A TOUCHSTONE REVIEW:
Bodymind *
by Ken Dychtwald
Tarcher Putman; updated edition (1986)
* For this review, I have mined information on the history and influence of this book from Kurt Leland’s Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016).
The Book
The original title of this book – Bodymind: A Synthesis of Eastern and Western Approaches to Self-Awareness, Health, and Personal Growth – bespeaks the general tendency of the 1970s to synthesize the popular Hindu yogic concept of chakras and the concepts of prana (vital energy), tantra, and the nadi (subtle energy channels) with popular Western therapeutic practices like reiki and Chinese acupuncture to improve personal self-esteem, mental health and to unblock energy flow throughout the body.
“Bodymind” was the title of the first “open encounter” workshop which the author, Ken Dychtwald, attended at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. The book opens with a description of the author’s experience during this first amazing therapy session, when the therapist “read” with uncanny accuracy what was “held” in the posture of the author’s naked body.
In this book, the author, a 27-year-old with a PhD in gerontology at the time of writing, recalls in a friendly conversational tone experiences he had like this during his younger days in therapy sessions and encounter groups. The author portrays his own journey of self-analysis, body region by body region, as a model for his readers to follow to discover themselves. More than a memoir, Bodymind is one of the most revealing records of the therapeutic theory and practice going on at Esalen in the early 1970s.
During this time, the traditional five-chakra system of Hinduism developed into the seven-chakra system popular today and the correlation between Esalen chakra qualities and rainbow colors was established. The system of Hinduism further influenced the chakra system established at Esalen through the published teachings of yogi Sri Aurobindo on the Indian Vedic practice he called Integral Yoga (which did not record his esoteric solar practice).
After that, Esalen established the workshop format that has been the primary means of disseminating information about the human body, energy healing, and the Western chakra system ever since. (It is perhaps worth noting that while Zen and Tibetan Buddhism were growing more popular elsewhere at this time among Americans, neither influenced the development of the healing practices at Esalen or this book.)
Dychtwald defined bodymind as “the evolutionary storehouse of all life’s potentials.” His book describes the various methods used to explore bodymind by therapists at Esalen. These methods fostered the view that the energies spoken of in Eastern kundalini traditions and the energy associated with Western forms of bodywork — like bioenergetics, Reichian energetics, Rolfing, and chiropractic — validated each other.
The updated edition of the 1977 classic explores the bodymind connection, integrating ancient Eastern knowledge with the pioneering contemporary work of Wilheim Reich, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Fritz Perls with the author’s own intuitive analysis of the psychosomatic functions of the bodymind region corresponding to each of the Kundalini chakras.
Dychtwald’s Chakra System
The tantric traditions of the East consider the psychic body (the subtle body or energy body) to be the intermediary between the individual person and the godhead. In terms of the Esalen human potential movement the bodymind is the intermediary. Dychtwald and his chakra system represents this movement. He lists the qualities to be achieved at each level of the chakras in order to realize full liberation from the social conditioning that prevents full use of and enjoyment of bodymind.
In Dychtwald’s system, the notion of a continuum of human potential is thoroughly psychologized. The notion implies a process in which people must disentangle themselves from the needs of the first three lower chakras by powers of mind in order to achieve a more developed sense of self. By “powers of mind” Dychtwald implies both cognition (Aurobindo’s thinking mind) and intuition or psychic abilities (Aurobindo’s higher mind). He even used the term “third eye chakra” to describe the sixth chakra in his system.
Dychtwald for the first time brought into print the spectrum of rainbow colors into the list of chakra qualities commonly in use today. Kurt Leland, in his book Rainbow Body, tells how.
The dust jacket of the first edition of Bodymind, published in June 1977, pictures a human silhouette in meditation pose with the chakras represented by colored bands in rainbow order.
The chakras are more specifically located in the body throughout the book in black-and-white illustrations based on this form. For Dychtwald, the location of the chakras “suggests a path along which an individual might travel on his personal road to optimal bodymind health and a full realization of his human potential.” His use of this metaphor implies that the chakras are where the body and mind meet. This implication marked a change in Esalen’s central metaphor of the continuum of human potential.
To promote his book Bodymind, Dychtwald contributed an article to the July/August 1977 issue of Yoga Journal: “Bodymind and the Evolution to Cosmic Consciousness.”
In this article, Dychtwald states that “each chakra corresponds to a particular color vibration with the lowest chakra projecting the color red and each ascending chakra projecting the next color of the rainbow: orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet for the seventh chakra.” Thus he made the first statement in print that assigned the rainbow spectrum colors to the chakras that is now ubiquitous.
Following this statement, Dychtwald lists the chakra qualities given in his book and gives a resume of chakra functions, adding the phrase “expanded mental powers” to his description of the sixth chakra. He also says that the seventh chakra “corresponds to the highest level of human development.” He lists several names for this state: “enlightenment, samadhi, nirvana, God consciousness, and cosmic consciousness.” And so, by means of his book Bodymind and this Yoga Journal article, the Esalen list of chakra qualities and the chromotherapists’ list of rainbow colors came together for the first time.
