What is the Heart Center Chakra?
There are 7 Chakras and the Heart Center Chakra is the 4th one that is located in your heart. It’s called Anahata in Sanskrit and means to have compassion, beauty and love for yourself and others. .
The Heart Chakra is associated with feeling your life purpose and meaning in life, giving and receiving love for yourself and others, and holds one of the keys to healing past negative events.
Where is the Heart Chakra?
It’s located in your heart area. If you put your hands over your heart, you can feel the energy of this area vibrating. You can also feel a sense of who you are when you hover your hand over this area.
What color represents the Heart Chakra?
The color that it is mostly represented with it is green. I always thought that was surprising to associate the color green with the Heart Chakra because supposedly our blood is blue, but looks red when it comes in contact with the oxygen in the air. Traditionally, the heart has always been associated with red.
However, red is often associated with anger, and, in performing a color meditation for a group of patients during one of my internships, we started with seeing red as being an angry color and then flipped this script into how red is a vibrant, loving color. At the end of the meditation, one of the participants said they hadn’t thought of red as being filled with energy and vibrancy! It is and green is also. Read on to see how you can open up to the soothing, healing, and vibrant color of green.
When is the Heart Chakra open?
When the Heart Chakra is open, you’ll experience an ease in all that you do. You’ll feel more connected with your purpose and meaning for life, with others, with the world, the universe, and, most importantly, with yourself.
One of the things that comes up for trauma victims is that many have to overcome layers and layers of trust issues to get to a place where they can give love and also receive it back from others. In your Heart Chakra, when it is open, you will know when someone is worthy of your trust and when they are not based on watching their actions. You’ll be able to stand in your power more authoritatively and able to filter out those who have your best interests in mind and those who do not. You can then move forward with those who you can trust and not trying to please everyone who comes across your path.
In addition to having better boundaries, you will be able to receive love. Sometimes it is hard to hear how awesome we are or even to get a compliment on an outfit. When your Heart Chakra is open, you will feel better able to allow yourself to feel the energy from the compliment in recognition of your hard work without wondering if the other person wants something, and, even if they do, you won’t be worried about it. You’ll already have confidence in yourself.
When is the Heart Chakra blocked?
When the Heart Chakra is blocked, there are different symptoms that will show up in the way you act towards yourself and others. These issues also show up in your emotions, mental thoughts, and behavior.
- You may have poor boundaries, trusting anyone and letting anyone into your space
- You may not understand what a healthy relationship looks like with giving and receiving between two people, whether a partner, friend, or acquaintance.
- You may feel like you can’t trust people and question their intentions and motives from a very suspicious level
- You may fear that everyone is going to do something negative to you and has the intention of doing harm in some way to you, whether physical, mental, or emotional
- You may intuitively feel your Heart Chakra is blocked because you could feel pain when thinking of someone from your past who has hurt you
- You may feel unworthy of love from anyone, grief because you feel you’re going to forever be unloved by anyone, and pain from these feelings
- You may feel alone most of the time and not safe around people you don’t know well
- Being passive-aggressive in your behavior towards other people by projecting issues you’ve had with others from your past onto the people in your life now
- Defending yourself against others for minor issues, feeling aggravated by their seeming accusations
How to activate the Heart Chakra?
Activating the Heart Chakra is easy to do and really only takes your focus, concentration, and intention to activate it for yourself.
You can:
- Place your fingers or a gemstone or crystal on your Heart Chakra and feel the vibrations from this area
- Listen to a guided meditation to activate your Heart Chakra
- Listen to certain sounds that are meant only for your Heart Chakra
- Draw, paint or color intuitively what you feel and see in your Heart Chakra each day until the blockage dissolves and your Heart Chakra is activated
- Say affirmations to awaken this area
- Send a prayer to another person or group of people, or people around the globe
- Say a mantra in meditation
- Meditate with your focus, concentration, and intention on activating your Heart Chakra
- Get out in nature
For me, my Heart Chakra activated after listening to my desire to help people. Through helping people and volunteering my time, I felt better about myself and what I could offer to the world. Over time, I learned and strengthened my boundaries.
How to balance the Heart Chakra?
If you feel that the Heart Chakra is off balance, there’s a few things you can do to bring it back in balance that are simple and fun to do.
Color Therapy for the Heart Chakra
Find a green card and focus on the color of it. Let the green energy come into your mind and space. Look into the green and allow for yourself to feel its energy. Ask for the color to open your heart chakra to feel and perceive what truth and information you most need from the universe right now.
When you feel complete with focusing on the color, hold Rose Quartz stone up to your Heart Chakra. I recommend Rose Quartz because it is a stone associated with helping you with compassion for yourself and others, calms your energy, and helps you to feel safe releasing your feelings and emotions. Sometimes crying is the only way to release emotions so let those tears flow if you feel you need to.
Crystal Therapy for the Heart Chakra
Crystals you can use to help balance and heal your Heart Chakra include:
- Rose Quartz – a pink stone that is healing in nature for your Heart Chakra. It allows your emotions, fears, and any negative energy to be flushed out. Helps you find compassion for yourself and others and helps with self care.
