The heart chakra is found at the level of your heart. Focus on the area and imagine funnel shapes moving out from your spine both forwards and backwards, this is our heart chakra. Chanting Yam, the sound vibration will help us to locate our heart chakra. The funnels’ necks point to the spine and their wider openings outwards. Our soul enters through our heart chakra, and engages our life. This chakra is expansive and capable of tremendous love: a love that is larger than the personal self. When the lower three chakras are well functioning it becomes the center of love, compassion and community. It radiates affiliation, kindness and generosity as well. Being attentive to it and letting go of your shoulds, have-to’s and ought-to’s can be a pathway to balance.
A skillful heart chakra has the ability to collaborate and communicate with others. The heart chakra’s element is air. Its color is green. It bridges the lower chakras, which emphasize physicality, to the upper chakras, which emphasize spirituality. A balanced heart chakra offers a love that is bigger than the personal self, it is our souls expression.
Through the heart chakra, we connect to humanity. When our lower chakras are not balanced, we can cause the heart to carry issues belonging to other chakras, for example: survival (first chakra), boundaries (second chakra), power (third chakra). We may mistake lust for love. We may hurt ourselves and or others by embodying the savior complex. We may, in the repression of our feelings, project a calm or peace that is not authentic, and this allows anger and resentment to fester. Although the heart chakra includes personal relationships, it is more. When we are acting from the heart chakra, we’re able to let go of our ego. A balanced heart chakra allows us to collaborate, to recognize that the desires of others and our own may not be the same.
The heart says, I see you. Often, we unconsciously close down our heart at the first sign of pain, whether our own or another’s. The heart can be fierce like a mother’s love. It can say no for the good of the child or another person. It can hold steady while watching another go off into the world using their free will, allowing them to find their way and make their own mistakes. An open and flowing heart chakra will work best with good boundaries. We can observe pain without rushing in to remedy. Often our inclination to fix invalidates the other. It says, you are broken, I will fix you. You need me to help you. Standing in your own position with your own heart open, listening and witnessing, can model resources for another. It says, I see your pain, but I know you are more than your pain, you are still whole, we all know suffering.
The heart is a place from which women nurture others. Women want to be attentive to the impulses to over nurture, the tendency to go into responsibility, to see someones potential rather than where they are. Those are all variations of rescue. An open expansive heart says, I love you and I cherish you as you are. It does not close down in fear at the sight of pain. It does not require the other to need you. An open heart chakra gives love freely, without strings, and without expectation.
A balanced and open heart chakra sees the humanity in others. It appreciates that we all experience suffering in one form or another. It can love through heartache and pain without taking from another. As we give room to our pain, we find compassion, our heart opens to the precious imperfect humanity that we are. As we open to our own pain we become more accepting of the foibles of others, we become more generous and forgiving. Likewise, when we accept those things in another we accept our own shortcomings.
It is important to tend to our lower three chakras, so that our heart chakra does not have to do all the work. Just as when one of our body organs is out of sorts, the heart works extra hard. If our lower chakras are not flowing and balanced, we may run energies through the heart that could be better served by our lower chakras. An unbalanced heart chakra can cause us to be overly concerned with how others perceive us. We may want to be seen as kind, compassionate and generous. However, when our heart is incongruent with these, anger and resentment tend to grow. When we confuse the heart chakra with the second chakra, where we experience enmeshment and sexual energies, our love may become tainted with jealousy. We may develop a tit for tat relationship to exchange, closing down the heart chakra.
As we balance our lower three chakras, we are able to open our heart more easily. We can feel more expansive and great love for our humanity, we become more skillful with our heart energies. As we become more aware of each other!s unique suffering, our hearts soften to our ourselves and to others.
Learn more by signing up for Sara Remke’s Chakras and Auras class – meeting Tuesdays January 30 through March 12, 2024 from 6-7pm CST.
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