“If you’re an alive body, no one can tell you how to experience the world. And no one can tell you what truth is, because you experience it yourself. The body does not lie.” Stanley Keleman

Love

“Love will enter immediately

into any mind that truly wants it,

but it must want it truly.

Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find

 all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.

Love waits on welcome,

not on time.

When you want only love

you will see nothing else.

If love is sharing,

how can you find it except through itself?

Offer it and it will come to you,

because it is drawn to itself.

But offer attack and love will remain hidden,

for it can live only in peace.

It is the nature of love to look upon only the truth, 

for there it sees itself.

With love in you, 

you have no need except to extend it.”

from a Course in Miracles

“Love, Which created me, is what I am.”

  

Chakra 4 - The Heart

Location:  Center of chest.

Influence: Heart, lungs (the breath), shoulders, arms and hands, ribs and breasts, diaphragm, thymus gland, circulatory system.

Associative Color:    Green 

Central focus:   Unconditional love for self and others, compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, our ability to heal ourselves and others, vulnerability,  pain, co-dependency, possessiveness, grief, hate, fear.

“Love is the cosmic principal that unites all things through its power to reveal the underlying oneness in creation.”

William Meader

The heart chakra is the central system that mediates between spirit and matter. It is here that we experience this co-existence and discover the nature of the soul.

Through this chakra we love compassionately and unconditionally. This love is not tribal love based on security (first chakra) or sexual love (second chakra); it is a higher state of being.

To love unconditionally is to see love in all facets of existence. Loving beyond individuality and into universality: selfless love and the interconnectedness with all. 

The heart chakra  balances the love of ourselves and others; knowing how to love oneself teaches us how to love another. Our roles as caretakers is defined by this delicate balance. When we self-care , we fill our own hearts. However when we rely on others to do so, the heart is never filled. When we love selfishly through possession or co-dependency we are in love’s shadow. Fear then becomes the foundation from which our love emerges, and we wear it like an armor over our hearts.

Similarly  grief weights heavy - when we deny our grief we shut ourselves off from our feelings and block the flow of energy (blood-life force) to the heart and restrict the lungs. But when grief is expressed it can open the heart and release the breath.

The ability to forgive is also tied to our heart. Forgiveness comes through love and acceptance of ourselves and of others. To lay our defenses in rest and live with a forgiving heart begins with the willingness to let go, entering a state of surrender and vulnerability.  

Hate lives in love’s shadow of fear. With hate in the heart our interconnectedness with life is lost, along  with empathy and compassion. 

Healing the heart takes us into were we feel most vulnerable and wounded. Yet is is through the pain and fear within the psyche that we must travel to find the peace and light of our soul.

 Love is a paradox :  that the more we give, the more we can contain.