Layer Twenty, Week One – Sunday
- Read Week One Concepts
- Watch videos and read description for Heart Chakra Awareness
- Do Movement – Heart Chakra Awareness
Sunday’s Focus
What demands do you have in your life? Where do you expect things to happen or not happen in a certain way?
Sunday’s Concepts
This week, you will get to know the fourth major chakra and the prevalent energies it manages. We will come back to the third chakra next week. The third chakra works as a bridge and referee between the second and fourth chakras. Knowing more about the fourth will help you understand the third more easily.
Before we get started on the heart chakra, I want to spend a bit of time revisiting Auras. L18W1 and L18W2 are also a great review. The energy you absorb with your chakras influences your bodies, components, configurations, and environment through your auras.
Energies flow into your chakras where they are absorbed and dispersed as auras.
Auras create a resonance, an energetic wavelength with a specific amplitude and frequency. They also condition incoming energies. When you are balanced and radiating healthy energies, all incoming energies are transformed into a healthy wavelength. When you are unbalanced, incoming energies are distorted toward your imbalance.
Think of the lens in your sunglasses. To the degree the lens is clean and clear, light passes through. If you add a tint to the lens, the light passing through is restricted. If you add a colored lens, only select wavelengths of the light pass through. If you are looking at a red light with red-tinted sunglasses, it will appear redder. If you look at something yellow through blue-tinted lenses, it will appear some shade of green.
If you are afraid of dogs, every dog will feel like a threat. The energy from the dog will migrate toward your fear and energize and animate it. Each dog’s energy will be unique and the vast majority of them are not a threat. Fear of dogs tints your view of them … and their view of you.
When your auras are healthy and balanced, they have the ability to convert energy into healthy configurations. It would be like having sunglasses that would automatically color correct what you see to give you the most clarity and detail.
Unhealthy auras look for energies that confirm their imbalance.
If Jackson goes to the mall for a new cravat and believes the plebeian hordes are a scourge, his experience will verify that belief because his auras are predisposed to find fault and be intolerant. If Sarah goes to the mall at the same time because she loves meeting new people, she will fulfill that intention. Same mall, same time, same energies, and vastly different results.
Monday’s Focus
What are you most afraid of? How does that fear influence your ability to be present and authentic?
Monday’s Concepts
Each chakra will have a primary benefit and deficit potential. How those impact you, your environment, and your relationships is the next level in understanding your potential, communications, fears, relationships, and resistances. Let me introduce you to your heart chakra.
The fourth chakra, Anahata, and its predispositions:
Common Name: Heart Chakra
Vedic Name: Anahata
Number: Four
Location: Middle of the sternum and just in front of the spine
Vortex – Forward and back, perpendicular to the spine
Primary Responsibility – Relationships and Authenticity
Body: Environmental
Component: Strength, Endurance
Healthy Configurations: Expansive, Fluid
Unhealthy Configurations: Bleeding, Stagnant, Fluctuating, Compressive
The Anahata Chakra is generally located at the middle of your sternum and just in front of your spine. Its vortices (vortexes) point forward and back, perpendicular to your shoulders. Your heart is off-center, usually to the left. Your heart chakra is directly in the midline. Your heart chakra has very little direct connection with your heart muscle or its innervation.
The Anahata Chakra and its aura manage the energy of your relationships. It opens, expands, contracts, and closes depending on your willingness to engage.
The greater your authenticity in relationships, the bigger and more functional your fourth chakra will be. As you curtail your self-expression in relationships, as you let fears limit your vibrancy, your heart chakra and its aura respond by getting smaller and reducing the exchange of energies.
Fearless, playful, and intimate people have healthy and well-developed heart chakras.
Why it matters: Beyond the ability to interact authentically, a healthy fourth chakra allows you to exist effortlessly in any environment, situation, and interaction.
Picture a dog house. If the house is too small, the dog won’t fit or will feel squeezed. If the dog house is a little bigger, the dog will fit but not much else. The bigger the dog house, the more that will fit in. A dog house the size of a mansion will have a huge capacity to bring people, things, ideas, and energies together in a place that feels familiar and safe.
Your fourth chakra is like a dog house. A small, unhealthy fourth chakra won’t allow much freedom of expression or any range of inclusion and intimacy. The dog-mansion-sized fourth chakra will be a fearless bastion of goodwill, authenticity, tolerance, and intimacy. There will be enough room where everything and everyone will feel welcome and included.
Everyday Usability: The energy you metabolize in your heart chakra will probably feel the most fulfilling. Connecting to your environment is the easiest way to feel connected to something larger than yourself. Absorbing energies fearlessly and effortlessly from the people and things around you gives you the feelings of presence, connection, and collaboration.
