Anahata - Love
Click on the picture above to go to the 5th Chakra
The Heart Chakra is associated with the color green. This love center of our human energy system is often the focus in bringing about a healing. Thus, the words "Love Heals All" have great truth. Hurtful situations that can effect our emotional being are divorce or separation, grief through death, emotional abuse, abandonment, adultery. All of these are wounding to the heart chakra. Physical illnesses brought about by heartbreak require that an emotional healing occur along with the physical healing. Learning to love yourself is a powerful first step in securing a healthy fourth chakra. The "wounded child" resides in the heart chakra.
Chakra Four - Associations
Mental States
Chakra Four - Associations
- Color - green
- Sanskrit Name - anahata
- Physical Location - center of chest
- Purposes - emotional empowerment
- Spiritual Lesson - forgiveness, unconditional love, letting go, trust, compassion
- Physical Disfunctions- heart conditions, asthma, lung & breast cancers, thoracic spine, pneumonia, upper back, shoulder problems
- Mental and Emotional Issues - love, compassion, confidence, inspiration, hope, despair, hate, envy, fear, jealousy, anger, generosity
- Information Stored Inside Heart Chakra - connections or "heart strings" to those whom we love
- Area of Body Governed - heart, circulatory system, blood, lungs, rib cage, diaphragm, thymus, breasts, esophagus, shoulders, arms, hands
Mental States
- Negative- Emotionally unstable, self-indulgent and sentimental, jealous and lustful, procrastinating and indecisive
- Positive- Compassionate, open and cooperative, gives unconditional love leading to contentment, harmony, balance and grace
Meditation to help balance the Heart Chakra (Love)
Take another slightly deeper inhalation and draw your attention up to the center of your chest. Take in more. As you exhale, settle your awareness on this heart center, and imagine it feeling stronger, while at the same time reopening all previous levels in succession.
The fourth chakra rules the heart, lungs, thymus, and adrenals. The native element is air, and the feelings are light and expansive. The color is emerald green, natures own color of life, nourishment, and healing.
The transition from third to fourth chakra is a major evolutionary step, and one that differentiates you from most of the animals. Here, you have the potential for looking beyond your personal ego and melodrama, achieving some sense of balance between yourself and the world.
This is the center of the higher faculties: love, compassion, empathy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice. Here we become conscious participants in our own evolution. The heart is the center of the true calling of all human souls: pure unconditional love.
In your heart, you integrate body, mind and emotions. The outer and inner lives are in dynamic equilibrium. You work more patiently with the duality of things. You discover that mutual cooperation is better than fighting. Your boundaries begin to get softer, and you love it.
The symbol is the six-pointed star, the confluence of the downward and upward power triangles. Fully human, you are halfway between earth and heaven. In the heart chakra, you have the opportunity to choose, to live and work for more than mere individual survival. You discover some principles worth living for.
You can open your heart to others. This begins with taking pleasure in the happiness of loved ones, and evolves, through community service, and ecological awareness, to the direct experience of the larger bodies of beings in which we participate, including the Earth Herself. For the Earth is the heart center of the Solar System.
At the heart, your main motivators are love, compassion, harmony, peace, and cooperation. There is a sense of the interconnectedness of all beings, and a deep, somewhat saddened perception of the prevalence of unnecessary suffering in the world. With an open heart, you learn the higher qualities of goodwill, altruism, devotion, and sacrifice. Now group success is at least as important as personal success.
Fourth chakra energy makes you a natural gardener, good cook, skillful parent and a compassionate mate. You are capable of feeling religious. With love, you can teach and even heal others. You feel life's full complement of human emotions - from grief to joy - and somehow contain it all in a humane and workable way.
If the belly is the center of control, the Heart is the center of the loss-of-control: laughter, the emotional equivalent of orgasm. Both laughter and orgasm are kinds of ego-death. When we let loose with uncontrollable laughter the rigid personality loses hold, the protection mechanism is reset to zero, and excess tension is dissipated. When you laugh, you unblock the emotional center, and fill the heart. (Spiritually, the best thing to laugh about is yourself.)
