Fourth Chakra

[Guest guest]

Day Four - Fourth Chakra

 

~ HEART DAY ~

 

" Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world

seek each other so that the world may come into being. "

Pierrre Teilhard De Chardin

 

Element:::Air

 

Name:::Anahata (unstruck)

 

Purposes:::Love and Balance

 

Issues:::

 

Love, Balance, Self-love, Relationship, Intimacy,

Anima/Animus, Devotion, Reaching out and taking in

 

Goals:::

 

Balance, compassion, self-acceptance,

good relationships

 

 

Color:::Green

 

Location:::Chest, heart, cardiac plexus

 

Orientation:::Self-acceptance, acceptance of others

 

Archetype:::Healer

 

Basic Rights:::

To Love and Be Loved

 

In a family this can be damaged by any dysfunction in

the parents' ability to love and care for their child.

Culturally, the damage appears in judgmental attitudes

toward men loving men and women loving women. The

right to love is further damaged by racial strife, cultural

prejudice, war, or anything that forces enmity between

groups as well as by poor self-esteem, broken will, and

inability to feel or communicate. As the central chakra

in a system of seven, the right to love is harmed when

any of the other rights are lost or damaged.

 

Affirmations:::

 

" I am worthy of love. "

" I am loving to myself and others. "

" There is an infinite supply of love. "

" I live in balance with others. "

 

Identity:::

 

In the fourth chakra, we create a social identity, also

known as the persona. The persona is the personality

created to interact with others—it is the part of ourselves

that the ego allows to rise above the surface, separated

off from the shadow. Our social identity may be the

compulsive helper, the seductive lover, the pleaser, or

the entertainer. In our families we may take on the role

of the lost child, the hero, the good girl, or the rebel.

Initially, our self-concept is based on how others react

to us—whether we are popular or an outcast, admired or

criticized, loved or rejected—identifying ourselves pri-

marily through our relationships. As we mature, the

identity shifts to include how we perceive our role of

service to others, or how we have learned to give and

embrace a world beyond our ego-oriented self. This

becomes our basis for self-acceptance.

 

The social identity has the ego as its base, yet contin-

ually expands beyond the realm or self-centered needs

to embrace an awareness of others. As I transcend my

ego identity to care more about others, my social iden-

tity emerges. Yet, how I present myself to others

depends a great deal on underlying ego strength.

 

Demon of Chakra Four:::

Grief

 

As the resident demon, grief sits on the heart chakra

like a stone. When our heart is heavy with grief, it's

hard to open, even hard to breathe. When grief is

denied, we become numb to our feelings and our alive-

ness. We become hard and cold, rigid and distant.

We may feel dead inside. When grief is acknowledged

and expressed, however, we find a vital key to opening

the heart. Tears are shed, truth expressed, and the

heart lightens. The breath deepens. There is a sense

of spaciousness that emerges, allowing more room in-

side for our spirit. Hope is reborn. Coming to terms

with our own grief leads us toward compassion for

others.

 

When we fall in love, we strip ourselves of defenses.

We open to another and to the world. We expand

and grow. When we are hurt in matters of love, we are

hurt in our most vulnerable, trusting aspects. The

purest form of self is wounded. It no longer seems safe

to be authentic. Our system—wounded at the very core

--shuts down and we lose not only our lover but ourselves

as well. This is the deepest loss.

 

If we consider that love may indeed be the most import-

ant element of well-being and spiritual growth, then any

impairment in our ability to find love is a profound wound.

When we further consider that this impairment affects

how we treat each other in the larger social sphere, we

have not only a personal problem, but a serious col-

lective situation as well. Where grief is the wound,

compassion is the healer.

 

SHADES OF GREEN

 

We may be a culture obsessed by power, but we are

driven by the need for love. The basic right of the heart

chakra--to love and be loved--is simple, profound, direct.

Sadly, this chakra is easily damaged, diminished, or

wounded. These wounds have profound importance as

they wound both spirit and soul, affect both mind and

body, and impact the very core of the self.

 

Why is love so elusive when it is so simple? Literature

abounds with sagas of love and its loss, sagas we know

only too well from personal experience. Nothing is quite

so uplifting as the flowering of love, nothing so devastating

as its loss. A deeply archetypal experience, love is the

force that runs our lives. We cannot live without it, yet the

world is crying for lack of it.

 

All forms of child abuse are, in fact, travesties of love.

They are travesties because they are not a complete

absence of love, but an absence of healthy love. How

many children have been spanked and abused, se+ually

molested, punished severely, or smothered and over-

managed while being told, " This is because I love you

so much. " Travesties of love occur when the most

needed element of life is twisted and torn, withheld and

used as a means of control. Without knowing what

healthy love looks like, we have a hard time creating it

in our lives. We hang on to mere shreds of love,

sacrifice ourselves on its altar, run in fear when we find it.

