Practitioners of certain types of yoga may be interested in reading chakra books to deepen their understanding of the seven chakras. The best chakra books include basic, introductory guides for beginners, as well as more advanced texts that delve more into the methods folks can use to incorporate these principles into their daily lives.
What are chakras? How are they important when it comes to meditation, healing, and your overall sense of being? How can you use them to guide your yoga practice? Read on to answer these questions as we cover a wide range of the most informative chakra books for beginners and experienced yogis.
What are Chakras?
“Chakra” is a Sanskrit word that means “wheel” or “vortex.” It describes the energy channels of our bodies. Though some Hindu or Buddhist texts mention five or six chakras, today folks generally believe that we have seven chakras located in a vertical line that runs along our spines.
Each chakra is typically represented by a distinct symbol and color. The major chakras, working from the top down, are:
-Sahasrara (crown of head)
-Ajna (3rd eye / between the eyebrows)
-Vishuddha (throat)
-Anahata (heart)
-Manipura (navel)
-Svadhihthana (groin)
-Muladhara (base of spine)
You may also see them referred to by more casual names, such as crown chakra, solar plexus chakra, and root chakra.
Those who believe in the existence of chakras believe that our bodies function best when our chakras are functioning properly. When the chakras are not in balance, this can cause physical, emotional, or spiritual disturbances or disease.
Learning about chakras can help you correct these disturbances and lead to healing and contentment.
Who Can Benefit From Learning About Chakras?
Anyone who values mental peace, physical health, and spiritual balance can find something in the study of chakras to incorporate in their own lives. Since yoga is an activity of mindfulness and balance, yogis can benefit from learning about chakras.
Some styles of yoga, such as Kundalini yoga, are specifically based around cleansing your chakras. However, the typical studio yoga class rarely mention chakras at all. So you don’t need to understand chakras to perform yoga. Whether you want to delve into studying these energy centers is up to you.
Here now are our suggested chakra books for beginners, followed by a section of suggested books for more experienced learners. If you’re new to all of this, see also our beginner’s guide to meditation.
The Best Chakra Healing Books for Beginners
1. Chakra Healing: A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Healing Techniques that Balance the Chakras (Margarita Alcantara)
Margarita Alcantara’s Chakra Healing: A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Healing Techniques That Balance the Chakras is one of the most thorough chakra books around. That subtitle pretty much explains it all – this is an introduction to chakras and how you can channel them in your life.
Split into two sections (“The Powerful Chakra System” and “Healing Your Chakras”), the book opens with an informative section to build your foundation of knowledge. Part two goes into great detail about healing techniques.
Alcantara’s book includes two valuable appendix sections. One describes the best yoga poses to connect with your chakras. Not all poses offer that same kind of connection, so that appendix is super-helpful.
The other appendix is an in-depth section about crystals. Various types of crystals correspond with different chakras. Aquamarine, for instance, is said to activate your throat chakra, while amethyst helps you connect with your crown and third eye chakras.
2. The Ultimate Guide to Chakras (Athena Perrakis)
Here’s another good introductory guide to the chakra system. The Ultimate Guide to Chakras by Athena Perrakis is ideal for folks coming into this with no prior knowledge of chakras.
The subtitle “The Beginner’s Guide to Balancing, Healing, and Unblocking Your Chakras for Health and Positive Energy” makes clear that the text is aimed at helping readers fully understand how to make the connection between the physical world and the energy centers of the body.
The book really is the ultimate guide. It devotes an entire chapter to each of nine chakras, including two that aren’t covered in other texts: Vasundhara (earth star chakra) and Sutara (soul star chakra). You’ll learn which crystals, essential oils, planets, and tarot correspond with each chakra.
3. Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System (Anodea Judith)
Anodea Judith’s Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System has been one of the top books on this subject for years, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It can be thought of as a road map for the journey to consciousness.
What makes this book so great? It’s jam-packed (more than 400 pages) with information on everything related to chakras. She writes that the book “will not tell you where to go, but will help you navigate the journey you wish to take.” Each chapter has an opening meditation and real-life examples of how these concepts appear in action.
New sections in the most recently-updated version of the book include chapters about healing, relationships, and raising children with healthy chakras.
4. Yoga of the Subtle Body (Tias Little)
Tias Little’s Yoga of the Subtle Body: A Guide to the Physical and Energetic Anatomy of Yoga comes at the topic of energy centers from a different angle, focusing on how the chakras relate to the specific anatomy of the body, such as nerves and glands.
Little covers each chakra from a physical perspective, offering up lengthy chapters such as “The Belly Brain,” “The Pelvis Potential,” and “The Lungs and the Lotus Heart.”
