.When your chakras are balanced and functioning properly, you are said to feel a sense of harmony, vigour, and overall well-being. But if your chakras become imbalanced, the flow of energy is disrupted, potentially leading to physical, emotional, or spiritual imbalances and health difficulties. This is why balancing your chakras is important for a happy life.

The concept of balancing your chakras is rooted in traditional Indian and yogic practices. According to these beliefs, the human body has seven major energy centers known as chakras that are interrelated and play an important role in physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The chakras are believed to be spinning energy wheels that regulate the flow of prana or chi, or life force energy, throughout the body. 

So how do you balance your chakras, or energies? Why is chakra balancing important?

I spoke to Francesca Bonta, who empowers people to live life with love, light and joy. She has developed her own unique practice of healing arts through her years of experience and intuitive abilities. Through her spiritual guidance, she offers chakra balancing, reiki, yoga and meditation, energy work, and more. 

She gives a brief overview of what are chakras and what is chakra balancing, and why balancing your chakras is important for a happy life. Watch the video!

Why Balancing your Chakras is Important for a Happy Life 

with Francesca Bonta

Maria: Welcome Francesca! Thank you so much for joining me today!

Francesca: Thank you lovely to be here!

Maria: Can you tell me a little bit about our chakras.

Francesca: I certainly can. So basically, chakras are energy centers in the body and there are many of them. But we typically focus on the seven main ones which are aligned through the midline of the body from the tailbone area the pelvis area the belly button area or solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the third eye or the spot in between the forehead, and then the crown of the head are just slightly above the crown of the head. Those are sort of our seven main chakras and each of them is connected to physiological functions in the body, emotional properties. We can support them with foods, colours, scents, energy, medicine, planets – there are all sorts of ways that we can balance out the body and find some sort of oscillation within these chakras that works for where we’re at in that moment.

Maria: So why is that important, to balance those out?

Francesca:  I think it’s essential that we have balance in our body. Our body speaks to us in so many ways. The whole idea of speaking about chakras might be new to people but I don’t think the idea of finding balance in our body is new to anyone. When we have more of this understanding. it helps us to be our own support. So instead of looking outwards to be rescued or to be helped or to be healed, we go inwards so that whole journey is from the inside out.

You know when sometimes people will comment, “oh you’re glowing!” It’s not because I have something topical on my skin – it’s because of the energy from the inside out. Over the years I’ve learned to go inside and clear out a lot of that energy that has been holding me back. That can be trauma experiences, it can be limiting beliefs, it can be just habits that you fall into. When we go in – which by the way isn’t always easy – to honor that truth and to see things about ourselves, then we can clear space. It’s kind of like a closet right? Your closet only has so much space – our energy body only has so much space too. So, if we fill it even if we put things in boxes in the corner and shove it away, eventually the closet gets full. That’s sort of what happens with all of us in our energy bodies when we don’t want to look at things, we just kind of shove them away but they don’t really go away. We need to clear it out and we can do that through movement through actual talking about it, through energy shifting, and there’s a lot of options for how we can clear out the space. Basically, I call it our energy bubble, but it’s actually our aura which is language that I think a lot of people are becoming more familiar with if there aren’t already familiar with it.

Maria: Can you give me an example like a symptom? Say a body symptom of like when maybe a chakra is blocked for example?

Francesca: First of all, I love the fact that you mentioned the word blocked because I don’t like to say that chakras are actually blocked. I usually say that they’re congested because I don’t think a chakra can be fully blocked because if it is, I don’t think we would be alive because energy moves through the whole body. I really like to look at the vibration of language and the moment we say blocked it’s like – gasp – we say congested. It just feels a little bit softer and so many people say that you know, “oh I was told this chakra is blocked,” well I don’t agree.

So, there’s two spots on the body that I feel it’s best for us to sort of connect if we’re not really understanding what this is all about. One of them is the throat chakra. Sometimes we need to do a presentation, or we need to have a challenging conversation and we just can’t find the words, or all of a sudden, you get like a frog in your throat. Or the opposite happens what I call like you know, verbal diarrhea, where we can’t stop talking. So that is a symptom of that chakra being off balance. For example, if we were about to do this presentation today and I got a frog in my throat or I just suddenly thought I don’t know what to say, I could support that chakra by humming or using spearmint or lavender oils which I actually happen to subconsciously use just before a session. Although I had no anxiousness about it, it’s just intuitively our body does things. You’ll find too that over time of playing with chakras and understanding your body, you just naturally go to things. Just like no one has to remind me, oh go brush your teeth, it’s just something I do every day. A lot of this just becomes very natural.

