Organize Your Google Drive by Chakra
Is this what they mean by "somatic integration"?
The Fall of Western Culture
Much ink has been spilled on the Western separation from nature. We Occidentals, the cultural inheritors of the Cartesian divide, are sick. We work, all day sitting in unnatural chairs, our butts carefully suspended far from the ground. We toil away at spreadsheets, docs, and trackers, employing them to efficiently build and sell more spreadsheets, docs, and trackers, all so that our financial spreadsheets, docs, and trackers will tell us that we are going to be ok, before we grow too old and tired to continue managing all of the spreadsheets, docs, and trackers. We speak to our colleagues — fluently, cleverly, endlessly — of markets, synergies, processes, and bottom-lines, but we must hire professional, credentialed, confidentiality-sworn strangers to teach us to speak to our own childhood anger.
Our language, our cities, and even our conception of time itself has reified our separation from our bodies and the sensuous Earth:
To indigenous, oral cultures, the ceaseless flux that we call 'time' is overwhelmingly cyclical in character. The senses of an oral people are still attuned to the land around them, still conversant with the expressive speech of the winds and the forest birds, still participant with the sensuous cosmos. Time, in such a world, is not separable from the circular life of the sun and the moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the animals- from the eternal return of the greening earth.
- David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
So mired in the confines of our linear linguistic legacy, how can we ever hope to get back in touch? Enter Ancient Wisdom, known to all indigenous cultures, but philosophized, systematized, and preserved across the centuries in Asia. While the scientifically-quantifiable benefits of the more pedestrian Vinyasa Flow, Taichi, and “Mindfulness Meditation” are old news, the torrent of knowledge and its American synthesis by workshop junkies marches boldly forwards! Jhanas, post-Daoist poetic qigong, Reiki and endless other exotic energy work methodologies have made their way across the Pacific, and into the hands of serious practitioners and casual “woo” festival goers alike.
But How Will This Maximize Shareholder Value?
I know that this astute question is the first to cross your mind, dear reader. To take seriously the cyclic time of ancient religions would be a folly in the face of the ticking clock on our Q1 Quarterly OKRs. But fear not! Capitalism finds a way. Just look at how Transcendental Meditation® backed enough white-paper research to justify its presence among Silicon Valley startup perks (not to mention the heady price tag for its ego-cleansing “personalized mantras”). Or look at how execs flock to C-suite-exclusive Ayahuasca retreats:
Team-building is not the only thing business leaders believe they stand to gain from psychedelics…
Indeed, unladen by the superstitions of the past, and armed with the tools of Rationalism (or Post-Rationalism, or whatever), we are becoming quick experts in sanitizing the methods of pre-Enlightenment traditions (including, but not limited to, pro-Enlightenment religions), to preserve our epistemic hygiene, whilst continuing to glean the benefits. Psycotherapeutic ones, of course! The Buddha, at the end of the day, was nothing but an expert therapist. (and when he and his monastic followers refused to touch money…well, that was probably just a superstition)
My dear loyal subscriber, I wouldn’t let you miss the boat in this exciting new age of spirit-tech1. As we pass the holyidays and enter into the New Year, what better time to integrate embodiment practice into our daily lives, all without leaving our office chair!
This hot tip is simple to implement, and can make your digital life more somatically intuitive: Organize your Google Drive by Chakra. It doesn’t have to be your Google Drive either. Your PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) software, your email — anything with a tagging system or folders!
Hold Up, What the Fuck is a Chakra?
I should probably pause the pitch to give a bit of background. You have almost definitely seen a map of the chakra system before, even if briefly, because it is plastered on the wall of every yoga studio in America. It looks like this:
“Chakras” are centers of somatosensory energy in the body, with a set of associations - the colors of the rainbow, human spiritual functions, feelings. The word chakra comes from Sanskrit “wheel” or “circle” (as in “dharmachakra” ☸️). The chakra system originated in post-Buddhist Vedic tradition, though there are precursors the Upanishads. In our modern, epistemically-sanitized terms, the system is a “phenomenological model”: it describes a structure to sensation and experience that is somewhat consistent across humans.
If you are unsure of what “somatosensory energy” feels like, it’s very easy to demonstrate:
Close your eyes, and hold your hand out in space somewhere.
Notice that you still have a strong sense of where your hand is. That’s proprioception, not somatosensation, though they’re related.
Now, focus on your hand for a while. Feel everything you can possibly feel coming from it. After a while, you might notice something that you didn’t at first, that doesn’t correspond to the air on your hand. It could be heat, or pressure, or maybe a little tingling.
That’s it! That’s what “energy” is in this context. (see also pīti/prāna/qi) Imagine if that sensation were much stronger. So strong it could grab your attention or make you twitch, even if you were engaged in something else. If you spend a lot of time doing this kind of thing, such as if you are practicing Kundalini Yoga or Qigong, you will notice that energetic sensation in the body tends to pool in a handful of places, that align pretty well with the chakra map2.
