4th Chakra

​Published 8/29/19:

The Heart Chakra

Given the increasing prominence of heart chakra work, particularly in group sessions of late, I’d like to share a bit about its nature:

• Its name is Anahata, its element is air, and its color is green.
• Its associated organs are the heart and lungs, and its emotional predilection is grief.
• Sitting as it does in the center of the seven main chakras, it plays a balancing role between matter and spirit, lower and higher, and inner and outer.
• Its main theme, as one might expect, is universal love, which surrounds us as thoroughly as air and is just as vitally essential to life.
• When the heart chakra is open and balanced, we’re compassionate, generous, accepting, and forgiving towards self and others, with peace, joy, authenticity, trust, vulnerability, healthy boundaries, and good relationships.
• Like any of the chakras, it can become either overactive or underactive, leading to issues such as clinging, pleasing, jealousy, and dependency, or isolation, loneliness, criticism, and intolerance, respectively.
• At any given moment we can choose to open to our love just as we can choose to open to our breath.

Exercises to open the heart chakra:

• If it’s comfortable, lace your fingers behind your back, allow your head to drop back, your chest to expand, and your heart light to shine.
• Observe your breathing and notice where it’s restricted. Repeat frequently and notice this tendency lessen with awareness over time.
• Wear green!
• Practice random acts of kindness with no expectation of return. Conversely, give to others by allowing them to give to you.
• Make gratitude a regular practice.

Some believe that humanity is evolving from a third chakra, willpower-based stage into a heart chakra-based stage. May we all grow in compassion, balance, acceptance, forgiveness, and selfless generosity, and may we allow both our love and our breath to flow freely.
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Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. —Rumi

​Reference: "Chakras Made Easy" by Anodea Judith
2nd picture credit: deviantart.com