What the chakras are, where they come from, and what the evidence says

This tree maps the pose families onto the seven chakras, the model most Western yoga classes use. That map is a teaching tool, and it is worth being clear about how old each part of it is, and how much of it can be checked. On this site, three kinds of claim are kept apart: what the tradition says, what history shows, and what research can measure.

What they are

In the tantric and hatha traditions, chakras (Sanskrit for “wheel”) are centers of subtle energy set along the central channel of the body, where prana, the life-force, gathers and moves through the channels called nadis. They were understood as part of the subtle body, the felt energetic body of yogic experience, and were worked with through breath, mantra, visualization, and concentration, embedded in ritual practice rather than drawn as decorative diagrams. The lotus in which each chakra is traditionally drawn carries a teaching of its own. In the Bihar School of Yoga reading, Swami Satyananda takes the flower through its three habitats as an image of the path: it “sprouts in the mud (ignorance), grows up through the water in an effort to reach the surface (endeavour and aspiration) and eventually reaches the air and the direct light of the sun (illumination).” That is a modern lineage teacher’s reading rather than a claim from a named classical scripture.

Their history

The number of chakras was never fixed. Classical Sanskrit sources describe systems of four, five, six, seven, and nine centers, chosen to fit different aims of practice rather than out of disagreement; the scholar Camilla Damkjaer, drawing on Mallinson and Singleton, notes that “the most common belief was that there were six chakras… some systems included different numbers, such as four, five, nine or eleven,” so the familiar seven is itself a later standardization. The arrangement most familiar today, six centers from Muladhara at the base to Ajna at the brow, plus the thousand-petalled Sahasrara at the crown, was codified in tantric texts such as the sixteenth-century Śaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa. The West met that system largely through Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, whose 1919 The Serpent Power translated it into English. The rainbow of colors now assigned to the seven chakras, red at the root through violet at the crown, is a twentieth-century Western addition. It does not appear in the classical texts, and as the historian Kurt Leland traces, the familiar system that pairs the colors with a psychology of the self did not settle into print until the 1970s.

What the research says

Chakras have not been shown to exist as physical structures, and they are best held as a contemplative map of where energy and emotion are felt in the body rather than as a claim about anatomy. Some teachers align them with the body’s nerve plexuses and endocrine glands, which is a useful mnemonic and an interpretation rather than an established finding; that particular mapping is recent, added in 1930 by the Theosophist Alice Bailey in The Soul and Its Mechanism rather than carried down from the classical texts. Formal study has been sparse: the most serious empirical attempt, Hiroshi Motoyama’s mid-twentieth-century instrumentation work, sits outside mainstream science. Held this way, the chakra map earns its place here as a language for the body and a way to organize a practice, and the poses linked to each center in the tree above are offered in that spirit.

What the research says about the practice itself

The benefit lines on this tree describe how a family of poses is meant to work in the body. What the clinical literature actually supports is narrower, and worth stating plainly. The steadiest evidence is for pain. A meta-analysis of sixteen controlled studies found moderate effect sizes favoring yoga for chronic pain and for the disability that comes with it (Büssing and colleagues, 2012), and for low back pain in particular a later review of randomized trials found that yoga beat non-exercise controls such as usual care and education, while it was no better than an ordinary course of physical therapy exercise (Zhu and colleagues, 2020). The honest reading is that regular, attentive movement does most of the work, and yoga is one good way to get it rather than a uniquely superior one. For anxiety the evidence is thinner and more cautious: a meta-analysis of eight randomized trials found that yoga “might be beneficial in the short-term for improving intensity of anxiety when compared to untreated controls or active comparators,” but the same authors found no effect once only people with a diagnosed anxiety disorder were counted, so the benefit is for elevated anxiety symptoms rather than clinical anxiety disorders (Cramer and colleagues, 2018). A small 2026 randomized trial makes the magnitude point again for the back: it found that “a short-duration, structured yoga program resulted in greater short-term improvement in pain, disability, and analgesic use than a higher-dose” conventional exercise regimen, “although the clinical superiority was modest,” with the between-group gap falling below the threshold for a clinically meaningful difference (Bharti and colleagues). It was an underpowered, unblinded pilot in a light-review journal with mismatched exercise doses, so it reads as one more sign that attentive movement helps rather than proof that yoga beats other exercise.