The chakra system presents a very interesting claim beyond the mere presence of these nexuses of sensation: the chakras are each associated with abstract aspects of being. For example, the throat chakra (or “5th chakra” — counting from the bottom) is associated with communication, and also ego: our face to the world. If you feel subtle somatosensory energy “sticking” in your throat, perhaps you are feeling like your words are being silenced, or that you are being judged by those around you. Or, perhaps you have an issue with arrogance covering an inner wound, etc. In psychotherapy we work with this sort of complex by talking, telling stories, and hopefully crying at some point. In energy work, the claim is that we can work with this energy directly to resolve the issue. (the stories will arise naturally during the process)
Now, 3500 years of beautiful tradition evidently isn’t enough to pass American psychiatric scrutiny. There are embarrassingly few studies on this stuff, but I’ll throw in that from a neuroscientific perspective, the claims of this system aren’t crazy. We have a somatosensory map of the body on the postcentral gyrus, smack dap in the middle of higher cortex. It is reasonable to suspect that there’s cross-wiring between somatic feelings in the body, and some very complex neural functions.
If you want to learn more, there’s plenty of literature on the subject3, but now that you have been equipped with a cursory traditional background on chakras as talked about by yogis and hippies alike, we can return to matters more modern, practical, and invented by me.
Chakras are an Excellent Priority Ontology
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, streamline mission-critical wood-chopping and water-carrying competencies to move the needle on KPIs.
One view of the seven4 chakras’ themes, is that they align with the priorities of a human animal life, roughly ordered by urgency:
Root Chakra - Associated with safety, groundedness, and the physical. Keep the body safe.
Sacral Chakra - Associated with sexuality, Eros, and art. Procreate.
Solar Plexus Chakra - Associated with energy, vitality, and power (and digestion). Maintain stable energy.
Heart Chakra - Associated with love and healing. Also an “integration point” between upper and lower chakras. Relate to others.
Throat Chakra - Associated with communication and ego. Communicate, Collaborate, and Convince.
The Third Eye - Associated with intuition, insight, and imagination. Understand, intuit, become aware.
The Divine - The space over the head is associated with our connection to the divine. Seek a purpose greater than ourselves.
Does this make sense? We evolved these functions vaguely in order, and we develop them vaguely in order over the course of our lives. Each function depends on the functions below. But even if this sensual-semiotic sorting skews standard sanity, thinking about life according to “chakra-priority-order” can be very grounding and helpful. The categories alone tell you what matters, but the order helps too: Before you find your purpose (7), you need to self-examine (6). In order to exercise regularly (3), you need to not get injured (1).
No, But Seriously
This year, I went through a period where I was meditating a lot, and feeling a LOT of body energy. During this period, I was trying as hard as I could to integrate intuitive feeling into every aspect of my life. I was waking up at 5:30am and doing my Taichi set every single day. I was off all substances, caffeine included. I was making sure to touch nature every day. No screens until after breakfast, and only then, with computer glasses. 1 hour nap after lunch in the afternoon. Reading only physical books before bed. During this period (while there was lots of…stuff…going on in my actual chakras), I manically decided to reorganize all of my folders and tagging systems everywhere by chakra.
I stuck 7 folders in my Google Drive, named them as you see above, put the number first, and colored them according to tradition.
For every document or folder in my drive, I stuck it under the chakra folder it felt most like.
I then recursed it. If it seemed that one chakra had too much junk, I then split it into 7 “subchakras”, and repeated.
For example, where is my health insurance info? 1-Stability/1-Physical Safety. Health stuff is a pretty clearly animal safety. Where is stuff about my house? 1-Stability/3-House. Housing is foundational, but it’s more of a maintenance thing, so 3 subfolder. How about exercise instructions? 3-Vitality/1-Diet&Exercise. These essays? 5/5. Job interview reimbursements? 7 - Purpose/3 - Maintenance - obviously. My choices might not make sense to you, but that’s because they’re mine. Your intuition will look a little different.
Somehow, this stupid idea works really really well. Every time I’m looking for some group of documents (even if I’m only browsing and not yet entirely sure which documents I’m looking for), I ask “which chakra does this feel like?”, and then it’s there5. That vague intuition may be subjective, but it’s repeatable. Maybe the only thing you needed to get your life in order is being told what the big labels are.
If we were fully committed to somatic embodiment and the spiritual journey, we’d all quit our corporate desk jobs and give our ergonomically-optimized desk chairs and carpal-tunnel wrist braces away, to become shepherds, or monks, or carpenters. But barring that, if my ridiculous suggestion makes you pay attention to your body one or two extra times a day, I’ll call it a win.
Interestingly, “spiritual technology” is — entirely accidentally — not a gross corporate neologism. One translation of the word “Tantra” (as in “Tantric Buddhism”) is “technology”. 6th century Buddhists and Hindus were quite literally talking about technical innovations for spiritual advancement.
One can talk about confirmation bias and placebo effects, but for what it’s worth, I noticed some of this stuff before I learned much about the chakra system.
Judith, A. (2011). Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self. United States: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed. is the canonical California-intelligentsia recommendation for learning about chakras.
There are elaborations on this system which have up to 10 or 12 chakras, many stretching above the head. They might only be accessible to double-enlightened Megayogis though.
I even color my Gmail labels by Chakra-color.
I mean, it's a way to organize data that makes sense to you, and it fits a system you spent a lot of time thinking about. People used to build memory palaces before the advent of mass produced books, hooking recall to the spatial parts of their brain.
The ROYGBIV aspect is actually quite new, and I think the original Indian chakra systems used six. I remember tracking down the actual text, "The Serpent Power", by 'Arthur Avalon' (Sir John Woodroffe) that appears to be the initial translation from the Sanskrit that brought the idea into the Western world, and the chakras are mostly red or occasionally purple.