The outer wheel holds memories from one’s soul, past lives, epigenetic material, genes, family system, childhood and life experiences. The outer wheel uses these memories to create programs for survival. Adapting is the key to survival. However, your soul is the part of you that travels from lifetime to lifetime. With experience comes wisdom and wounds. These are the foundations of your karma or life lessons. Your soul programs the outer wheel of every chakra, usually at preconception. The application of the outer wheel keeps re-creating the event until we’ll change it. This is not to hurt anyone; this is Karma. Karmic (soul) thinking runs is like this: if a negative experience is presented, then I have the opportunity to act differently.

The problem is that it’s hard to do something different than you are used to doing it. So that this means is that your outer wheel is continuously responding to old memories.

The outer wheel (like the ego) isn’t bad. We do need to adapt and fit in to survive. Our past experiences, perceptions and lessons chart a course that helps us steer through life’s many opportunities and disasters. But many of these programs are fear, or shame-based and promote the same hurtful responses to life’s stimulation.

A chakras’ inner wheel differs significantly from the outer wheel in that it holds your spirits truth, principles and programs. Your spirit is your essential self. Also called the true or higher self, this is the aspect of you that is knowingly connected to the divine. This is your dharma, devoted to spiritual integrity. We can think of dharma as intuitive and Karma as thought, dharma has more ease and grace.

When you want to understand your highest nature, you will work with your inner wheel, and when you want to follow a current situation, you will work with the outer wheel. It is important to note that we do not cause all the sicknesses and difficulties in our life. Some of the things that come up are from our ancestors. However, the state of our chakras does affect surrounding energetic fields and can attract certain types of situations. If we work on our chakras and subtle energies, we can alter some of what occurs. We can stimulate dormant areas of our brain and allow ourselves to experience higher states of consciousness (the goal of Yoga). We will still have challenges, but we can manage them differently.