The Heart Chakra: An Emotional Turning Point

The 4th or Anahata Chakra is the halfway point of our journey inward and upward through the chakras to Self-realization. It is the primary pivotal point in this system (three chakras below it and three chakras above it). And it is the place where your life-force or prana can most easily be diverted outward into likes, dislikes, and harmful emotional attachments. Conversely, it is here that energy can be moved joyfully inward, into devotion, unconditional love, and compassion. Here, too, you can learn to transmute all emotion into devotion. Its element is air, symbolizing lightness of spirit and a sense of lifting away from the solidity of the material world, eventually to soar in complete inner freedom.

Visualization/Meditation Exercise:

Experience you heart chakra by sitting up very straight and positioning your hands with the palms upward, at the juncture of the thighs and abdomen. Draw your shoulders-blades together tightly in back, sitting with a physically exaggerated openness of your chest and heart areas. Take a few very deep breaths, and then relax. Mentally chant AUM, AUM, AUM in the center of your chest, the visualize cutting away all your “heartstrings” of attachment. Now feel the loving joy of your heart chakra’s energy, as it flies upward to the spiritual eye.

A Short, True Story:

Have you ever felt your “…heart turn to stone?” This happened to me once, when I felt I had been greatly mistreated by some folks and needed to shut them out of my life completely and forever. Then I remembered the story told by Corrie Ten Boom. She had witnessed her saintly sister brutalized and killed in a Nazi concentration camp. Many years later, she personally met one of the guards directly responsible for her sister’s death. She felt it was impossible to love this person, even though she had just been speaking to her audience about loving and forgiving everyone. But she prayed a loving, heart-felt prayer: “Lord, I can’t love or forgive this person! Nevertheless, I know You can do it through me.” Immediately, her heart melted and she was able to offer words of love and comfort to this sad ex-soldier, who had just asked her, face-to face: “Can God forgive even someone like me?” It is not our own love of the heart, which will change us—rather it is Divine Love flowing through our hearts.

Chakra Attitudes/Daily Life Application:

Negative emotions such as anger, rage, hatred, grief, fear, and jealousy can grow easily in the heart chakra and are crippling to sincere spiritual seekers. Realize that these attitudes are caused by attachment, that is, by wanting things to be different from the way they are. Negative emotions can be changed best, not by suppression or expression, but my transmutation. First accept all things as they are, then pray for the ability to change yourself as needed to meet all life’s tests with inner freedom, rather than suffering through the bondage of a heart tied down by negative emotions. Let divine, unconditional love flower in your heart. If you are finding it hard to love someone who is treating you or others badly, remember that you have friends in high places to help you. Let God and Gurus lovingly flow through you. And remember that “…the channel is always blessed by what flows through it.”

Action Item:

Today, pray this prayer: “Help me to love someone who needs love (who doesn’t?), but is not so loveable? Divine Mother, open my heart and flow through me to this person in waves of unconditional love.” Watch carefully. You might be very surprised at what happens to your own heart!

Finally:

A great saint once said: “If you knew how much God loves you, you would die for joy!” What a thrilling thought! You are loved perfectly, amazingly, and eternally. Give that love back to God through devotion and give out that love to all, without attachment—then your joyful, loving heart will soar in freedom, more than you could ever have imagined!

Next in the Chakra Series:

The Fifth Chakra: A Place of Calmness, Silence, and Expansion of Consciousness

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