Tag Archives: third eye chakra and writing

How to Use the Third Eye Chakra for Deep Character Development

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This is the next in a series about how to utilize my Writing Through the Body Method™ which uses the chakra system as a practical tool for uncovering a character’s desires, wounds, and motivations. By exploring these psychological foundations, writers are able to portray their characters’ behaviors, reactions, and responses on the page with greater depth and emotional truth.

For example, the Third Eye (sixth) Chakra rules Mind Power. The third eye relates to the ability to distill wisdom from life experience, clarity about what is best for one’s highest good and joy—it’s about the intuition. The Third Eye Chakra says I SEE.

By considering how your characters connect to their intuition and ability to make meaning of life will give you clues about the ease with which they move through the world and within the story.

Below is a brief explanation of the Third Eye Chakra, its traits and characteristics, and some ways you might integrate its attributes into your character development.

Sixth Chakra – Third Eye Chakra

Location
Lower forehead, between the eyes

This does not directly apply to your character but is used for visualization purposes when doing certain exercises within the Writing Through the Body™ method, offered here as an FYI.

Primary strengths
Strong intellectual abilities/skills, self-acceptance, mental flexibility, ability for objective contemplation, high emotional intelligence, open to wonder

This is about how your character responds to situations that call for them to think beyond the here and now. This is how they make meaning (and have made meaning) of life, and what they do with that understanding. 

Primary fears and fearful expressions
Fears of one’s shadow side/looking within, inability to self-reflect or identify illusion, pushing oneself to extremes, poor intuition/concentration, fear of unknown, judgmental/overly analytical, mental fog/overwhelm 

This is where you’re able to start seeing your character respond in ways that may not make sense to them, as if they’re driven by something they don’t see or understand.

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Writing exercise

Take some time to sit quietly, and think about the aspects of the Third Eye Chakra as they relate to all your characters. 

Write a sketch of a character that may not be materializing as fully as you would like, and answer the questions below as fully and exhaustively as possible. 

Tip: Every time you arrive at a new place of understanding or identify a particular behavior or response in your character, ask “why?” Continuing to ask “why?” is how we get to the deep psychology of our characters. 

Example: Your protagonist has just done something they are not proud of. There is one person in the world they trust—living or dead. Write a letter from your character to their trusted person. 

Questions to begin your exercise:

• What is the thing they did?

• When did they do it? Was it recent or many years ago… something they’ve been carrying around, like a dead weight?

• What has moved them to disclose this now?

• What happens—both within them and in their life—after the disclosure?

Let me know what you discover in the comments.

As always… Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie
OOOOO

How Understanding the Third Eye Chakra Can Improve Your Writing

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Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels

We’ve all heard how important it is to listen to and trust our intuition. But what about our characters? How do we know what they intuit? When we spend time truly getting to know our characters, our people, no matter our genre of choice, we can start to hear their intuitive thoughts. This is the Third Eye Chakra. These intuitive thoughts may be thoughts that pass through the minds before they speak, and use the power of the Throat Chakra. Or they may be thoughts that remain locked inside the confines of their minds.

 

For fiction, consider the thought that crosses your protagonist’s mind that he disregards right before making the choice we know will create more strife for him.

 

For memoir, consider your own life trajectory and make note of all the times you disregarded your intuition – those times you said, after the fact, “I knew I should have…” Think of your overarching desire, in the context of the time in your life you want to explore, and all the ways you were detoured from that desire.

 

For a non-fiction, self-help/how-to book, think about what your Ideal Reader must know deep down about herself to want to learn about your method, process, or program and change her life.

 

One of the best ways to understand a character’s intuition is to listen to her thoughts. Write an interior monologue piece of the thoughts that pass through your protagonist’s or Ideal Reader’s mind, the thoughts she doesn’t want anyone else to know about. Write it as a stream-of-consciousness piece. Then write it as a more controlled expression of your protagonist’s thoughts.

 

Please leave a comment below. I’d love to know what you discover.

How understanding the third eye chakra will improve your writing

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Getting inside our characters’ heads can feel second-nature to us writers, and oftentimes, we gravitate to stream-of-consciousness or interior monologues. This can work – as William Faulkner showed us with The Sound and the Fury (although the novel’s success was delayed… and I found it unreadable, but I digress). However, we need to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with this kind of invasion to our characters’ minds.

Showing our readers all the troubled, angry, tired, sad, fragile, and destructive thoughts in our characters’ minds is most definitely a way to connect them with and help them empathize with characters. And the way we do that can mean success or failure.

After we’ve gotten clear with our characters’ voices – as discussed with the Throat Chakra – we can explore their Third Eye Chakra, which is the seat of intuition. What do they know, without a doubt? (We typically think of this as a “gut-level” response to life; however, it starts here, in the Third Eye Chakra, a somewhat ethereal part of us that defies “rational” human thought.)

Whether our characters trust their intuition or not is one thing, and the way we portray that intuition is another. We run interior monologues all the time. This is how we sort out life. We run through a multitude of scenarios, trying on all the “what-ifs” for each one.

What our characters think, HOW they think (stream of consciousness, more understandable broken thoughts, or pretend conversations), and what they do with those thoughts informs not just our readers about how to interpret their stories, but us, the writers of those stories, as well.

How do your characters’ thoughts align – or not – with their desires and motivations, and what does this tell you about their ability to make decisions?