 

Instead, we are turning toward the opposite of love:

warfare and violence. Television violence models behavior

for our children and gangs provide many of our youth with

their only sense of belonging. Adolescents in my practice

tell me that " cruel is cool, " and to be a man you have to

be mean. On any given day in America, 270,000 children

carry guns to school and guns are now surpassing

automobiles as the number one killer. Is this not a travesty

of love?

 

Currently, popular politics is moving toward cutting funds

for the downtrodden, and needy, the immigrants and child-

ren, while the defense budget remains a sacred cow,

seldom mentioned in the balanced budget debates.

(published 1996) It is alarming enough that our political

leaders embody this value system--more alarming still

to contemplate the number of people who must hold

similar values.

 

What kind of mythos is driving such values?

 

Myths are the cultural stories of our origins and our

purpose. Unconsciously, these stories influence and may

even rule our lives. They define what is possible, shape

who we are, and lead us to what can be. Myths are a

statement of the primal relationships that exist between

archetypal elements in the universe, and their counterparts

in our own psyches.

 

In the prevailing mythos, we are children of divorce. The

Great Mother, a fundamental archetype of the psyche, was

worshiped as a living deity for at least 25,000 years during

the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of human history. She

is archetypal ancestress to us all, her memory buried

deeply in the collective unconscious. She mirrors the

early childhood experience of our own mothers and

embodies the archetypal imprint of the mothering

source--nurturance, nourishment, containment, and

connection.

 

In the collective mind of Western civilization, she has long

been forgotten. Removed from our predominant mythology,

she is conspicuous in her absence. She is only beginning to

resurface through the growing Goddess movement, recent

archeological research, and the popularity of Jungian

archetypal psychology. She is the Mother we have lost

and are only just beginning to find again. She is the

archetypal feminine at the primal origin of our cultural

history.

 

In her absence, the Great Father has become the sole

protagonist in our dominant mythology. He is strong and

powerful, but distant and ethereal. He is without a wife or

daughter and is estranged from all that the feminine

archetype represents. His immediate son has been

crucified, ostensibly for the sins of the children. In the

divorce settlement, we are the bastard children who were

taken to live with the Father.In our new household,

Mother could not be discussed and became forgotten.

 

We have inherited the myth of a broken home. We are

the motherless children in our distant father's house,

trying to find wholeness in a world that is longing for the

magic and mystery of love. This is our story. These

are our parents. We are the children of an unacknow-

ledged marriage.

 

No wonder we have such a yearning for romantic love.

No wonder the myth of man-meets-woman-and-lives-

happily-ever-after pervades our collective fantasies,

rendering other forms of love unrecognizable. If we were

children of an intact and loving mythical home, a

partnership mythology, we might seek union from an

experience of cooperation, rather than through a

compulsive need to complete our diminished selves

through another.

 

Our predominant myth is one of separation. We see

ourselves as separate from Nature, separate from each

other, and separate from the divine. Separations are

created by race, class, gender, and age. Individuals are

endowed with the moral right, to do whatever is necessary

to further their own individual existence. The environment

and its inhabitants are destroyed while we further our

own individual needs. Wealth and class create more

separation, more privacy, and more individualism.

 

We have created vast separation and alienation between

men and women, and further separation between women

and women, and between men and men. Love, as the

all-pervasive glue of the universe, is culturally restricted

to the bonds of limited heterosexual dyads and their

often lonely offspring. The model is obviously flawed, for

our children are abused and our marriages repeat the

pattern of our mythical parents--with epidemic divorce.

 

Collectively, it seems we are falling out of love with the

world. We all know what deep pain we feel when we fall

out of love. It pierces the very core of our being, carves

a deep hole in the soul, and wounds and cripples the

living spirit.

 

In our disconnection, we can barely relate to all the

tragedies occurring in the world. Is it because the

very art of relating is becoming a lost art? Is this because

the time it takes to relate deeply, feel fully, and communi-

cate and understand is no longer valued as time well

spent? We are becoming alienated, hostile, defensive,

self-centered, and compulsively consuming. The result is

isolation, constriction, and limitation. The ground that

holds us becomes shaky, and the energy that evolves

us is restricted to traditional patterns that support the

myth of separation. In our isolation, we are lost from our

spiritual core, lost from the heart.

 

To cross the Rainbow Bridge connecting Heaven and Earth

is to consciously reconnect severed parts of the world. It

is to anchor the myth of individualism in the necessary

grounding of self, while simultaneously expanding that

self into a conscious unity with the world around us--

socially, ecological, and mythically. To access the divine

and become as Gods, we need to recognize our own

divine nature as part of the greater mystery of unfolding.

To heal the heart is to reunite mind and body, the mystical

and mundane, self and other into an integrated whole.

 

This is our task in the heart chakra as it is the task for every

one of us that wants to heal this world and assure its future.

Without love, there is no binding force to hold our world

together. Without love, there is no integration but instead

dis-integration. Without love, our Rainbow Bridge collapses

in the middle and we fall into the chasm of separation below.

