Tag Archives: crown chakra and character development

How to Use the Crown Chakra for Deep Character Development

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This is the last 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 Crown (seventh) Chakra rules Spiritual Power and Understanding. The crown relates to the ability to conceive of and create spiritual context for life experiences, which leads to resiliency and bliss. The Crown Chakra says I KNOW.

By considering how your characters connect to their own meaning-making (from the Third Eye Chakra), you’re able to take them through their transformation—their new normal.

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

Seventh Chakra – Crown Chakra

Location
Top of head

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
Faith in inner guidance/trust that overrides fears, mystical/intuitive connections, ability to create and live by a personally chosen belief system, ability to put life’s challenges in a spiritual context, positive attitude, awareness in the divine—whether in a self-proclaimed higher power or within other humans/living entities

This is about how your character responds to situations that call for them to have gained perspective, to be on the other side of their struggle(s) throughout the story. 

Primary fears and fearful expressions
Disassociation, ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, spiritual crisis, inability to let go of the past, greed, lack of inspiration, apathy, elitism/superiority

This is where you’re able to see your character’s “full circle” or “transformational” moment. This is where they arrive in a more settled place after having run the gauntlet of the story’s trajectory, have put it in perspective, and are in a position to start living their “new normal.”

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Writing exercise

Take some time to sit quietly, and think about the aspects of the Crown 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 completed a difficult thing—taken difficult action, spoken out against the powers that be, put themself in physical danger, ended a relationship, etc. 

Questions to begin your exercise:

• What is the thing they did?

• How did this inform their understanding of the situation, of themselves, of the world?

• Where does this new-found understanding leave them?

  • What will they do next—in the next week, the next month, the next year (whether this belongs in the story or not)? 
  • How do you, the writer/author, see them now that you’ve guided them through?

Let me know what you discover in the comments.

As always… Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie
OOOOO

How Understanding the Crown Chakra Can Improve Your Writing

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Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels

When we have defined the shaping of our characters’ identities (Root Chakra); understood their sense of self-awareness in relationship to others (Sacral Chakra), their displays of agency in the world (Solar Plexus Chakra), and their supporting characters and antagonists (Heart Chakra); listened to them speak (Throat Chakra); and tuned into their intuition (Third Eye Chakra), we stand a better chance of reflecting their transformations.

 

The Crown Chakra is about having a deeper knowing about one’s life, perspective based on wisdom and experience, and an understanding of one’s Self as part of a much bigger picture. When a person reaches this level of development, she has been able to make meaning of her experiences, actions, and reactions.

 

If we’re writing fiction or memoir (because we are writing about a period of time in a life), we want to envision an ending, if possible. Sometimes this take a fair amount of writing to know the ending. Sometimes the ending comes to us early in the process.

 

This has something to do with perspective, and more precisely, point of view. Not only do we want to understand our protagonist’s perspective about life before, during, and after her transformation, we also need to decide who can best tell the story.

 

In the case of fiction, the story may be told in first person from the protagonist’s point of view, or it may be told in third person by an omniscient narrator or a combination of both by another character.

 

In the case of the non-fiction, self-help/how-to category, you will likely use a combination of first person and second person point of view. You will also want to be clear about who your Ideal Reader will be after she has followed your plan based on your method, process, or program.

 

Write a significant scene in your story (fiction or memoir) from first and third person points of view, considering the options for third person: totally omniscient (an all-knowing voice that has insight to all characters’ thoughts and feelings), partially omniscient (an all-knowing voice that has insight to only the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings), or a more subjective point of view from one of the other characters.

For a non-fiction book, try writing passages both with and without second person “you.” The tone you want your book to have will determine which is the right choice.

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

 

 

How understanding the crown chakra will improve your writing

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Believe it or not, your characters’ spiritual lives have a big impact on their stories, whether that’s part of the plotline or not. Just as with we humans, our characters have spiritual beliefs – or not – that inform their motivations and decisions in life. In religion, this is called the eschatology of a belief system: what we think happens to us when we die, whether or not we believe in karma, how we view humanity’s purpose in this life, or whether we believe in past lives.

Even if we don’t embrace any of these beliefs, the fact that we don’t also influences our day-to-day motivations and decisions.

It’s easy to by-pass this part of our characters’ development, but it’s essential, I think. Whether your character is a mystic or an atheist, a Buddhist or a Baptist, their belief system – or lack thereof – has everything to do with their movement through life and their story world.

After you’ve gotten clear about a character’s inner world, as we do when using the Third Eye Chakra, go one step further and think about the character’s connection (or not) to a higher power. This higher power can be anything – even their own sense of inner wisdom. Or their meditation practice. Or their love of literature. Their daily hike. Or their daily cocktail. It doesn’t have to be overtly religious or spiritual.

Understanding our characters to this degree can help us portray their complexities in deeply moving and complex ways. And this is the very quality our stories need to have if we want them to stay with readers long after they’ve put our work down.

What is the source of your character’s higher power, and how does it inform her/his way of moving in the world?