Now breathe in a relaxed manner, through your heart center, and imagine your beloved appearing before you. Just feel the love coming in and out of your heart with each breath. You can picture it as colored light beams, or symbolic images, like streams of little cartoon valentines. Feel your most gentle nature emerge, as when a mother nurses her infant. Breathe in soothing love (remind yourself that you deserve to receive some of the beneficial loving vibrations in the world) and give it away every time you exhale. See your loved one sitting before you receiving all this most excellent, healing love energy. Wrap your beloved in a blanket of your love.
Now allow your envelope of love to grow to include all the people you know, and all the people you don't know, until your expanding love covers the world, and you feel boundless compassion for all sentient beings in your heart.
Let each exhalation begin by relaxing you physically, and end by opening you spiritually, like a flower unfolding its petals. Know yourself as a kind, generous, loving human being, worthy of giving and receiving the unconditional love that renews your soul. Pray for the welfare of us all.
The fourth chakra rules the heart, lungs, thymus, and adrenals. The native element is air, and the feelings are light and expansive. The color is emerald green, natures own color of life, nourishment, and healing.
The transition from third to fourth chakra is a major evolutionary step, and one that differentiates you from most of the animals. Here, you have the potential for looking beyond your personal ego and melodrama, achieving some sense of balance between yourself and the world.
This is the center of the higher faculties: love, compassion, empathy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice. Here we become conscious participants in our own evolution. The heart is the center of the true calling of all human souls: pure unconditional love.
In your heart, you integrate body, mind and emotions. The outer and inner lives are in dynamic equilibrium. You work more patiently with the duality of things. You discover that mutual cooperation is better than fighting. Your boundaries begin to get softer, and you love it.
The symbol is the six-pointed star, the confluence of the downward and upward power triangles. Fully human, you are halfway between earth and heaven. In the heart chakra, you have the opportunity to choose, to live and work for more than mere individual survival. You discover some principles worth living for.
You can open your heart to others. This begins with taking pleasure in the happiness of loved ones, and evolves, through community service, and ecological awareness, to the direct experience of the larger bodies of beings in which we participate, including the Earth Herself. For the Earth is the heart center of the Solar System.
At the heart, your main motivators are love, compassion, harmony, peace, and cooperation. There is a sense of the interconnectedness of all beings, and a deep, somewhat saddened perception of the prevalence of unnecessary suffering in the world. With an open heart, you learn the higher qualities of goodwill, altruism, devotion, and sacrifice. Now group success is at least as important as personal success.
Fourth chakra energy makes you a natural gardener, good cook, skillful parent and a compassionate mate. You are capable of feeling religious. With love, you can teach and even heal others. You feel life's full complement of human emotions - from grief to joy - and somehow contain it all in a humane and workable way.
If the belly is the center of control, the Heart is the center of the loss-of-control: laughter, the emotional equivalent of orgasm. Both laughter and orgasm are kinds of ego-death. When we let loose with uncontrollable laughter the rigid personality loses hold, the protection mechanism is reset to zero, and excess tension is dissipated. When you laugh, you unblock the emotional center, and fill the heart. (Spiritually, the best thing to laugh about is yourself.)
Now breathe in a relaxed manner, through your heart center, and imagine your beloved appearing before you. Just feel the love coming in and out of your heart with each breath. You can picture it as colored light beams, or symbolic images, like streams of little cartoon valentines. Feel your most gentle nature emerge, as when a mother nurses her infant. Breathe in soothing love (remind yourself that you deserve to receive some of the beneficial loving vibrations in the world) and give it away every time you exhale. See your loved one sitting before you receiving all this most excellent, healing love energy. Wrap your beloved in a blanket of your love.
Now allow your envelope of love to grow to include all the people you know, and all the people you don't know, until your expanding love covers the world, and you feel boundless compassion for all sentient beings in your heart.
Let each exhalation begin by relaxing you physically, and end by opening you spiritually, like a flower unfolding its petals. Know yourself as a kind, generous, loving human being, worthy of giving and receiving the unconditional love that renews your soul. Pray for the welfare of us all.