The Chakra Map · formal research study
Research Study Information & Participant Disclosure
What the study collects, what each permission authorizes, how long records are kept, and how to leave.
- Study
- The Chakra Map, public build version 2
- Researcher and designer
- Charles Muhammad, CMW Research Program
- Contact
- charlestm22@gmail.com
- Research cohort
- 2026 to 2027
- Data collection
- 27 September 2026 through 26 September 2027
- Cohort closeout
- 31 October 2027
- Standard retention through
- 31 October 2030
What this is
The Chakra Map turns seven acts of reflection into a digital body. Structured questions and written reflection produce provisional readings, the figure responds through color, movement, density, and position, and a completed Map brings those readings into relation through an archetype, selected karmic laws, a Samkhya forecast, and a suggested pose.
The participant can move the interpretation after seeing it. That is what the study examines.
The study is not university-sponsored, clinically validated, or institutionally reviewed. Its readings belong to a reflective and philosophical apparatus. Medical diagnosis, mental-health assessment, biomedical measurement, and prediction remain outside the claims of the study.
What participation involves
The root chakra opens first. Once the root is complete, a participant can move among the sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, and third-eye centers, and the crown opens after the preceding six are complete.
Each center begins with its correspondences and present condition. A participant can remain with that material, skip forward, or step away. The questions open after thirty seconds with that material, or at once if the participant skips ahead. Three structured questions follow, then one written reflection. A participant who chooses not to write can skip the reflection, and the skip is recorded.
Each center’s tone dial becomes available as soon as that center has its reading, and a center already answered can be answered again before the full reading. After all seven centers are complete, the Map generates the larger reading, and each center’s tone dial can be moved when the system’s reading does not describe the participant’s experience closely enough.
There is no fixed length. A participant may stop at any point.
What is collected
Arrival count
Before anyone consents to anything, the Map counts that a visit reached a given point. The count carries no identifier of any kind, so two arrivals cannot be joined into one person even in principle. It is the only thing recorded before consent.
Interaction trace
Which chakras were opened, in what order, whether the reading was completed or skipped, when a participant stepped away, returned, or answered a chakra again, whether a written reflection was skipped, how much of the Map was completed, how long the encounter lasted, and whether results were downloaded or the mailing-list form was used, never the address itself. Steps within one visit are joined by a number made when the page loads, which is never stored in the browser and is gone when the tab closes.
Structured response
The options selected across the three questions at each chakra.
Generated interpretation
The provisional state, archetype, laws, forecast, pose, and other results produced by the system. They are kept as first produced.
Participant revision
Where and when a participant moved a tone dial after seeing the system’s first interpretation, before or after the full reading.
Written reflection
The participant’s own language, and only when the participant separately chooses to send the completed Map to the CMW Research Program. Research participation on its own does not send a written reflection anywhere. The system reads that sentence locally for a small set of language signals that contribute modestly to the provisional center reading.
Each kind is stored and analysed as itself. A result the system generated is never read as something the participant said.
Records are held in the Research Program’s own database. The Map writes to it through five functions and nothing else: one that counts an arrival, one that records a step, one that records a session, one that records later tone-dial changes to that session, and one that shares a completed Map. The database accepts a written reflection only through the function that shares a completed Map. A sixth revokes a record, and it is called only from the Research Program’s studio when a participant asks to withdraw.
If a completed session cannot reach the database, the Map holds it in that browser for up to a week, without written reflections, and sends it on the participant’s next visit from the same browser. A failed attempt to share written reflections is never held.
The three permissions
Research participation. Allows the disclosed interaction traces, structured responses, generated interpretations, and participant revisions to enter the research record. It begins unchecked.
Share my results for research. Allows the full completed Map, including written reflections, to enter the CMW Research Program. It is offered separately, at the end, and declining it does not undo the participation already completed.
Email signup. Adds an address to the Charles Mindful Wellness mailing list for Research Program updates. The address travels through a separate system and does not create research consent.
One action does not silently authorize another.
Voluntary participation, and refusal
Participation is voluntary. A participant may step away from a center, skip reading material, skip a written reflection, stop the encounter, decline to share written reflections, leave the system’s first interpretation unchanged, revise it, or begin again.
No explanation is required for leaving.
Participation does not authorize every later use of participant material.
Risks
The Map works close to questions of safety, desire, power, love, expression, perception, and meaning. A participant may encounter discomfort, disagreement, frustration, unexpected recognition, or a sentence that feels more exposing after it has been written.
Digital transmission also carries privacy risk.
The design addresses those risks through affirmative consent, separate permission for written reflections, separation of mailing-list information from research data, participant record numbers, defined retention, and explicit limits on what public findings may identify.
Absolute confidentiality cannot be promised by a digital system.
Benefits
No personal benefit is guaranteed. Someone may find the experience clarifying, irritating, pleasurable, inaccurate, useful, strange, or forgettable.
The research value lies in what the encounter can establish about the apparatus: how people move through it, where system judgment and participant judgment converge or separate, which conditions produce revision, and which design assumptions fail under use.
Retention
Research records will ordinarily remain for three years after the cohort closes, through 31 October 2030.
Contact information used for mailing-list communication is handled separately from the research record.
After the retention period, identifiable research records will be securely deleted or de-identified. De-identified data and completed findings may remain available for later analysis, documentation, comparison, or publication.
Withdrawal
Participation can stop at any point, and further collection stops when participation stops.
Material that remains identifiable or linkable may be removable while the research record can still locate it. A participant’s record number provides the handle for that request, and a request can be sent to the contact address above.
Once information has been irreversibly de-identified, combined into aggregate analysis, or incorporated into completed public findings, individual removal may no longer be possible.
What this study can support
The Chakra Map can document what happens inside this particular apparatus: interaction patterns within the study, the system’s interpretations, participant corrections, contradictions between design assumptions and use, and questions for later versions or studies.
Its current evidence does not establish the seven chakras as biomedical structures, establish its archetypes as objective descriptions of participants, demonstrate clinical benefit, or support population-level causal claims beyond the conditions and participants studied.
A null result still belongs in the record.