You’ll be amazed at how much detail the author goes into as it relates to various areas of the body. For instance, the chapter on the feet provides information about the bridges, arches, heel, and the ligaments and tendons that hold everything together. Understanding anatomy will take your knowledge of chakra energy to another level.
5. The Book of Chakra Healing (Liz Simpson)
The Book of Chakra Healing by Liz Simpson is another good introduction to the body’s energy centers. The book gives each chakra its own chapter and includes a mention of how to balance the chakras, which is important, since you want to learn how the chakras relate to each other, rather than just learning about all of them individually.
The publication includes daily questions and affirmations, a discussion of altars, crystals, and essential oils, and a glossary of important terms. The book has been on the market for more than 20 years (it’s obviously been revised and updated), so it has helped many yoga beginners over the years.
6. Chakras: A Complete Guide to Chakra Healing (Kristine Marie Corr)
Kristine Marie Corr’s Chakras: A Complete Guide to Chakra Healing takes the subject of chakras and focuses on how to use them for healing purposes. The subtitle promises to help readers “Balance Chakras, Improve your Health and Feel Great.”
The book discusses aromatherapy, affirmations, and techniques such as chakra block, which means keeping out negative energies from folks you encounter who might rub you the wrong way. It’s shorter than some of the others on this list, but it’s also more affordable, so if you want a good starter book on the topic, it’s a solid option.
The Best Chakra Books for Experienced Yogis
7. Essential Chakra Meditation (April Pfender)
For those who are big into meditation as a means to transform your mind, body, and spirit, April Pfender’s Essential Chakra Meditation: Awaken Your Healing Power with Meditation and Visualization may be just what you’re looking for.
This new book (published in 2019) describes meditation as a tool for reaching enlightenment. Each of the seven chakras receives its own chapter, with a special focus on how the chakras relate to meditation. Some of the material is presented in an introductory fashion, so this one is suitable for both beginners and more experienced folks.
What’s great about this book is that it isn’t some vague, high-level text that focuses only on theory. It actually focuses on specifics. In fact, 5- and 15-minute meditation instructions are presented with precise suggestions for carrying them out.
8. Chakra Yoga (Anodea Judith)
Learning about chakras is great, but how can you actually bring the chakra system to your yoga mat? Anodea Judith’s Chakra Yoga is a great book for making that happen. The author describes several postures with step-by-step photographs to help you get the most out of each pose.
Like Judith’s other book Wheels of Life, this one is more than 400 pages of goodness, with lengthy chapters on how each chakra fits into a hatha yoga practice. Each chapter contains descriptions of more than a dozen poses. For instance, you’ll learn how the root chakra powers Tree Pose and opens up your upper chakras.
There are so many different poses covered here that you’ll likely learn a few new postures, regardless of how experienced you are.
9. Crystals for Healing: The Complete Reference Guide (Karen Frazier)
Want to learn all about the specific crystals that match up with each chakra? Crystals for Healing: The Complete Reference Guide will teach you more than you’ve ever wanted to know!
The book includes detailed descriptions of 95 different crystals and their healing properties. You’ll read about their ideal uses and placements, plus daily meditations and mantras. The tagline for the book is “200 remedies for the mind, heart, and soul.”
The publication includes everything from tips on shopping for crystals to preparing your mind to use them. Chapters 4 & 5 contain a massive number of specific remedies. Some address problems like anxiety, indecisiveness, and resentment, while others are aimed at positive attributes, such as courage, creativity, and motivation.
10. Chakras Beyond Beginners: Awakening to the Power Within (David Pond)
Most chakra books are written for beginners, but David Pond’s Chakras Beyond Beginners: Awakening to the Power Within aims to take the conversation further, with more advanced and detailed study and discussion.
The book covers how to tackle common obstacles that inhibit people’s energy centers. It also goes beyond the simple focus on self and covers how to be aware of the chakras of other people and how to use that knowledge in personal relationships.
Pond’s book is arranged like similar books, with chapters on each chakra. Useful sub-chapters include “Past-Life Karma,” “Digestive Fire and Metabolism,” and “Reentering the World After a Spiritual Awakening.”
Summary
That completes our list of the best chakra books for beginners and experienced yogis! Whether you’re involved with yoga, Reiki, or any other practice that attempts to harness or channel the body’s energies, this list should get you pointed in the right direction.
Ultimately, it is up to each individual to decide how best to receive this information and adjust their yoga practice accordingly. Listen to your body and your heart, and do what feels right for you.
If you’re looking for books that deal less with chakras and more with traditional yoga instruction and principles, see our list of essential yoga books you must read.
And if you’re ready to buy new yoga gear, take a look at this article where we help you find the best yoga starter kit for beginners.