together as a group class: REBALANCE, weeknights in Windsor.

Free, and starting tonight

Working with your chakras at home

None of this requires a practitioner to begin. Four practices, in order of how much they tend to do:

• Listen to the matching frequency, ten minutes a day. Earphones, quiet room, sitting upright, eyes closed. Morning to set the day, evening to unwind it. Pick the centre you recognised most, and stay with it a week before switching.
• Hum. The most underrated practice on this list, and the fastest way into the throat and heart. Find the note that feels effortless and stay on it for ten slow breaths. You cannot ruminate and hum at the same time.
• Ground before you go up. If you do anything for the third eye or crown, do something for the root first — barefoot on the ground, weight through the feet. Energy work that lifts you without grounding you is how people end up floaty and unsettled.
• Write one line a night. What you noticed, nothing more. Change here is gradual, and your critical mind will insist nothing is happening unless you have receipts.

And if something surfaces — tears, tiredness, a raw day or two — that is normal integration rather than a problem. Here is what to do with it. For the full home practice, see 7 ways to regulate your nervous system.

From the studio

What people say afterwards

What the work feels like, in the words of people who came to our Windsor studio. We are rated 4.9 on Google across 50+ reviews.

Read all our reviews on Google

Common questions

Chakra healing FAQs