Another one that is a big one – the belly, or solar plexus chakra. Gas, indigestion, bloating – all these sorts of symptoms that could appear that is a sign of maybe a lack of trust, inability to make decisions, listening to that inner voice. This chakra is one that I think speaks to all of us and that is one of my main chakra areas that I have to constantly work on. I use a language of, “I have a sensitive belly” so I will go through phases where I don’t have any stomach issues and then I’ll go through times where I call it a flare. That is something that I always have to be mindful of, so that sort of can lead us to the point that balancing your chakras.

It doesn’t mean like, okay got their check mark done! It’s impossible to be fully balanced from head-to-toe 24/7 because we are all energy and things are always shifting. Even when I see clients in clinic and we do a chakra balancing session and I show them with the pendulum how every chakra is balanced beautifully and then I show them a sample on my own body and it moves to show that it’s not balanced, I tell them that is in this moment you are as balanced as your body can be. But it doesn’t stay like that because we’re all energy and things are always shifting. And then we’re human so I might be having a great belly week and then all of a sudden, I hear unpleasant news about a family member, or get a flat tire, and then these things are going to affect how we feel. Even though we might be feeling great, things will shift.

What I tell people is the understanding of our chakras and doing work, whether it be healing sessions or your own work, is that we create this bigger bubble around us so that we have more of a playing field. I use the analogy of those bubble balls that people play soccer in when we inflate that then we have this really big bubble of energy and we can see in all directions and we bounce so even if we fall, we bounce up. If something comes at us, it deflects because we’ve got this bigger bubble… If you imagine that soccer ball bubble being deflated even if you know a little ball comes at you it’s going to hit you and if you fall, you’re going to hurt your knee… I like to use those kinds of concrete examples so that we can put what’s energy and not tangible into real life.

After hundreds of people later, maybe thousands of people later, my analogies seem to work and it’s amazing how quickly things can shift in our world when we are ready to take those necessary steps. It’s beautiful to watch people transform in you know literally from the first session it’s amazing.

Maria: Awesome I love that analogy; I could picture that so thank you for that! What are three things that people should keep in mind?

Francesca: 

1. Listen to your Body.  

I believe that listening to our body is essential and although I talk about all of this awareness of the body, my body still speaks to me on a regular basis. But not everything speaks all at once and if it is screaming at you, then you better press it listen and focus. That’s what we do a lot of times – how many times have you had that feeling – I had a feeling and you didn’t listen to yourself? Start listening to your body and start playing with simpler things. For example, your husband or your friends what you want for dinner or where should we go and eat, and our answer is, “I don’t care whatever”. Why not start listening – what do you actually feel like? What do you want, something spicy? Do you want something creative that you would never make at home? Do you feel like something kind of light and simple? Start listening and playing with things like that – they are a little bit easier for us to play with. Don’t dive right into something enormous, so get comfortable and start feeling out and then you’ll notice. For example even our bodies during the winter when where we live in Ontario, it’s very cold and it’s very dark and what do we tend to lean towards? We want root vegetables – lots of potatoes, carrots, these are root vegetables asking us to connect with the earth. We can’t go walk barefoot in the middle of winter! We need to support ourselves; our bodies are intuitively asking. With the lack of sunshine. We all gravitate towards citrus fruits especially oranges. Citrus elicits joy and joy is more easily found when the sun is shining, when we can walk by the water, when we go to the beach. During our winters we’re lacking this so intuitively we lean towards these things, and so when we start pointing out things that we do intuitively it’s like, “oh cool!” That helps to trust your body a little more. We are so intuitive, but we were never encouraged … we are allowed to feel things out and to have these kinds of discussions, even as little as five years ago for you and I to do this kind of a share, people would be like, “what are you talking about?” But in more recent times, we are being permitted to start being feeling beings right as opposed to thinking beings.

