Your Chakras Keep the Score: How Jungian Psychology Placed Samskaras in the Tantric Body

There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.