The Seven Chakra Personality Types (2018) is a popular book by Shai Tubali, which I really enjoyed reading a lot. Not that there is any lack of books on personality, like MBTI and Enneagram. In fact, it is somewhat in between both with the added twist of tying the types to ancient Ayurveda chakras (energy points in the body) and doshas (body types). The types are as follows (with their rough MBTI and Enneagram correspondences):
Chakra | Chakra type | Dosha | MBTI | Enneagram | |
1 | Root | Builder | kapha | SJ | 6,1 |
2 | Sacral | Artist | pitta-vata | (S)FP | 4,7 |
3 | Solar Plexus | Achievers | pitta-kapha | E(S)T | 3,8 |
4 | Heart | Caretakers | vata-kapha | (N)F | 2,9 |
5 | Throat | Speakers | vata (-pitta) | (E)(N)T | 7,1 |
6 | Third-Eye | Thinkers | vata (-pitta) | (I)NT | 5 |
7 | Crown | Yogis | vata | INF | 4,1 |
It’s not hard to find specific people (historic or alive) in Tubali’s descriptions. Some of his examples are somewhat off, in my humble opinion. Typing Charles Darwin as “builder”, when he was a far away 6 (thinker) is hard to comprehend. Also, the Artist group is too heterogeneous. Even though Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain were both artists and had very similar life trajectories, they were really quite different.
Apart from that, the descriptions are often really very deep and accurate. What is missing, like from any typological system: an explanation of the origin of these types. If personality types are objectively real to some degree and not just arbitrarily slicing up the spectrum of human behaviour and experience, we have to ask about the evolutionary origin of these types.
The author does have a historic and evolutionary perspective but really fails to explain why 40% of all people are builders. The answer is quite simple because most people are of farmer descent and we live in a mostly farmer world. As the author says himself:
From a purely practical perspective, for the world to “happen,” we require more Builders,
Achievers, Speakers, and Caretakers than we do Artists, Thinkers, and Yogis.
The existence of the latter types (artists, thinkers and yogis) is not only hard to justify from a practical perspective but from an evolutionary perspective as well: how the heck did artists, thinkers and yogis survive and reproduce if they were never productive in any way? Well, they were, just not in 9-5 jobs, but as herders and hunter-gatherers.
So, here is the complete table, including evolutionary types
Chakra | Chakra type | Dosha | MBTI | Enneagram | Evolutionary type | |
1 | Root | Builder | kapha | SJ | 6,1 | farmer |
2 | Sacral | Artist | pitta-vata | (S)FP | 4,7 | herder-hunter-gatherer |
3 | Solar Plexus | Achievers | pitta-kapha | E(S)T | 3,8 | herder-farmer |
4 | Heart | Caretakers | vata-kapha | (N)F | 2,9 | gatherer-farmer |
5 | Throat | Speakers | vata (-pitta) | (E)(N)T | 7,1 | hunter-herder |
6 | Third-Eye | Thinkers | vata (-pitta) | (I)NT | 5 | hunter |
7 | Crown | Yogis | vata | INF | 4,1 | gatherer |
And here is my own Chakra test result
If you want to learn more about evolutionary types, check out my book
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