 

 

Finding the Balance in Love

 

The Mystery of Love

 

Riding on the golden flames of our power center, we

now arrive at the heart of the chakra system. Here,

in a band of green, lies the center of the Rainbow

Bridge, the midpoint of our journey. Like the green,

growing plants which push toward the heavens from

their roots in the earth, we too, reach outward in two

directions --anchoring the manifesting current deep in

our bodies and expanding the liberating current as we

reach beyond ourselves. In the heart chakra, these

currents come to perfect balance in the center of our

being. From that sacred center--the heart of the

system--we enter the mystery of love.

 

The basic issues that we encounter in the heart chakra

deal with balance, love, and relationship. Through

balance we find a center from which we can love,

through love we form relationships, and through

relationships we have the opportunity to awaken the

self-centered ego of the lower chakras into awareness

of the larger realm in which we are embedded.

 

BALANCE is the underlying foundation of longevity in

all things. Ancient tantric diagrams depict the heart

chakra as a lotus of twelve petals containing a

six-pointed star, made of two interlacing triangles.

This represents the downward movement of spirit into

matter and the upward liberation of matter into

spirit, meeting in perfect balance in the heart. More

than just a meeting, this is an interpenetration whose

final goal is integration of spirit and mind with body

and soul.

 

Since the heart chakra is the middle point in a system

of seven centers, balance is an essential principle at

this level of integration. This implies both internal

balance between various aspects of ourselves (mind an

body, persona and shadow, male and female), as well as

balance between ourselves and the world around us

(work and play, giving and receiving, socializing and

being alone). Finding this equilibrium supports the

basic issues of love and relationship, for without

balance within ourselves it is difficult, if not

impossible, to achieve healthy and long lasting love

relationships.

 

INTIMACY, as Thomas Moore so aptly points out in Soul

Mates, is about bringing forth deeply interior aspects

of the self. In order to have intimacy we first need

to have a sense of self. We need to be intimate with

our own interior, to know our needs, wishes, fears,

boundaries, and hopes. Through knowing the self

within, we can honor the self that lives within

another. We need to be able to love our own self

enough to offer it openly to someone else. Without

self-love, this cannot happen.

 

COMPASSION means to have passion with. In the

second chakra we encountered passion in the realm of

feelings, through the desires of the soul reaching

forward to meet its own needs. In the heart chakra,

we now reach beyond ourselves and expand that passion

to include an understanding of another's needs. The

ego, when secure in its own autonomy and power, can

now surrender willingly toward altruism. If our own

needs have been met and satisfied, we can now share

our fullness with another.

 

The ability to have compassion for others depends first

on our ability to be in touch with our yearnings and

pain. Expansion of spirit is one of the silver

linings of hardship. Pain opens us to deeper

understanding of others and expands our own limited

being. Only by experiencing our own trials and

tribulations can we share wisdom and understanding

from the tender level of feelings. Thus compassion is

an exquisite balance of upper and lower chakra

expression. Compassion remains centered, yet open,

and it quietly holds the space for change to occur,

providing both the stability of a container and the

freedom of release.

 

Love is the essence that heals. Patience, skill,

training, and talent all play their part, but without

love they are merely techniques. All wounds cry for

the universal medicine of love. As the cosmic glue of

the universe, love is the force that bridges the gaps

that cut us asunder. In the gap between Heaven and

Earth, love is the binding force that holds together

the many-colored steps of the Rainbow Bridge.

 

Unfortunately, due to the damage we have each received

in our lives, we are not always sure how to apply love

to the wounds within ourselves and others. We do not

know what real love looks like or how to create it.

 

FORGIVENESS is said to be the ultimate step in

healing. Forgiveness uses the compassion of the heart

to understand situations in terms of the forces that

were acting on both ourselves and others. We may

still vehemently disagree with the actions taken. We

may say, rightfully, that we would never have done

such a thing. We may even need something from the

other person in order to allow forgiveness--an

apology, some kind of restitution, or an

acknowledgment of harm. But in the end, forgiveness

allows the heart to lighten and move on; it is the

redemptive action of the heart.

 

Forgiveness softens the hardening of the heart and so

renews openness. It is not meant as a process which

allows the same thing to happen again, but it will

allow greater awareness to evolve in situations that

have gone awry. It allows us to unhook the energy

from the negative past and free it up for a more

positive future.

 

The heart chakra brings us to a place of acceptance

and openness that allows the spirit inside to be still

and find peace and stability without constriction. If

the third chakra below has done its work correctly, we

have created a place where the fourth chakra can now

let go and just be. The state of being as opposed to

doing is the qualitative difference between chakras

four and three.

 

Healing the heart involves attending to the most

vulnerable and sacred aspects within ourselves. Only

through attending to their truth can we drop the

protective armor that keeps us bound to the ego, bound

to smaller parts of ourselves. Manipulation,

derision, criticisms, or command will not work. We can

only melt the armor with the combination of feeling and

understanding that is love.

 

Through love we are able to expose our instinctual

core and evolve to the next step of expressing our

truth. Through love we are able to embrace and heal

the larger world around us. Relationship furthers the

evolution of individual souls and the collective soul

of our planet.

 

Eastern Body Western Mind by Anodea Judith