I am DEEPLY GRATEFUL WE WERE ON THE HEART CHAKRA WHEN ALL OF THE STUDIOS MOVED TO LIVE STREAM CLASSES! The Universe is GREAT!
I put those letters in green because emerald green is the emanating color for the heart chakra; Happy St. Patrick’s Day too(I’m a little Irish)!
The intention I hoped that everyone would take away, if anything, from the class on the heart came from this quote out of Anodea Judith’s book, “Eastern Body, Western Mind,” which reads,”To behold is not to fix, change, judge, or even want. It is simply to witness – to embrace with our awareness. In beholding the self, we witness a miraculous manifestation of divine energy living right inside us, with all its hopes and fears, joys and tears. This witnessing is “the heart of the heart.” It brings us to the sacred. It is the essential realization that must be present for any real healing to occur.
It has been said that an unexamined life is not worth living. To Enter the heart is to enter self-reflective consciousness, a place of self-examination. In that reflection, we not only define ourselves (as in the third chakra) but come into relationship with ourselves. Self-reflective consciousness is the process of beholding.” May we all behold ourselves and each other, always. May we simply behold ourselves thru this current time. May we embrace our self with simple awareness, and not judgement.
What might you imagine the sound that would be made when two people are simply beholding each other? Or, when one is beholding ones self? I imagine it is the sound of peace, and the sound of love. Anahata, the name of the heart chakra, means “unstruck”, and also, “sound that is made without any two things striking”. I imagine this sound as peace, understanding, beholding. and wonder. That way of not fixing, but embracing with awareness. So, when we are witnessing our self, or another, there is no enmity, there is being. There is watching/seeing/hearing without attacking.
The basic associations with the Heart Center are love, balance, and relationships. It’s about altruism and affinity, compassion and forgiveness. Its shadow side is grief.
The rights are to love and be loved. YOU have a right to love, and to be loved!
It’s sense that’s connected with the heart center is touch.
It is the heart, the cardiac plexus, the pericardium, the lungs, an arms and hands.
The bij, or seed, mantra is ‘yam’, pronounced “yum”, and the vowel sound is the long ‘a’, as in able. Remember, typically we use the bij mantra to pull Universal life force into a chakra, and the vowel sound to emanate its essence outwards. You could chant the vowel sounds of the chakras and shift the prana, life force, between chakras that have abundance of energy to those that are feeling lack of energy, and vice versa. You can send the essence of a chakra out to someone, or someplace as well. You can send it to your self.
Some of the affirmations are:
-“I am worthy of love.”-Anodea Judith
-“I am loving to myself and others.”-Anodea Judith
-“I live in balance with others.”-Anodea Judith
-“there is an infinite supply of love.”-Anodea Judith
-“I have an affinity for myself.”-Shawna Emerick
-“I listen to my heart, it speaks of Truth.”-Shawna Emerick
-“I trust my heart and it’s wisdom.”-Shawna Emerick
-“I accept all of life, without condition.”-Shawna Emerick
-“I love myself here and now, without condition.”-Shawna Emerick
The basic function of the Heart Center is love.
“Learning To Love takes energy on many levels. We need all of our chakras functioning in order to create and maintain it. We must be able to feel, we must be able to communicate, we must be able to have our own autonomy and power, and we need to be able to see and understand. Most important, we need to relax and let it happen. The heart chakra is Yin, and sometimes the most profound love is that which can simply let things be the way they are.”-Anodea Judith. I truly believe it is the courage from the heart that supports us in leading a life of unconditional acceptance for all of life. It is what can open us up to Grace and see the silver linings in moments of fear and doubt and uncertainty. It is also from this place within the heart that the way of acceptance without condition supports us in being more able to see what actions we can take, and to remind us that we still have power, in these moments when we feel as if our power is lost, because so many things are out of our control.
