Location of the Heart Chakra: Center of the chest
Core Issue: Grief
Age of Development: 4 – 7 years
Developmental Tasks: Developing relationships with family and peers, development of persona
Function: Love, compassion, empathy, tolerance, openness
The purpose of the Heart Chakra is to nurture our capacity for love and compassion. This chakra begins to form between ages four and seven as we build deeper connections with others. When it’s balanced, it helps us give and receive love freely.
Heart Chakra: Foundation of Life
The heart chakra represents our right to love and be loved.
Connection to the Physical Body
The heart chakra is linked to the heart and circulatory system, ribs, breasts, thymus gland, lungs, shoulders, arms, hands, and diaphragm.
Connection to the Emotional/Mental Body
The heart chakra represents our ability to perceive emotions and create emotional balance within ourselves so we can act with empathy and compassion.
Connection to the Spiritual Body
The energy of the heart chakra resonates with the ability to love oneself and others.
When the heart chakra’s energy is out of balance, it can develop either an excessive or deficient coping strategy for survival.
Excessive Heart Chakra
Too much energy stays in the body, making it overactive, dense, and stagnant. Signs of excess imbalance include:
Deficient Heart Chakra
Too much energy leaves the body, leaving it passive, empty, and feeling useless. Signs of deficient imbalance include:
Balanced Heart Chakra
A balanced heart chakra means:
The heart chakra can face several complications affecting love, self-love, relationships, intimacy, and devotion.
Possible Causes of Complications
Complications can arise from experiences like rejection, abandonment, loss, shaming, constant criticism, abuses to other chakras, unacknowledged grief, divorce, death of a loved one, being in a loveless environment, experiencing conditional love, sexual/emotional/physical abuse, and betrayal.
Physical Manifestations of Imbalance
When the heart chakra is imbalanced, it can show up in physical issues such as:
Therapeutic Color: Green Associated Element: Air
Every trauma held in the body affects your whole system–physically, mentally, and emotionally. For example, breaking a leg not only impacts you physically but also influences your thoughts and emotions. When trauma happens it can create a gap between your mind and body and cause issues with how your system communicates with itself, keeping you from healing. When healing, it’s crucial to address trauma comprehensively and work towards reestablishing a connection between what you are thinking and what you are feeling in your body and allow it to be expressed emotionally.
The following suggestions can help to balance the energy of the heart chakra. It is important to note, that healing requires careful attention and patience, especially when dealing with long-held traumas. It may be uncomfortable as you confront past experiences, but this is a natural part of the healing process.
For the best results, combine several methods that you find enjoyable and practice them regularly. Healing takes time and persistence, so be patient with yourself throughout the journey.
1. Practice deep breathing
Practicing deep breathing is great for all chakras, but it’s especially helpful for the heart chakra because it’s connected to the lungs. Deep breathing exercises help your lungs work better and reduce stress on your heart and other organs. You can try specific breathing exercises like box breathing or alternate nostril breathing, or just focus on taking deeper, longer breaths throughout the day. This can lead to lower stress levels, better digestion, improved immune response, and better sleep, among other benefits. Since every system in your body needs oxygen to function well, better breathing means every system will benefit.
2. Yoga poses
Yoga focused on opening the chest can help to balance the energy of the heart chakra. Some helpful poses include camel pose, cat/cow, cobra, and locust pose.
3. Spend time outdoors in nature
Spending time outdoors in fresh air has many health benefits. When you stay indoors or in air conditioning a lot, you end up breathing the same stale air. Being outside around plants and trees is great for the heart chakra because they make the air cleaner and easier to breathe. Fresh air helps reduce airborne illnesses and infections, which thrive in warm and humid indoor environments. It’s also easier to practice deep breathing from the diaphragm while being active outside, compared to sitting indoors, which usually leads to shallow breathing.
4. Focus on loving yourself
The energy of the heart chakra is linked to your ability to love, including self-love. Self-love is crucial for a balanced life and for having healthy relationships; you can’t expect someone to love you if you don’t love yourself first.
Showing yourself love can be anything from buying yourself a gift to taking time to relax in a bath. Do things that let you enjoy yourself. If you’re not sure how to show self-love, think about how you show love to others and try doing those things for yourself.
5. Work on making an effort to show love to others
When the heart chakra is unbalanced, you might struggle with feeling loved and showing love. It can be hard to want to show love to others when you feel unloved, but giving love is just as important as receiving it for a balanced heart. You can’t just wait for people to love you first; sometimes, you have to take the first step to find healing in your own life. It doesn’t require expensive gifts, instead, it takes empathy and compassion. The best way to show love is by making a focused effort to listen to and support the people around you.