- Kyanite – this stone helps you with establishing boundaries with others through working things out in communication. There’s different colored Kyanite and each one brings a different energy and use to your therapy for the Heart Chakra.
- Kunzite – associated with the Twin Flames, or bringing in your lifetime soul partner, Kunzite helps to bring comfort and cleansing to your heart chakra and any negative influences or vibrations that are there. It is especially helpful in releasing apathy and recovering from feeling out of balance, or out of connection with life. It is helpful in releasing guilt and shame to restore trust in yourself and a self care regimen.
- Malachite – This stone brings nature indoors with its vibrant green hues. It also protects your energy from negative influences and purifies your space. It’s also supportive in your overall emotional balance by reducing depression and anxiety while also healing emotional issues you’ve been holding onto from past events. Malachite can be helpful for you to speak your truth about what you most need in your relationships, which is an important boundary-learning technique.
- Peridot – if you’re seeking a boost to your happiness and positive outlook on life levels, Peridot is your stone. It has a high, vibrant energy that aids in uplifting your mood quickly even with a small piece of the stone. Its bright green color looks great in jewelry that you can wear with polished stones on a bracelet, ring, or necklace.
- Pink Tourmaline – when you’re ready to truly clear out all the negative feelings and motions from past experiences, get Pink Tourmaline. It is soothing and balances the right and left hemispheres of your brain to release trauma and old wounds trapped here and in your heart chakra. Helpful to bring in self love and to release numbness you may feel from traumatic experiences. Brings in peace and a zest for life. It’s a really great stone to have for your Heart Chakra.
- Rhodonite – this stone helps with your boundaries and waiting for confirmation that someone is who they say they are before trusting them, it helps to protect your aura against those who would argue and be in conflict with you. Helpful for after heartache, breakups, and other disappointments to overcome and regain your emotional, mental, and physical balance.
- Vesuvianite – the stone that connects you to your heart chakra so that you follow your heart’s desire. Its vibration puts you in touch with your truth as soon as you hold it so take note of what you intuit when you come in contact with it. Vesuvianite can also heal you of the fears that are holding you back from following your heart chakra.
- Clear Crystal Quartz – cleanses, removes built up thoughts and emotions, purifies, energizes, balances, helpful for communicating truth with still, clear thoughts. Works with any chakra.
- Moldavite – not for the faint of heart, Moldavite is a powerful crystal that can clear out negative people and situations from your life, it boosts your intuition more than any other stone I’ve used, it will bring new perspectives and shift your awareness to clear out anything that is not working for you. It also will have some interesting things that may happen as a result of having this stone. I suggest to keep it with a crystal for balance and the most peaceful resolution of situations. Moldavite for your heart chakra will remove negativity and balance out your emotions. Just be aware it is a powerful stone and when you feel heavy emotions, it may be a good time to take it off (if you’re wearing it) and let your energies rest for awhile.
Essential Oil for Your Heart Chakra
- Rose
- Marjoram
- Ylang Ylang
- Bergamot
- Geranium
- Jasmine
How to heal the Heart Chakra?
If you find imbalances and stuck energy in your Heart Chakra, healing these things requires moving the trapped energy out of your body and it also means gaining trust again with this chakra.
One of the ways I strongly suggest healing your Heart Chakra is through art therapy. One of the most powerful ways to heal this area, especially if you feel numb and unable to express your emotions, is through drawing what you see in this area. You may see what is there as iron gates with spikes on them. It’s a very unwelcome scene for any new, would-be love in your life. Seeing gates and fencing of any kind in your Heart Chakra tells us you’ve been through a lot and have walls built up.
What you need to do is to draw what you see in this area each day. With consistent practice and daily work, you will notice that your drawing begins to change until one day, the gates or fencing or barbed wire is no longer there. Using art therapy is another way to express your emotions without having to put words to them.
Alternatively, I suggest using a journal to write all of your thoughts and feelings into. Through daily journaling, you will also transform your negative experiences by getting out everything that you internalized through your past experiences.
There’s other ways to heal the Heart Chakra you may want to try:
- Find the root cause. Typically, we ask the Heart Chakra to reveal what we need to know that is blocking it in this moment.
- Channel information from your Heart Chakra is helpful to allow yourself the time and space to just be with this chakra area without restriction.
- You can also keep a bullet journal if you have just a few minutes each day to doodle here and there.
- Ask questions to resolve the issue. Be curious and genuinely ask questions that will help resolve the negative event in your mind.
- Move the energy out of your body. Use emotional freedom technique tapping or guide the energy out of your body with your hands. You can also imagine your chakra spinning and see the purple or bluish-purple color get brighter as you do this.
- Use crystals to release the stuck emotions from your body.
- Use color therapy to imagine the color and light drawing the stuck emotions and energy out of your body. Imaging the light outside your body and any negative or trapped emotions being drawn to it, then dissolving in the light.
- Use art therapy to draw what’s going on in your Heart Chakra and to release the energy that’s stuck there.
- Use music or a guided meditation to release the stuck energy from your Heart Chakra.