Located near your heart, in the very centre of your chest, your fourth chakra is de domain of human intimacy. It is essential to affection, warmth, nurturing, friendship and familiarity. Your fourth chakra is the seat of your ability to feel joy, unity, laughter and especially, love- the very highest power in your life. It expands your capacity to be generous, sensitive, forgiving and tolerant.
This chakra resonates to our emotional perceptions, which determine the quality of our lives far more than our mental perceptions. As children we react to our circumstances with a range of emotions; love, passion, confidence, hope, despair, hate, envy and fear. As adults we are challenged to generate within ourselves an emotional climate and steadiness from which to act consciously and with compassion.
More than any other chakra, the fourth represents our capacity to ~Let go and let ~God~. By releasing our emotional pain, by letting go of our need to know why things have happened as they have, we reach a state of tranquillity. In order to achieve that inner peace, however, we have to embrace the healing energy of forgiveness and release our lesser need for human, self determined justice.
Primary Strengths of a balanced fourth chakra are: Love, forgiveness, compassion, dedication, inspiration, hope, trust and the ability to heal oneself and others.
Primary Fears of an unbalanced fourth chakra are: Fears of Loneliness, commitment, and "following ones heart"; fear of inability to protect oneself emotionally, fear of emotional weakness and betrayal. Loss of fourth chakra energy can give rise to jealousy, bitterness, anger, hatred, and an inability to forgive others as well as love is becoming recognised as a force that influences and perhaps determines biological activity. Love helps us to heal others and ourselves.
Life crises that have issues of love at their core, divorce, death of a loved one, emotional abuse, abandonment, adultery are often the cause of an illness, and not just an event that coincidentally precedes it. Physical healing often requires, and may demand, the healing of emotional issues.
The expression "If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else" is commonplace. Yet for many people loving oneself remains a vague notion, which we often act out in material ways, through shopping sprees and outrageous holidays. But rewarding oneself with trips and toys is using physical pleasure to express self appreciation. While this type of reward is enjoyable, it can obstruct our contact with the deeper emotional stirrings of the heart that emerge when we need to evaluate a relationships, or a job, or some other troubled circumstance that affects our well-being. Loving oneself as a fourth chakra challenge means having the courage to listen to the hearts emotional messages and spiritual directives.
Healing is possible through acts of forgiveness. Self love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us - for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us.
Our fourth chakra culture has seen national increases in divorce. The opening of the fourth chakra has transformed the archetype of marriage into the archetype of partnership. As a result most contemporary marriages require a strong sense of ~self~ for success, rather than the abdication of ~self~ that was required in traditional marriages. The symbolic meaning of marriage is that one must be in union with one’s own personality and spirit first. After one has a clear understanding of oneself, one can create a successful intimate partnership. The increase in divorce is therefore rooted directly in the opening of the fourth chakra, which draws people into self discovery for the first time. Many people ascribe the breakdown of their marriage to the fact that their spouse has given them no support for their emotional, psychological and intellectual needs, and as a result they had to seek out a true partnership.
Healing is simple, but it is not easy. The steps are few yet they demand great effort.
Commit yourself to healing all the way to the source of the pain. This means turning inwards and coming to know your wounds.
Once you have verbalised/affirmed your wounds observe how you use them to influence or even control the people around you as well as yourself. As you observe yourself during the day, note your choice of vocabulary, and then formulate new patterns of interaction with others that do not rely upon wound power. Recognise that it is often far more difficult to release the power you derive from your wound than it is to release the memory of the painful experience. A person who cannot let go of wound power is a wound addict, and like all addictions, wound addiction is not easy to break. Don’t be afraid to seek therapeutic help in getting through this step.
Identify the good that can and has come from your wounds. Start living within the consciousness of appreciation and gratitude, and if you have to ~fake it till you make it~. Initiate a spiritual practice and stick to it. Do not be casual about your spiritual discipline.
Once you have established a consciousness of appreciation, you can take on the challenge of forgiveness. As appealing as forgiveness is in theory, it is an extremely unattractive personal action for most people, mainly because the true nature of forgiveness remains misunderstood.
Forgiveness is not the same as telling the person who harmed you "It’s OK". Rather, forgiveness is a complex act of consciousness, one that liberates the soul and psyche from the need for personal revenge and the perception of oneself as a victim. More than releasing from blames the people who caused our wounds, forgiveness means releasing the control that the perception of victimhood has over our psyches. The liberation that forgiveness generates comes in the transition to a higher state of consciousness - not just in theory but energetically and biologically.
Think Love. Live in appreciation and gratitude. Invite change into your life, if only through your attitude. And remind yourself continually of the message of all spiritual masters keep your spirit in the present time. In the language of Jesus "Leave the dead and get on with your life”. And as Buddha taught "there is only Now".
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