Hey baby. What's your exploded chakra?

In character-driven fiction, it’s important to know the characters inside and out.

My sister takes a voice and movement class for her acting degree, and she’s been learning about the ancient study of “chakras”.

The chakra comes from Hindu texts originally, but has been studied in many eastern cultures.

These are “force centers”, or spinning discs of energy within the physical body. If someone has an “imploded” chakra, the energy is withdrawn from that chakra. There’s a disconnect there. This could result in a change of posture, behavior or affect interaction with others. An imploded chakra could come from a traumatic experience (If someone has a deficiency in chakra 2 where sexual pleasure is located, it’s possible that the individual may have undergone abuse in childhood.) In the case of an “exploded” chakra, there’s an excess of energy. If someone has an exploded 1st chakra at the root, that could mean that he or she speaks with forceful conviction and enters rooms with great assurance.

So how does this affect character development?

Does your character have exploded and imploded chakras? Is your character earthen, with a strong 1st root chakra, with a tough attitude and a forceful presence? Perhaps he or she has a strong 7th chakra at the crown, and feels connected to the heavens above. Or, perhaps this person is weak at the 5th throat chakra and has trouble voicing his or her opinions. I think it would be a worthy practice to diagram a character based on this ancient study of movement and soul. I think it would affect the way the character walks into the room, the way he or she speaks and the way he or she deals with problems.

I can’t wait to map out my characters in this fashion.

More on this later. Perhaps a blog about some famous characters and how their chakras may have been.

Happy writing.