This Western chakra system developed for the purpose of well-being into the most common version of the major chakras in use in the West today. It retained the Sanskrit names, located them on the physical body from the base of the spine to the top of the head, and established the English names of their qualities:
7. Crown Chakra (Sahasrara) – wisdom / self-realization / cosmic consciousness
6. Brow Chakra or Third Eye Chakra (Ajna) – self-reflection / self-awareness
5. Throat Chakra (Vishuddha) – communication
4. Heart Chakra (Anahata) – love
3. Solar Plexus Chakra or Navel Chakra (Manipura) – power
2. Sacral Chakra (Svadhisthana) – sexuality
1. Root Chakra (Muladhara) – survival
Tibetan Buddhism began to grow more popular among Americans, Dychtwald’s version of the chakra system gained ground while the other systems gradually disappeared from most New Age presentations of the chakras and became extinct. Dychtwald’s pairing of the chromotherapists’ rainbow colors with Esalen’s chakra qualities began to spread into alternative healing modalities beyond those taught at Esalen to relieve energy blockage and achieve activation of the pineal gland, which Dychtwald recognized to be the master gland of the endocrine system that controls and stimulates all other glands.
Dychtwald no doubt hoped that his book would inject something transformative into American culture. But that “something” was not the chakra system itself. He doesn’t ask or answer questions like, Are chakras real? What is the number of chakras? Is there scientific evidence for the existence of chakras? He used the concept of chakras and the seven-chakra system primarily to organize the structure of his book. But in doing so, Dychtwald’s book provides a gift to our understanding of how intimately and intricately interwoven the human mind is with the human body. And this understanding suggests the image of still higher and more intricate states of “bodymind,” states of being which the author himself was in search of.
Going Further
Man is not solely a physical being. Man also has a psychic being and a spiritual being. But their attributes, the psychic and spiritual faculties, are not usually experienced to any practical degree by the average individual who does not follow a system of spiritual development.
We experience the physical body through our sensory faculties. The psychic and spiritual bodies can also be experienced. Their existence can be substantiated in much the same way as sensory perception substantiates the existence of the physical mind/body. The three energy bodies are interrelated from the level of the force centers to the level of energy particles. Each energy form or body is permeated with the energy of the others.
Matter, energy, and intelligence (information or knowledge) are interrelated. The nervous system of the physical organism can be acted upon by frequency patterns carried by energy stimuli. The force centers of the psychic body are the catalysts through which higher frequencies of energy flow. The force centers are to the psychic or spiritual bodies what the nerve plexuses are to the physical body – channels of energy.
The physical body and mind – what Dychtwald calls the physical bodymind – together form what we may call the “human soul.” We see the physical bodymind to be an excrescence of the psychic “bodymind,” which is itself an excrescence of the spiritual “bodymind,” the immortal Light Body. Thus we might say that the physical bodymind is an image of an image of an Image.
The psychic body, or “rainbow body,” together with the mentality that accompanies it, forms what mystics in the old days of the Hermetic Schools called the “counterfeit soul.” This “counterfeit soul” is the soul under the influence of Darkness. It utilizes intelligible energy out of the sun, which means it’s half solar energy and half spirit. Instead of being bright and golden and light, it’s more iridescent – a “Dark” light. It is mutated spirit. If one could go to this higher level and concentrate only on the Dark nature without becoming evil, one would be a great magician, a very powerful person, and probably live longer than the average person.
However, a still higher nature is expressed if one goes on to exercise the arts and sciences of being using the multiple forms of the energy of the sun and the Intelligence within it. When a person’s mind is illuminated — when one projects one’s mind into the sun, into outer space, into extraterrestrial worlds, one’s being is amplified — one becomes more cosmic.
After you begin to study the arts and sciences of the sun on the physical level, you then move on, desiring to ascend back to the source of your being. And if the Logoi, the Angels of Light, bring about the regeneration of the Word, or the Logos, in your being, then the immortal Light Body together with its Spiritual Consciousness forms the immortal soul, the true soul.
Being immortal, the true soul doesn’t receive any Intelligence of a physical/cosmic nature. It works with transcendent energy. To do this, you need to have the faculties to be able to put that energy to work. You need a Light Body, because energy cannot manifest without a body. You need a Light Body to be able to receive and utilize transcendent energy from the higher dimension we call Heaven or the Worlds of Light.
Being of a higher nature, the true soul is taught how to handle divine energy with its inherent divine Intelligence. And this is what is meant by the soul’s being able to reason on the divine. A rebirth is generated, and that preexistent soul comes alive and begins to involve itself in the divine.
This is what the System of Cosolargy and the Sacred Teachings of Light have to offer.