Chant and Be Happy: The Fifth Chakra

In the way that water needs earth to be carried and shaped by it, sound needs air to travel and be heard. In the presence of ether, sound cannot travel. Many people believe that the elements of sound and ether are interchangeable at the fifth chakra, but they are in fact mutually exclusive, sound depends on partciles of solids, liquids or gasses to travel, while ether is the absence of such particles.

For me, all the chakras are ethereal, sub etheral gateways, even, which defy the laws of matter. Prakriti and purusa, matter and consciousness, the two foundational principles of the Hindu Sankhya system of creation, almost meet in the realm of ether, said to be the most subtle element of the physical world on the cusp of matter and consciousness. Ether is found in space, and is sometimes called space. Our thoughts are ethereal, ether is in the air between the particles, it also carries light.

Reading up on the fifth chakra you are likely to find correlations between it and ether, and also sound. Ether is the logical next step when drawing parallels between the elements and the chakras, starting with earth at the root chakra, water at the sacral, fire at the third and air at the fourth. But an increasing number of people recognise sound as the fifth chakra’s elemental counterpart, not ether.

‘Thought’ commonly found associated with either the sixth of seventh chakras, gets close to representing ether on the chakra scale. ‘Light’ the remaining element is also ethereal, as it travels through space. Unlike sound, light does not rely on particles to travel; luminiferous ether was a concept put forward by the scientific community in the early 1900s reflecting how light travelled, but is now extant. Ether, then, could be said to underlie both thought and light, at the sixth and seventh chakras, but not sound.

Sound is pure, vibrational energy that depends on the other elements to be heard. We hear sounds all day long, everything we touch makes a sound, and our bodies make sounds too! Sound communicates between people, it carries energy from one space to another and it can be felt as vibration in the body. When you do your chakra work, be aware that things get more subtle after the fourth element. Including and following air, at the heart centre, we are well and truly in the realm of the invisible.

So with this in mind, what does the fifth chakra represent? How do we integrate it into our daily practice? At the end of my yoga session I chant a mantra that I associate with the chakra I am working on eight times. When we focus on the fifth charka, I particularly encourage students to embrace their sound, and make some noise. I find singing empowering, and think it is a shame that we have moved away from a time when everyone in the community sang songs together. When you sing, you make space for yourself in the world, you fill your aura with your own sound, your body resonates with good vibrations and you embody what you represent.

This moonth focussing on the fifth chakra, ask yourself, ‘what do I stand for, what is my truth?’. By singing with an open heart you invite an open relationship with yourself, you build confidence in your voice and invite greater prosody in your self expression, a key aspect of overcoming negative feelings. Chanting is probably one of the most powerful exercises you can do to improve your mood. Singing in a group is even more uplifting as the harmonies bend to create a unique sound. So go ahead, sing sing sing, chant and be happy!