Progression: The heart chakra’s growth and development will be toward MORE. More energy in and more energy to its aura. As you develop your heart chakra, your ability to be authentic, intimate, and connected will increase. It is important to remember that this growth potential is infinite. Your subconscious mind will try to convince you that there is a limit to how much you can love, how deeply intimate you can be, and how fully you can connect and collaborate with the people, situations, and things in your environment.
Tuesday’s Focus
What external demands arise from your primary fears?
Tuesday’s Concepts
A healthy chakra pulls energy in, it absorbs. An unhealthy chakra either doesn’t spin or it spins in a way that pushes energy out. Pushed energy happens when you are trying to manipulate someone, something, or some aspect of your environment. When you have a demand, you stop absorbing and start pushing energy through one or more of your chakras. This is fairly common with the heart chakra. Let’s explore why.
The primary body associated with the heart chakra is your environmental or relational body. Makes sense, right? You have multiple levels of relationship. Some of them are internal and some external.
Let’s look at your relationships, internal and external, as they apply to your environment. Environment is relative. Your environment is defined by where you place the limits, constraints, or borders. Home, work, grocery store, mountains, friends, food, etc. are all environments that you set limits to – where they begin and end. If I am talking about my internal environment, I can be talking about everything inside my skin or just what is in my abdominal cavity.
If I am talking about my abdomen, I can include all the organs and accompanying viscera, or I can get specific and just include my digestive system. As I constrain the definition of environment, I create a relationship, and define a specific aura, an area of influence.
If you have stomach issues, your relationship with your stomach will have different qualities than your relationship with your patellas. Your relationship with your boss will be different than your relationship with someone else’s boss. Those relationship configurations are largely controlled by the subconscious mind and when you allow it, your heart chakra.
You create boxes to put things, people, situations, and relationships in. You give them value and assign fears. You configure your heart chakra to conform to those values and fears.
You act, react, and respond differently with your significant other than you do your local barista. Your relationships have limits. There are things that you will do and say, ways you will interact, levels of intimacy that you allow yourself to have depending on the circumstances.
Your level of resistance and fear sensitivity changes depending on the labels you give your environments.
Wednesday’s Focus
What fears do you have about or around your primary relationships?
Wednesday’s Concepts
If you didn’t have fear, your relationship with everything and everyone in every situation would have the potential to be the same. Fear creates limits of acceptability, tolerance, pleasure, pain, safety, comfort, intimacy, connection, and collaboration. Your subconscious mind wants to keep you safe, so it tries to manage your relationships.
Your heart chakra wants to remove the limits from your relationships. Its intention is to absorb, expand, and merge with everything and everyone around you.
So why don’t you just connect completely with everyone and everything? Why aren’t you immersed, embedded, and involved with everything? Partly because your fear holds you back, but your Essence and Hara also play a part as does your biology. You are attracted and repelled. Some things, people, situations are resonant and others dissonant. Pheromones, hormones, axillary steroids, smells, sounds, and energy configurations all prioritize, sensitize, and categorize.
Social, familial, religious, and ethnic programming play a part. Familiarity is another big contributor. It is harder to love, connect, and blend with something, someone, or any situation in which you have no reference, exposure, or history. Environmental energies and your ability to absorb them are defined by your biases.
You love pizza, poodles, and pantaloons to the degree you have an attraction, lack of fear, or familiarity with them. Your relationships will absorb and expend most of their energy from your heart chakra and its aura. When you see a poodle, you will allow the energy from the poodle and the rest of your environment to more easily absorb into your system. If poodles bite you, you won’t allow the energy in. You will get defensive. If your last pizza gave you a week of gastric distress, you probably won’t find it appealing. If you love poodles and they occasionally bite you, you will only allow energy in from familiar poodles.
Your habits and habitual imbalances limit your ability to be neutrally attracted, connected, and collaborative.
Your subconscious mind favors the energies that confirm your imbalances or align with what is familiar.
Thursday’s Focus
What demands do you have of your loved ones that you don’t have of others? Why?
Thursday’s Concepts
Your heart chakra opens in response to internal and external stimuli. A heart charka absorbs energy to the degree it is open. As it opens, it increases the range or field in which it can absorb. Have you ever noticed that when you are feeling love that everything else also seems more attractive? Your heart chakra is open to receiving and absorbing a broader range of energies.
Your emotional body is influenced by the state of your heart chakra. The more open it is, the more emotional energy you can feel (absorb) from your environment and the more of that energy that can radiate into the aura of your heart chakra.
When one or more of your bodies is imbalanced or unhealthy, you can project energy out of a chakra to try to manipulate your environment. Your subconscious mind has the ability to reverse the spin of the chakras which changes the direction of the energy flows. This can happen with any of your chakras but is common in the heart chakra. Can you feel why? You are much more likely to try to manipulate relationships or something environmental.
Think of someone you know who you would describe as pushy, aggressive, or manipulative. Recall an interaction where you felt bullied or coerced. All of the above are energies being directed or pushed out of one or more chakras.
