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:
Exercises to open the heart chakra:
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.
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
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.
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