6. Journal
Journaling is a great way to explore your inner thoughts and express your feelings in a safe space. It helps you understand how you treat yourself and others. Journaling can also help you see what you can control and what you can’t. Through self-exploration in your journal, you can practice positive self-talk and identify any negative thoughts and behaviors about love.
7. Practice empathy
One of the main functions of the heart chakra is empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others by putting yourself in their shoes. When your heart chakra is imbalanced, it can be hard to practice empathy and easy to get frustrated with people.
If you struggle with empathy, try asking yourself “what if?” the next time you feel frustrated with someone. For example, if someone is rude to you, ask yourself, “What if they just lost a loved one?” or if you’re having a hard time with someone, ask, “What if they’ve experienced trauma that I don’t know about?” We can never fully know what someone else is going through and how it affects them. Practicing empathy in this way can help balance your heart chakra and make you a more compassionate, loving person.
8. Examine relationship expectations
When the heart chakra is imbalanced, it can lead to unrealistic expectations in your relationships. This might mean you expect too much or too little from others. You deserve kindness, love, affection, and respect in all your relationships, just like the people you’re in relationships with do. By examining what you expect from your relationships, you can understand how you’re letting people treat you and how you’re treating others.
9. Work on setting relationship boundaries
When the heart chakra is imbalanced, it can make it hard to set and enforce healthy relationship boundaries. Your boundaries might become too loose, letting people take advantage of you as you try to keep them close and feel loved. Or they might become too rigid, keeping people at a distance because you’re afraid of rejection. A boundary is an important space between you and another person that shows where you end and they begin. Healthy boundaries let you prioritize yourself and take care of your needs so you don’t lose yourself in another person.
Being able to set and enforce boundaries is crucial for a healthy and balanced heart chakra. Without healthy boundaries, your relationships can suffer. The key to creating boundaries is figuring out what you want and need from each relationship, setting boundaries based on those desires, and then being open and clear with yourself and others about those boundaries. Remember, healthy boundaries aren’t static; they can be flexible when needed.
Affirmations are powerful tools for changing how you think about yourself. They help replace negative self-talk with positive statements that support healing.
Aromatherapy uses certain scents to create a focused connection with different parts of the body through the sense of smell.
Some scents that work great for the heart chakra include Jasmine, Pine, Rose, and Tarragon.
Color therapy uses the different wavelengths of light found in color to establish a connection to specific areas of the body.
The color green vibrates at the same range of frequency as the heart chakra. Because of this wearing the color green or bringing it into your surroundings can help balance the energy of the heart chakra.
Food is the most powerful medicine. It can affect different parts of the body in specific ways.
Some foods that are great for the heart charka include foods that are green in color (e.g., broccoli, celery, cucumbers, peas, zucchini, avocado, green apples, kiwi, lime), especially leafy greens (e.g., chard, kale, spinach). Green tea and matcha are also great for heart chakra health.
Music therapy can be beneficial for a wide range of physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs. It can help with emotional processing and expression, reduce stress, alleviate anxiety and depression, promote relaxation, manage pain, and support overall well-being.
Music therapy can be used in various ways. You can try listening to specific songs work through feelings like anger or to transition to a different emotional state, such as happiness. You can also try using music that promotes relaxation/reduces stress levels or music that will increase your energy level depending on your desired outcome. Including dancing and/or singing can also help you feel better both inside and out.
It's important to pick music you like and that helps you feel how you want to feel in the moment.
The heart chakra is positively influenced by music that features soothing melodies and gentle rhythms and frequencies. Songs that convey themes of love, compassion, and harmony are also beneficial, as well as those that encourage the emotional expression of grief.
Some suggested songs include:
Popular Song Suggestions:
Making sounds creates vibrations in your body, which helps reconnect your mind and body. Different sounds create vibrations that can target specific areas.
To focus on the heart chakra, try vocalizing the vowel a (as in father), or the mantra Yam. Focus on how the vibrations feel in your chest.
Sources: A Handbook of Chakra Healing Spiritual Practice for Health, Harmony, and Inner Peace, Govinda, Kalashatra; Anatomy of the Spirit the Seven Stages of Power and Healing, Myss, Caroline; Eastern Body Western Mind Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self, Judith, Anodea
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