The Fourth Chakra
Welcome to your heart center, the locus of connection between consciousness and embodiment or liberation and manifestation.
The fourth chakra’s Sanskrit name is Anahata (ahn-AH-hah-tah), meaning "unstruck sound." Its element is air, its color is emerald green, and its developmental stage is age 3.5 to 7. Its associated organs are the heart and lungs, and its associated gland is the thymus. Sitting as it does in the center of the seven main chakras, it functions to unite matter and spirit, lower and higher, and inner and outer. As one might expect, its main theme is universal love, which surrounds us as thoroughly as air and is as vitally essential to life, and its shadow side is grief. At any given moment, I propose that we can choose to open to our love just as we can choose to align ourselves with our breath.
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. An overactive heart chakra can lead to issues such as clinging, pleasing, jealousy, or narcissism, and an underactive to dependency, isolation, loneliness, criticism, or intolerance.
A few exercises to open and activate the heart chakra might include:
"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
Picture credit: deviantart.com
Welcome to your heart center, the locus of connection between consciousness and embodiment or liberation and manifestation.
The fourth chakra’s Sanskrit name is Anahata (ahn-AH-hah-tah), meaning "unstruck sound." Its element is air, its color is emerald green, and its developmental stage is age 3.5 to 7. Its associated organs are the heart and lungs, and its associated gland is the thymus. Sitting as it does in the center of the seven main chakras, it functions to unite matter and spirit, lower and higher, and inner and outer. As one might expect, its main theme is universal love, which surrounds us as thoroughly as air and is as vitally essential to life, and its shadow side is grief. At any given moment, I propose that we can choose to open to our love just as we can choose to align ourselves with our breath.
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. An overactive heart chakra can lead to issues such as clinging, pleasing, jealousy, or narcissism, and an underactive to dependency, isolation, loneliness, criticism, or intolerance.
A few exercises to open and activate the heart chakra might include:
- 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 the increased awareness.
- Practice random acts of kindness with no expectation of return. Conversely, give to others by allowing them to give to you.
- Make gratitue a regular practice.
- Chant “Yam.”
"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
Picture credit: deviantart.com
