The heart chakra is associated with love and the idea of wholeness connected to a higher purpose or nature. To open and balance the heart chakra, it’s not necessarily about focusing on who or what you love but instead examining how you love.
The color of the heart chakra is green tying it back to nature and the power of universal love. It is located in the middle of your upper body, so it’s central to the alignment of the other chakras. The heart chakra is essential to your chest, heart, and lungs. Emotions stem from this chakra. Feelings are formed in your mind, while emotions are kept and developed in the heart chakra. Emotional blocks like pain, fear, or doubt can keep your heart chakra unbalanced and closed.
As individuals, we will have many emotions that may need to be addressed during the process of healing the heart chakra. Since some emotions can be complicated, it will be beneficial to set an honest intention to heal each of your blocks. If you’re struggling with difficult emotions, opening your heart chakra will help you feel connected to love and harmony. The power of love is undefinable. So, when balancing your heart chakra, remember that it will take hard work. Having patience with yourself will help you get closer to the idea of universal love.
Connecting to universal love involves a nonjudgmental perspective towards yourself and others. Oftentimes, opening your mind is key to balancing your heart chakra because of the association between feelings and emotions. Below are ten emotions to examine and embrace in your heart chakra. Depending on whatever emotional blocks you are struggling to balance, you can choose to practice introspection with one or more of these emotional states-of-being.
1) Gratitude
When first beginning heart chakra work, gratitude is a great emotional state-of-being to practice. It will be helpful for healing any nonalignment between feelings and emotions. Gratitude will help with any blocks and open this chakra to universal love. Practicing gratitude through keeping a journal, making gratitude lists, or visual tokens will benefit your emotional well-being. According to Wharton Health Care Management Alumni Association, there are many studies that show gratitude has numerous positive effects on well-being including lowering stress levels, decreasing depression, and increasing social support.
2) Forgiveness
After embracing gratitude and anchoring your heart chakra in this emotion, you will benefit from accepting forgiveness into this chakra. Forgiving yourself for things you can’t control or any hurt you may be holding onto is the key to opening your heart to love. Appreciation for what you have through a gratitude practice will make it easier for you to forgive yourself and others. Energetically speaking when you work on balancing and opening this chakra, letting go of all heavy emotions like pain, anger, disappointment, or any negativity will lighten your vibrational frequency.
3) Unconditional love
Feelings and emotions can be complicated, so you will need a lot of discipline to balance the heart chakra. People who work to heal their own energy use meditation to address internal patterns of emotions. Because meditation makes it easier to release unwanted emotional patterns, it can especially help to try mediation for your heart. Next to gratitude, loving without condition may be the most important emotional state-of-being for the heart chakra. Knowing yourself and excepting your flaws is a good way to open your heart chakra to unconditional. Introspection is the key to learning about yourself.
4) Empathy
Empathy is all about putting yourself in other people’s shoes, but that’s not all it entails. Learning from other’s perspectives and beliefs can be helpful to open your heart. Empathy is also about realizing that we are all connected and accepting whatever feels separate from us as part of our whole. When your exploring empathy in your heart chakra, you may find a new sensitivity to others and their emotions. The more you work to remove blocks in this chakra, the more you may notice yourself forming different perspectives about connecting with others.
5) Compassion
Compassion is a special emotional state-of-being for the heart chakra. Like empathy, it involves understanding others. But compassion extends service to others by giving kindly. In order to have compassion for others and to give in the universal energy of love, you must be able to recognize how you can be kind to your own self. When you embrace compassion, you will start to give without any hidden agendas.
6) Patience
Patience stems from practicing self-love. Like compassion, it is impossible to display patience to others if you lack it for yourself. Feelings like regret or fear can be stored in your heart chakra as blocks resulting in unhealthy emotional patterns. To address these negative patterns, patience and commitment to growth is the key to healing. Patience comes with understanding yourself and not pressuring yourself into anything that is not authentic. Feeling good about yourself wherever you are in the healing process will open your heart chakra to new emotional states-of-being.
7) Freedom
Removing blocks and opening this chakra will leave you feeling free to love. Liberation from any pain, so that your energy will feel lighter, can be obtained by letting go of any guilt, anger, or heavy emotions. Oftentimes, we harbor these difficult emotions in our heart chakra because of all the things that we have experienced. Release and freedom can only be achieved by committing to the process of healing. By being of aware of your own emotional patterns, you can expand in universal love. A good first step to feeling liberated is being totally honest with yourself and the difficult emotions you may need to release.
8) Contentment
As you develop your emotional intelligence by embracing these high vibrational states-of-being, you will begin to notice more contentment in your heart. Because of the relationship to your feelings, opening the heart chakra will lead to a better state-of-mind. A sense of contentment will form in your heart chakra by developing all other emotions discussed here. But this process will ultimately lead to a peaceful alignment between heart and mind.
9) Strength
We may think of strength as power — and certainly, there is a power to universal love. But true strength is obtained not through authority but grace in this power. Love is the most powerful emotional state-of-being. Strength in your heart chakra will come once you start resolving its blocks and opening yourself to love. Strength is overcoming any emotional patterns to rise above negativity. In order to overcome any unhealthy patterns, you need to recognize and accept your negative emotions. By embracing these blocks, the process of healing will become easier. You will start to move away from low vibrational emotions and your heart chakra will grow in strength.
10) Joy
Emotionally, joy is the highest vibrational state-of-being. It is like happiness but contains a blissful peace. It encompassing an almost childlike sense of purity. Practicing all the above emotional states-of-being will lead you to joy. When working to remove any blocks in your heart chakra, opening up to love for yourself and others will help to cultivate joy. Remember that any unhealthy emotional patterns can always be transformed through introspection. The more you commit to improving your connection to universal love and opening your heart chakra, the more joy you will experience.
source : Hope Stavish