We are all born with the basic right to love, and to be loved. This blog post addresses the fourth energetic centre, the Heart Chakra, also known as the middle chakra as it mediates the physical lower chakras with the spiritual higher chakras. A balanced heart chakra determines our overall health, vitality and strength.

As the name suggests, the physical location is found at the chest, over the heart – no doubt you’ve felt this energy as your heart bursting with love, or with the pain of heart ache and loss.

The Heart Chakra resonates with our emotional perceptions, which determine the quality of our lives far more than our mental perceptions. This energy centre helps to propel our emotional development, and teaches us how to act out of love and compassion, and to recognise the most powerful energy we have is love. More than any other chakra, the heart represents our capacity to “let go and let God” in order to find inner peace. The passive yin energy allows ourselves to simply let things be the way that they are. It encourages us to expand beyond our limited egos into a wider sense of connection with all of life; to rise above the confines of our own needs, and to find joy in service and altruism.

The Heart Chakra does not just address the matter of becoming connected, it is a matter of seeing that we are already deeply connected. Rather than seeing ourselves as alone, we can see that we are in fact “all-one”.

Love is the energy that keeps a family together and relationships in tact. This mysterious force is full of paradox; we fall in love, we are lifted by love, we are bound by love. It requires both closeness and distance in order to find balance and equilibrium.  

People who have an underdeveloped heart chakra see love as conditional, they can become critical, negative, isolated, and can become submissive in love which simultaneously resists closeness.  They may also require approval from others and have feelings of not deserving or not fitting in.

Excessive love may sound counterintuitive, but an excess can occur when we overcompensate for our own wounds. This is desperate in its need for constant assurance. Consider the scenario of a friend who complains to you that they have put on weight over the weekend after spending it with their parents; they are usually very health conscious, but felt they had no choice in eating things they wouldn’t normally choose to. Turns out their mother’s way of showing love is with food, so she over-feeds the child even though they are not hungry, and sulks when the child says no; the child eats so not to hurt the mother’s feelings. The result is that child feels smothered and does not look forward to the next visit. Both the parent and child have acted codependently, and the emphasis on love for the other is out of balance.