If you are in perfect health your chakras will all be responsive. Imagine a sea anemone. Most of the time it is relaxed, openly taking in nourishment, but it will quickly withdraw into itself when it senses a threat and when the danger has passed it opens out again. Ideally your chakras will open and close just as naturally. Unfortunately most people's chakras are not this responsive and they can sometimes get stuck in an overactive or tightly closed pattern.
Chakras are overactive and too open when someone has become addicted and dependent on the type of energy corresponding with that chakra area. Chakras can be held tightly shut down when someone has experienced too much grief or pain in the corresponding area of their life. Closing down is a self protective response and a way of avoiding the issue rather than processing it.
A chakra that is over or under-active will have an impact on the corresponding area of that person’s experience of life. If a chakra is wide open the person may be overwhelmed with too much information of that nature flooding into their system. If a chakra is under-active there will be too little.
One pattern to be particularly aware of if you are interested in your spirituality is the ‘top heavy’ pattern, where the crown and third eye chakras are overactive and wide open, but the lower chakras, especially the base chakra, are under-active and grounding is weak or non-existent. This is a pattern that can leave you feeling insecure and vulnerable.
In the healing world someone who is constantly escaping into the spiritual realms is sometimes termed a 'space cadet' because their perceptions are ‘out there’ but limited use can be made of the information they report. One lady I worked with always had beautiful meditations but would burst into tears on her return. Earthly life had been tough and she wasn't ready to face the issues she had, she wanted to escape them. Unfortunately to heal you do have to deal with your 'stuff'.
If you want to develop your psychic senses it is important to first establish strong grounding and healthy lower chakras. With the lower chakras closed and the higher chakras wide open there can be a disassociation from Earthly reality. We have seen extreme cases where such a person can appear to be insane, seeing and hearing seemingly bizarre psychic phenomena in an overwhelming way. That excess energy needs to move down into the lower chakras.
If you recognise the symptoms I’m describing please find yourself or your loved one some qualified and experienced support. Crystal healers like myself are usually knowledgeable about chakras and grounding, but other therapists also work with them. Check the therapist understands you need grounding and chakra balancing as simply channeling Reiki or other energy into an already overactive chakra can make things worse!
Sometimes it will take several balancing sessions before there is a noticeable shift as the client can self-sabotage their progress and unwittingly return their chakras to the pattern they have grown accustomed to. Of course if someone is felt to be so unstable that they are a potential risk to themselves or others they may need to seek psychiatric assessment and support.
Providing the situation isn’t this extreme one simple self help exercise you can try to bring responsiveness back to your chakra system is to visualise each of your chakras as flowers that can open and close. If you like you can add the typical colour of the chakra to your visualisation, so a red flower for the base, orange for the sacral, yellow for the solar plexus, green or pink for the heart, blue for the throat, indigo for the brow and violet and white or gold for the crown. Don't force these colours, you may perceive other shades. Visualise each chakra as having petals that can be opened like a flower drinking in the sunshine and closed down again into a bud. I usually start at the base chakra to open chakras up and close them down from the crown.
For people who experience a lot of psychic phenomena and sleep disturbance at night it has sometimes been beneficial to close the chakras down before bedtime, but do remember to open them back up again in the morning or you’ll lack energy for the day ahead.
If your chakras have been stuck in a pattern for a while you will need to persist over time to clear and correct their energies and bring balance back. Seek a suitable therapist to help you if need be.
Anodea Judith's understanding of the chakras is deeper than any other author I have come across and I treasure her audio CD set The Chakra System
. Her classic guide to the chakras is her book Wheels of Life.