“As the third chakra involves mastering the energetic principles of holding on and letting go, the 4th chakra works with reaching out and taking in. … Attachment and freedom is the way we experience the universal forces in there holding on and letting go. … The more we allow one kind of energy, the more the other can come through. Once a commitment is made, it is easier to allow a partner their solitude or freedom. Once we know our freedom is respected, we can more easily make a commitment. Conversely, the more a partner insists on one aspect, the more his lover will yearn for its opposite. Dynamic balance is a dance between attachment and freedom.” – Anodea Judith. “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive–to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to Joy, fulfillment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.”-Rollo May. This makes me think to our current situation in the world. The reaching out and taking in. May we all hold the ability to do both and to allow herself to take in as much as we are offering out, and vice versa. This will help the balance for ourselves and for others. But, we each need to remember that we are part of the collective balance, and that when we do not allow herself to take in, to receive, then the balance is lost. And also that when we forget to reach out, when we haven’t called that loved one, when we haven’t offered our self in service for others, and when we forget to ask for help, and ask for supporting our own needs, that the balance is also thrown off….
The heart chakra is the center of the rainbow bridge. If the center of the bridge is broken or has known trauma, then the entire bridge more easily collapses. And the opposite is true, when there is balance in the Heart Center, then it is more easy for all the other chakras to become balanced. The heart chakra is the only one of which we can claim these truths for balance within the system, within the rainbow bridge. So, you can never do too much work with the heart chakra. So, create an affinity to your heart, bond with yourself….
“Affinity is a term used in chemistry to describe the tendency of one substance to enter into and remain in combination with another substance. This occurs because of an intrinsic fit within the atomic structure of the substance. The result of affinity is bonding. … The most important aspect of affinity, however, lies not in our chemical attraction to others but in the development of affinity with in the composite parts of the self. When we have this sense of affinity, we emanate a vibration that is loving, accepting, and joyful. this allows, and even encourages others to find their own sense of affinity. … self-acceptance is our first chance to practice unconditional love. It doesn’t mean that we have to give up striving to be better, but the are self-love is not conditional on some future or imagined change.”- Anodea Judith. Therefore, this means that ‘I love myself now’, not when I do something, or when I get something, or when I’ve been able to let go of some piece of my past, or when I forgive myself enough, but that ‘I love myself here and now, without condition’. Can you do this now? Right now? Can you at least begin to offer yourself the space to behold your self? To behold your True Self? To recognize you are lovable?! To see that you ARE LOVE?! And to offer that love to your self, TODAY, without conditions? Perhaps you go sit, pick a mantra from above, or ‘yam’, and when you’re comfortable, sit and repeat it again and again to your self. Place your hands phuysically on your heart. Feel how it is beating for you, and with you. Its beating sound IS the sound of the unstruck! Your Heart Loves You. Can you let love in? Remember the balance here; when you let love in, it creates a balance to give love out.
This blew my mind:
“In the organ of the heart, each cell is beating continuously. If we were to dissect the heart, each cell would continue to beat by itself. As soon as we put these cells together with other heart cells parentheses as on a microscope slide parentheses, the cells shift there with them so that they are pulsating together. They enter a state of rhythmic resonance (something we will discuss more fully in the 5th chakra). By tuning into our heartbeat, we tune ourselves into the resonance with the core rhythm of our organism and the rhythm of the world around us.”-Anodea Judith. How appropriate to understand this very aspect of our own physicality, as we live in today’s reality of “social distancing”, and what feels as separation. So, to remember that even though we might be physically separated, we are still vibrating as one. And when we do come together virtually, and even within the interiors of our heart as we think about each other, OH, that we are still connected! I used to have a saying that I still sometimes think of to this day. The saying is this, “there is a hearts thread of compassion that connects us all”. I also used to say that “my heart is a tangled web of strings meant to be plucked”.
May we each continue to allow our song to sing, and may we remember how we are harmonizing with each other’s songs. Sending love to you all!
A little Bonus here:
Podcast from Tim Ferriss with Brene Brown on “Striving Versus Self-acceptance”: HERE
Breathe and Believe.