Manipura, the Solar Plexus Chakra: Asanas, Signs and Practices

Manipura — mani, jewel, and pura, city, the city of jewels — is the third of the seven chakras, sitting between the navel and the sternum at the solar plexus. Its element is fire, its colour yellow, its seed syllable ram. What it governs is will: confidence, the capacity to act, and the heat the tradition associates with digesting things, food and experience alike.

Manipura at a glance

What it is said to govern

Where the root is about having a place and the sacral about feeling, Manipura is about doing. The faculties assigned to it are the ones involved in acting on the world: deciding, asserting, carrying something through, holding a boundary. The tradition links it to agni in the body — the digestive fire — and treats literal digestion and the metaphorical kind as expressions of one capacity.

It sits directly below the heart, and the structural claim the system makes is that the three lower centres have to be in order before the heart centre can function as anything other than need.

When it is described as out of balance

Weak or blocked: indecision, low confidence, difficulty saying no, a sense of being carried along by other people’s choices, procrastination that does not feel like laziness from the inside. Physically the writers name digestive complaints, trouble in the stomach and liver, and low energy in the middle of the day.

Overactive is described as the opposite failure rather than an excess of a good thing: domineering, needing control, anger that arrives faster than the situation warrants, perfectionism that will not delegate.

Asanas for the solar plexus

More readers arrive here looking for the postures than for anything else, so they get their own section. The principle is simple enough to state: the solar plexus responds to postures that engage the core, compress the abdomen, or build heat.

• Navasana, boat pose — the most directly associated of them, holding the whole middle of the body in tension.
• Dhanurasana, bow, and Ustrasana, camel — backbends that open the front of the abdomen rather than compressing it.
• Ardha Matsyendrasana, the seated twist, which the texts connect to the digestive fire specifically.
• Paripurna Navasana and the plank family, for building heat.
• Kapalabhati and Agnisara kriya — breath practices rather than postures, and the ones classical hatha yoga names for agni. Both are more demanding than they look; learn them from a teacher rather than from a list.

The other practices

• The bija mantra. Ram, with attention at the solar plexus.
• Sunlight. The simplest instruction given for this centre, and consistent with both the element and the name.
• Warm, simple food eaten at regular hours, which the tradition treats as supporting agni directly rather than symbolically.
• Finishing something. Not in the texts in those words, but it is what the teaching amounts to: the centre of will is strengthened by exercising will, and the practices are a support rather than a substitute.

Where it sits among the seven

Manipura is the third and last of the lower three, after Muladhara at the base and Svadhishthana at the sacrum, and directly below Anahata at the heart, which is the system’s turning point. Above the heart sit Vishuddha, Ajna and Sahasrara. The full map is on the chakras overview.