What is a Chakra anyway?

What are these seven colourful places in your body?  

From “The Beginner’s Guide to the Chakras” by Anodea Judith

The chakras are holistic yet linear, stacked up like beads on a vertical string, from the base of the spine to the top of the head.  Each chakra represents an aspect of consciousness that is essential to our lives.  Together all the chakras create a system of consciousness that helps us embrace mind, body and spirit.   They sit in the areas of the body where there is a high degree of nerve activity.  When they are clear and functioning properly they act as a nexus between, and unlock the separation of, mind and body.  

Chakras receive, assimilate and express the various types of energy that enter your body.  For example, the throat chakra is all about sound and communication.   It helps you process and understand words and signals from the world around you, translates them into your own internal language and helps you express your thoughts and feelings in your own unique way.

It might help to use a computer as an analogy, where your mind is the software, your body is the hardware, and your life force is electricity powering both.  Your mind contains the programming that tells your life force where to go in the body.   This programming became instinctual habits encoded into your nervous system.  
 
The idea of a Reiki treatment is to get down into the chakras, get into the code that wrote the programs and get the bugs out, so your life runs more smoothly.  Here's a quick summary of each chakra (including the related element).

Root Chakra (Earth) - oriented to the consciousness of survival - our instincts - how you take care of your body, home, finances, and related to everything in the physical world

Sacral Chakra (Water) - relates to sexuality and emotions, our relationship with self and others, and the flow of energy through the body

Solar Plexus Chakra (Fire) - relates to personal power and self esteem, our effectiveness with the outer world

Heart Chakra (Air) - the centre of the whole system it relates to love,  the creation of our relationships and how we sustain them over the long term

Throat Chakra (Sound) - communication, creativity and self expression, how we relate to others

Third Eye Chakra (Light) - relates to perception and intuition, how we see things around us and how we see ourselves in the “big picture”

Crown Chakra - relates to consciousness itself, opens us to the universal connection to the intelligence of all life