Two more recent studies keep this honest. For post-traumatic stress, a 2023 overview that pooled eleven systematic reviews, covering fifty-nine trials and more than four thousand people, found that “yoga had a significant small-to-moderate effect-size on PTSD symptom decrease in 7 SRs and non-significant effects in 1 SR,” while warning that the underlying evidence is largely of low quality (Laplaud and colleagues, 2023). And the single best-powered trial here reports a plain null: a 2024 NIHR-funded randomized trial of a gentle chair-based yoga program in 454 adults over 65 living with multiple long-term conditions found that, although “the Gentle Years Yoga programme was not associated with any statistically significant benefits in terms of health-related quality of life, mental health, loneliness or falls, the intervention was safe, acceptable to most participants and highly valued by some” (Tew and colleagues, 2024). Held together, the evidence says gentle, accessible yoga is safe and often deeply valued, and should be offered in that spirit rather than sold as a cure.

Offering it in that spirit has a specific method. In Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga, David Emerson, who developed the approach at Bessel van der Kolk’s Trauma Center, builds the whole practice on what he calls “invitatory language, which is used to promote choice and control, two very important issues for trauma survivors,” so that a pose is always offered and never commanded. The point of the body-based approach, in his account, is that practitioners “are able to cultivate the ability to remain present, to notice and tolerate inner experience, and to develop a new relationship with their body,” the slow work being what one of his students names from the inside: “I have learned that my body is the enemy, but in order for me to live this life now, I must find a way to befriend my body.” This is why the poses on this page are a map of options rather than a set of instructions. The accessible-yoga teacher Jivana Heyman states the same principle plainly: “People are more important than poses, and it’s better to adapt a pose to a person than a person to a pose.” The shape is the servant of the practitioner, never the other way around, which is what lets this whole family of poses meet a body wherever it actually is.

Matthew Sanford, a teacher paralyzed from the chest down, offers first-person evidence for that reach. Teaching an adapted class for students living with spinal-cord and neurological injury, he found that “the principles of yoga are nondiscriminating,” not contingent on a fully sensate or mobile body, and he credits Iyengar’s emphasis on alignment and props for making that accessibility real.

That felt-sense method also places yoga at the root of a wider family. Borrowing Thomas Hanna’s 1976 coinage of somatics, knowing the body from within, the yoga therapist Jaime Stover Schmitt argues that because self-referencing through the body is what defines somatic work, “yoga may well be the mother of all somatic practices,” a shared ancestor of Feldenkrais, the Alexander Technique, and the modern somatic-movement field.

That instinct has a named home in the tradition. The Viniyoga branch, carried from Krishnamacharya through his son Desikachar, turned it into a method: practice is fitted to the person rather than the person to the posture. Gary Kraftsow puts the starting rule plainly, that “the study of āsanas in Viniyoga always begins from an understanding of the individual body’s unique condition, both theoretically and actually: in order to get anywhere, we must begin from where we are.” It is the therapeutic lineage underneath every body-specific adaptation this family of poses already makes.

That Viniyoga line is one of several branches from a single modern trunk. A.G. Mohan, who studied with him, records that “Krishnamacharya was the primary source, in the last century, of much of the effective physical yoga that millions of people around the world now practice,” the common root from which the Iyengar, Ashtanga, and Viniyoga lineages each grew.

Why a body-based practice should reach trauma at all has begun to be studied. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, whose Trauma Center developed the method above, reports from his group’s imaging work that “twenty weeks of yoga practice increased activation of the basic self-system, the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex,” the regions that carry the felt sense of the body, and that in one trial “ten weeks of yoga practice markedly reduced the PTSD symptoms of patients who had failed to respond to any medication or to any other treatment.” The teaching craft matters as much as the finding. The trauma-informed teacher Joanne Spence points out that calm itself is contagious: “Other people’s nervous systems will take their cues from your nervous system. Therefore, if there is only one person in the room in a ventral vagal state, let it be you.” Her first instruction is simply to slow down, to move, breathe, and speak at a pace that says “We have all the time we need” rather than “Let’s hurry up and relax.”

For post-traumatic stress the picture is promising and genuinely mixed. Pooling twenty randomized trials, yoga significantly improved how people rated their own PTSD symptoms, but it was not associated with improvement on clinician-rated measures (Nejadghaderi and colleagues, 2024), and a second review found small reductions concentrated in the intrusion cluster, the flashbacks and nightmares, with weaker effects on avoidance and arousal (Sinnott and colleagues, 2026). None of the trials that tracked serious harms reported any. Read together, this supports yoga as a low-risk support that most changes how people feel and report, not as a proven stand-alone treatment. For newer claims the evidence is thinner still: a pilot trial of a yoga program for people with long COVID found it feasible and safe but, in an analysis the authors deliberately left underpowered, showed no significant benefit over the control group (Welfordsson and colleagues, 2026). Adequately powered trials are still needed before yoga can be recommended for that condition.