Balancing the Heart Chakra
Anahata is the Sanskrit name for the Heart Chakra.
Your heart chakra is located in your central chest. It is considered the home of unconditional love. Here in the middle point of seven energy centers, the spiritual energies of your upper three chakras meet the physical energies of your lower three.
In this vital energy center, we experience our wholeness as individuals and our oneness with all of creation. The transition from the solar plexus chakra to the heart represents a passage through a gate to higher worlds.
Alan Seale says;
“The heart is the ultimate uniting force, the alchemical cauldron of transformation, healing, and understanding. As we make the journey from solar plexus to heart, we learn that unconditional love is our essence.
When both the solar plexus and heart chakras are open and free, we experience our supreme power as the constant flow of love through our being.”
Our heartbeat is a grounding rhythm available to us throughout life. 
Many beautiful meditations focus on our breath, heartbeat, and ability to access the law of rhythm in our bodies.
You found your individuality and independence in the solar plexus chakra.
As you move into the heart chakra, you recognize your interdependence with the world around you as relationships are formed and understood.
The heart chakra is the seat of your soul. Within this chakra, you recognize your oneness with all of creation. This realization allows you to develop compassion and love for others.
In the book Eastern Body, Western Mind by Andoea Judith, she makes a memorable point.
“We may be a culture obsessed by power, but we are driven by the need for love. The basic right of the heart chakra — to love and be loved — is simple, profound, and direct.”
Sadly, the heart chakra is easily damaged, diminished, or wounded. These wounds can impact the very core of the self.
Characteristics of the heart chakra include the basic rights of loving and being loved.
When you are in balance, being compassionate, loving, and empathetic is easier. It is easier to love yourself.
We all have heart chakra issues because we are all spiritual beings ensconced in challenging human situations. Learning life’s lessons, each of us has experienced a measure of rejection, loneliness, abandonment, criticism, shame, and betrayal. And some have endured even harsher abuses. It is inevitable to experience grief in life. All of these wounds are felt in the heart chakra.
The heart chakra’s demon is grief, which sits in the lungs and heart.
Grief is literally felt as a heaviness in the heart and the body’s chest region. When we are grieving, there is a contraction in the chest with shallower breathing and constriction of energy moving through the heart.
Making time for self-care is essential when living in grief and other heart chakra wounds. After a significant loss, it is not unusual to experience disorders in this area of the body, including lung-related illnesses such as pneumonia. The breath tends to be shallow, as our life force feels crowded out by the heaviness there.
Exercise for Tuning the Heart Chakra
To begin, sit in a chair with your legs uncrossed. Next, close your eyes and breathe into the center of your chest. Then, feel the breath fill your heart. Breathe in the color emerald green, the color associated with the heart chakra.
Feel this part of your body come alive. You may feel warmth or sensation or some other signal that energy is moving there. If you experience resistance, be patient and gentle with yourself and ease your way into the heart chakra with your breath. If there is a great deal of resistance, allow yourself several sessions of relaxed, intentional breathing to make your way in.
Repeat the following Heart Chakra affirmations.
Do they ring true for you? I:
Am worthy of love
Love myself and others
Am balanced
Open to give and receive love
Accept me
Forgive myself and others
One way to give love is to extend positive affirmations and feedback.
Try to go one whole day without judging or criticizing anyone, including yourself.
Start to foster the notion that love is a currency and whatever you give will return to you.
How to Balance Anahata
The balancing techniques mentioned here can be accomplished personally within your body’s healing processes.
Besides meditating and tuning into your intuition in your daily life, you can also balance the fourth chakra using yoga, colors, gems, journaling, eating green food, and using essential oils.
Yoga Asanas can balance the heart chakra.
Any yoga pose that opens the chest area will help balance the heart chakra. Some good yoga poses for Anahata include camel, puppy pose, standing bow pose, and cow face pose.
Chanting or toning sounds can also help bring Anahata back to balance.
Sounds create vibrations in the body, and these vibrations help the cells work together in synchronistic harmony. The mantra sound that corresponds to the heart chakra is the sound YAM. You can practice this in the linked video. You can also listen to recordings of the healing frequency of 639 Hz and 528 Hz, which is the love frequency.
A special mantra to help expand love and compassion is OM MANI PADME HUM.
You can repeat this mantra in meditation to gain greater access to these qualities.
Lovingkindness meditation is a wonderful way to open the heart and send yourself and others loving energy.
The color of Anahata is emerald green, and some gemstones associated with the heart are emerald, malachite, jade, and rose quartz.
Eating green foods like vegetables and wearing green colors helps balance Anahata.
Another tool for heart chakra health is sniffing essential oils.
Rose oil is expensive, but you can sniff it to stimulate the limbic portion of the brain. One drop of rose oil rubbed on the heart chakra area of the chest helps to lift grief. Jasmine and geranium are uplifting.
Lavender and marjoram can be good if the heart chakra needs to be calmed.
Journaling is another wonderful tool for heart balance.
The Joy Within Organization teaches that journaling is another powerful tool for self-reflection. Journaling creates an opportunity to be completely honest and process emotions. In the heart chakra, your experience is often beyond words. It is all about feeling and sensing. Creating art in an art journal can often reach places that are beyond your words.
Thank you for reading this post. Feel free to share it. Special thanks to Kathy Kellum for the heart chakra art image.
If you would like to learn more about the chakras, join us in the Soul Artist Experience.
Find out more about my journey through my book on Amazon: Vision Quest: A Journey to Happiness by Jane Ramsey.
Watch my YouTube video about freeing your inner artist.
Watch my YouTube video explaining the courses I teach.
To learn more about Chakras, read the Blog below:
Understanding Chakras
Practice gentle chakra tuning
Interested in the Universal Laws? The Blogs for each of the 12 Laws are found below:
1. Divine Oneness
Jane Ramsey