Pushy, aggressive, manipulative, bullied, and coerced have an inherent demand. Every demand has an underlying fear. When fearful, the subconscious mind wants to control some aspect(s) of the current situation or some projected future situation. It highjacks the chakra, reverses its spin, and uses that energy in efforts to control thoughts, emotions, energies, and outcomes.
Let’s say the manager for the band Josie and the Pussycats wants them to sign a revised recording contract that gives the manager 60% of revenues and splits the rest between the members of the band. The manager gets each of them alone and threatens to quit if they don’t sign. She says that they will fail without her.
The manager has a demand. Underneath that demand is some held fear. She tries to bully the band into submitting to her ultimatum. She does this by projecting her fear directly toward some fear of the band member (never playing another gig, not having any money, not being seen as a musician, being alone, not being seen, starving, etc.). That directed energy comes from one or more of her chakras and attempts to trigger some fear reaction in the band member’s bodies or chakras.
They may or may not react to her threats, but they will feel the push. If any band members have a high level of fear, they will be more susceptible to her demand. If one or more of the band members are healthy and balanced, they will not react to her bullying and probably start looking for a new manager.
Friday’s Focus
Who or what in your life do you spend the most time and energy managing? Why?
Friday’s Concepts
The primary components of the heart chakra are strength and endurance. Fluidly and effortlessly interacting with your environment allows you to utilize all your power and stamina. Engaging your heart chakra will give you boundless patience, tenacity, and acceptance.
Things usually feel hard because you have resistance, environmental resistance. Your subconscious mind assigns a negative value and begins to look for ways to curtail, slow, or stop change from happening. When you allow your heart chakra and its aura to flourish, you will use the energies around you as fuel for movement, action, and transformation.
As you do, your strength and endurance will skyrocket in all your bodies and each of your components because your resistance is diminished. When you lower your resistance to the people, situations, and things in your environment, you allow more energy to be absorbed by your heart chakra which will increase the influence of its aura. Increased influence attracts and allows resonant energies to begin to collaborate. Collaboration multiplies power and stamina.
Josie, not wanting to be bullied by her manager, begins to believe the band can thrive without outside representation. She researches what other successful bands have done in her situation and shares this new knowledge with the band members. She shares her idea as a what if, without a demand that they believe as she does. The idea gains momentum the more she researches it. She begins to develop marketing and promotional ideas. As she shares these with the other members of the band, they begin to believe. Their desire for change begins to grow and a resonance develops. The energy for self-management builds momentum and collectively, without coercion, they fire the manager and start a new self-directed journey.
Josie had success converting the energy of her environment because she used her Hara and Essence. Her intention and creativity were internally fueled. The expanding energies radiated out into her environment in the aura of her heart chakra. Her sense of wonder and internal drive for growth and success created so much resonant energy that it enchanted the other band members. They felt her idea, and it felt like something they wanted to participate in.
Saturday’s Focus
What fears drive you to manage others?
Saturday’s Concepts
Healthy Configurations: Expansive, Fluid
Unhealthy Configurations: Bleeding, Stagnant, Fluctuating, Compressive
A healthy heart chakra will make it easier to maintain fluid and expansive energy configurations. This should feel very true after this week’s concepts. The expression open-hearted is a great example of a healthy Anahata Chakra.
Since the heart chakra is your primary energetic connection to your environment, it is also the one most likely to be triggered by your environment.
The heart chakra is also the chakra most influenced by your subconscious mind. That feeling of emotions flooding out of your chest is actually energy spilling out of a heart chakra that is spinning the wrong way.
Most emotional overwhelm happens as a result of something or someone in your environment. You use your heart chakra to absorb environmental energy. When you are unbalanced or have reached the threshold of your capacity, the resonance/dissonance of some particular energetic configurations triggers the subconscious mind into a fear reaction. You purge energy through your emotional body.
When Josie’s manager learned of her dismissal, emotions flooded her system. She cried, got angry, and began plotting her revenge. She lost her only client and her sole source of income. She was rejected. She lost control of her situation. The change potential was much more than her system could manage and her subconscious mind usurped control of her energy body. She lashed out by calling Josie and hurling curses and threats. Her heart chakra, spinning counter-clockwise, vomited energy directly at Josie.
After that, she called others who she thought would agree with her and vomited more energy toward them. As this projecting of energy depleted her heart chakra, it started to pull energy from her other bodies and components. Her imbalance grew until she couldn’t manage it, tried to rob a convenience store, and was wrestled to the ground by a group of kids buying Oreos and Skittles. The judge gave her probation and required anger management training where she came to understand how her fear foiled her.
In the next week of this layer, you will explore the third chakra, Manipura. It is the essential bridge between your inner and outer experiences of self and relationship.
Heart Chakra Awareness