2. Enjoy the process

Number two on my list is – enjoy the process. The journey of healing and finding balance is meant to be lovely. When we explore some sides of ourselves, there are things we don’t want to admit. Maybe you don’t want to see that not everything is butterflies, roses, rainbows and unicorns! But to heal, there are so many amazing options out there. If yoga isn’t your thing and the thought of going to a mountaintop and chanting “om” is not your thing, there are so many things that you can do. What I encourage people to do is develop a toolbox – just like in our real-life toolkit, we’ve got screwdrivers and hammers. And you have different size and different heads of screwdrivers. You’ve got like all these things that you don’t use every day. But if your toolbox is organized, then you know where to find things! Once you start playing, it’s like: “oh okay I can use a drill for this but you know what? Today I’m going to use the screwdriver. I don’t need the power drill!”

So, you find that there are so many tools that work, and I don’t use all my tools all the time. Sometimes I gravitate more towards oils, sometimes I do longer meditations, sometimes I’m moving my body more, sometimes I’m going for healing sessions more. I know that I have all these things to pull from and I sometimes forget truthfully, sometimes I forget things in my toolbox and then it might take a client or a friend or they literally just appear and it’s like, “hello did you remember me?” Have fun as it can be so overwhelming and that, the process of healing, can create anxiety and distress in the body. We want you to have fun – enjoy the process. Play, which is another big part of this… a lot of times as adults, we forget to play and have fun and be willing to make mistakes and to try something that isn’t your favorite. But at least you tried it, right? Just like when we were little, you’re encouraged to try all these different foods – maybe you’ll love it, maybe you don’t. Whatever you can always add to it later.

3. Ebb and flow

The third piece to really keep in mind is that enlightenment or balanced chakras or wellness or however you want to term that – ebbs and flows. We live in a world of duality. So to be happy, we have to know what sadness feels like right, so full is to support individuals my mission statement is to support individuals to feel empowered navigate life’s adversities with ease and grace and let love light and joy flow through them. In other words, things are going to happen, we want to have a big bubble so that we can navigate all these things that come our way.

In any given day, I have great moments of pleasure like that absolute high, and I have lows. However, I try my best to live a life where I’m vibrating at a higher frequency so that even those really sad things – because in my family too we have death, we have illness, we have great sadness, there’s a lot of things that go on and even in my personal world and let’s not mention what’s going on in our world around us – we don’t want to get consumed by those lower vibrations. But balance is oscillating between. We’re living in Shades of Gray. There’s the full extreme of pure white light and then there’s the other extreme of that darkness. But we don’t live in black and white. You crash and you’re like, “I don’t know if I want to go on one more second.” But the thing is, we want to bounce out of that. What I noticed with people over time is that they bounce back faster so even something silly like, let’s say somebody cut me off on the road, in the past, that used to make me so upset. I would think about it and think about it for a long time, and it would just like eat away at me. Now, when things like that happen, it’s like, first I’m grateful thank goodness you know we didn’t have an accident. Then I approach that with compassion; maybe the person is rushing to the hospital, maybe they just got really bad news, maybe they’re just not well generally or maybe they have zero ability to feel or think about anyone else other than themselves. In all those cases, me offering compassion is much more supportive and therefore I’ve relieved myself of that weeks’ long of festering and stress over a situation because I had allowed it to consume me.  So that’s an example of how we bounce back.

Accepting that every day, we have these ebbs and flows, I tell people I want to see life more like this as opposed to those extremes, with our health to our moods to our experiences. Every day, have a little joy. A lot of times, people are like working so hard so that they can have that one week vacation or partying like they don’t go out for three months and then all of a sudden go out and they’re partying for like seven days! I prefer to have more of this; it’s a lot easier to keep this than it is these extremes. When you do have the extremes and you have that moment of like just elation, you recognize that even when it’s not that amazing, even this and that is still amazing. Those highs… and when you have that crash, sometimes you’ll sit there a little longer and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to bounce out of it right away; the goal is to oscillate more here. So those are my three main points around um finding balance in our bodies.

Maria: Thank you so much Francesca please share where people can find you?

Francesca: Well, I make it easy – my website is https://www.francescabonta.com/. If you’re looking for me on social media, I am a little more active on Instagram @francesca.bonta. I’m on Facebook not as much but I’m there and I’m also on LinkedIn as Francesca Bonta so just type in my name and you’ll find me.  I do have in person appointments available in Toronto and Coburg and I have virtual appointments available around the world.

Maria: That’s fantastic, it’s great that you have a mix of in-person and online too. Thank you so much for joining me today! I really appreciate your time.

Francesca: It was an absolute honor and a pleasure. It’s always great to connect with you and I feel really blessed that I’ve had this opportunity to share with you as well as with your audience so thank you thank you so much.