The Chakra System Part 4: The Heart Chakra

Happy Monday to you all. I hope your weekend was AWESOME!

Ours was a busy one as all of us are getting used to a new normal with the arrival of Zoe Pravana Grace Chek a couple of weeks ago. Pravana means “a beautiful bouquet of colors that contains everything.”

Again, I can’t stress enough that if you’ve just found my Chakra series, it’s important to start at the beginning with part 1 with the Root Chakra that covers some of the basic foundation that I don’t have time to explain here.

For those of you who have been following my blog/vlog series from the start, I hope you’ve been doing your homework, so all of this isn’t just a bunch of talk, talk, talk on my end and no action on yours!

The Heart Chakra

This week, I’ll be talking about the Heart Chakra, the fourth Chakra located in the center of your chest (your physical heart is located slightly to the left of center).

The theme of the Heart Chakra is giving and receiving love. The time in our lives when we’re learning how to do this is during the seven-year cycle between ages 21-28.

By this time in your life, you may still be in college or starting your first major job, finding it harder to make time for yourself and often facing challenges with giving and receiving love.

Just to be clear, it’s not that we aren’t experiencing challenges in giving and receiving love at lower levels of the Chakra system. During the 21-28 age cycle, however, you’re becoming more acutely aware of the challenges of love.

Remember, the first three Chakras — the Root, Sacral and Solar Plexus Chakras — are all about the I orientation… What do I want? Am I safe? What do I want or need sexually?

With the Heart Chakra, our orientation switches to we. This is when we start looking for a person who could become a life partner and learning how to be a self-sufficient adult.

Heart Chakra stressors

When it comes to what areas of the body respond to stress in the Heart Chakra system, apart from the heart, it’s the thymus, an immune gland situated right behind the sternum, the lungs, arms (particularly the armpit and along the inner aspect of the arm) and even the whole arm, chest and upper back region.

If that sounds too broad, think of heart attacks. Typically, people experience them on their left side due to visceral somatic reflexes (how the heart as an organ communicates through the musculoskeletal system). These stressors are part of the discussions we have in CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coaching (HLC) Level 3.

The most common challenge connected with the Heart Chakra is giving and receiving love. Whenever we’re challenged to give or receive love effectively, this will have an effect on how the energy flows through the Heart Chakra.

To make the concept of love easier to grasp, here’s a definition I developed with my students in mind: Love is the flow of energy and information through empathic and compassionate connection to self and others.

These others could be people, places or things. It could be your pet, your house, your car or a favorite vacation destination.

Whenever you experience the feeling of love, energy is definitely there. Think about when you kiss your lover, how much energy can flow through those tongues… it can light you up, right?

Wherever we have energy, some form of information accompanies it. If we put our hand above a flame, it’s hot and we pull our hand back. When someone asks you what happened, you’d say it’s hot.

Information is based on the concept of recognizable patterns. So when you see the word, LOVE, those are four symbols organized in such a way that the pattern has meaning and it’s pointing to how energy is perceived.

Going back to my definition, it’s the flow of energy and information through empathic (to feel) and compassionate means (to understand the connection to the self or other).

This seven-year span between ages 21-28 is a critical time as a therapist examining the health challenges my clients face. For example, when someone comes to me with a cancer challenge, I’ll ask if he/she may have endured a divorce or another deeply emotional challenge during that time.

Even if I didn’t know what someone’s relationships were like, if she/he came to me with immune or autoimmune problems or anything that suggests that it’s related to this region of the body, I may start asking questions.

Going forward…

From this point, I talk more about the other cycles during this formative time in your life. Learning how to teach others to love, teaching others safety and security and cultivating more life force energy are important responsibilities we need to embrace.

But it all starts with developing a compassionate connection with your Self. Once you’ve done this to the best of your ability — not unlike feeling good after scoring 98 percent on a test, and not ruminating over that missed 2 percent — you know you’re on the right path.

Learning how to love your Self is one of the hardest things an adult can do. You can fake it, but for only a little while before it gets you into trouble.

If you need more guidance with giving and receiving love and the Heart Chakra, I highly recommend Everything is Here to Help You and Whatever Arises, Love That by Matt Kahn, one of my favorite authors and teachers.

You can also learn how to balance your Heart Chakra energies and love your self by moving, eating and breathing better with help from my book, How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!, now in its second edition.

Love and chi,

Paul