Healing the emotional body in the fourth chakra is by far one of the most important things you can do for your health. With years of experience in Ayurvedic lifestyle counseling, I am convinced that heart health is directly linked to our emotional state.

A few years ago I had a client come in for an Ayurvedic consultation. He had suffered a heart attack at age forty-five and had a stent put in. He wanted to learn how to manage stress and adopt a healthier lifestyle.

During the consultation I asked him what had happened emotionally in his recent past. He looked at me strangely but answered that he couldn’t think of anything except that he had gotten a divorce a couple of years prior to the heart attack. I shared with him that the divorce was likely a contributing factor to the heart attack. He wasn’t convinced because he was only focused on the physical.

When there are blockages in the heart chakra, there is always an emotional component. Healing the heart — one of the most difficult things to do, yet crucial for growth — is mostly about letting go of past hurt and learning how to forgive.

Letting Go of Past Hurt

You don’t always consciously choose what happens to you throughout life. You can’t control how others will act around you or toward you. You can’t even regulate another person’s opinion of you.

You’re going through life trying to get your needs met, and so is everyone else. If I’m trying to get my needs met and you’re trying to get your needs met, there will be some clashes. Most of the time when someone hurts you or disagrees with you, it’s not even about you. Think about this for a second. Have you ever considered the idea that most people are absorbed with their own needs and desires?

The alcoholic father who ignores you is just worried about getting his next drink. The teacher who scolds you for talking is just trying to manage the thirty children in her class and to get the job done. The person who cuts you off on the road is just trying to get to work on time. The jealous sister who talks badly about you is just trying to get the attention and love that she feels she isn’t receiving.

Most of the time you’re just in the way of another person getting his or her needs met. It doesn’t make it right, just, or fair; it just is. Each person has his or her own pathway.

Holding On To Past Hurt?

When you hold on to past hurt, you are weighing yourself down unnecessarily. You’re creating heaviness in your own heart that could otherwise be lifted by simply letting go.

Whatever happened in your past needed to happen so that you could be where you are today. If you had only good times or people who lifted you up all the time, you couldn’t have had the emotional and spiritual growth to reach higher heights. You needed the adversity, resistance, and sometimes even hatred to propel you toward your destiny.

A couple of years back when I was training for a half marathon, I hired a personal trainer to teach me how to gain strength through weight training. I wanted to make sure I didn’t injure myself, and I knew that by creating muscle mass I would be less prone to injury.

During the first session the trainer worked me hard but took it a little easy on me. But after the first session he pushed me to the limit. He added more weight, created more resistance, and added even more repetitions.

During the session, it was awful. I’m not good at handling pain. I complained and nearly cried, but I did what he asked me because I knew I wanted to be stronger.

You might argue that I was paying him to put me through this adversity. While this is true, I couldn’t have gained muscle mass without the pain and resistance. I was hurting after every session, to the point of barely being able to walk the next day. But I was grateful, because I knew that the next time I encountered his tough workouts it would be easier. If I had avoided the workouts and the weight lifting I wouldn’t have seen any positive changes in my body.

Making the Decision to Let Go

Letting go of past hurt is as easy as a decision. Your ego might tell you otherwise, but it’s really that simple. Yes, you may have grown up in an abusive household. Yes, you may have had a spouse cheat on you. Any number of things may have happened in your past, however unfortunate. Yet the choice to hold on to the hurt or to let it go is all yours.

When you make the choice to let go, it doesn’t mean continuing to put yourself in the same situations that allowed the hurt in the first place. It means letting go and then making different choices that can put you on a different path.

Heal Your Heart Through Forgiveness

Once you make the conscious choice to release the hurt and pain, the only way to completely heal your heart is through the power of forgiveness. The act of forgiveness is extending grace to a person (including yourself) for what occurred. Offering forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re condoning the act itself or suggesting that it was acceptable. Forgiveness means that you’re choosing peace rather than the turmoil that the grievance holds.

When you hold on to the need to be right or to seek revenge in any way, you’re destroying your own heart. The other person has perhaps long forgotten what happened. Or maybe the person never realized she’d done anything wrong in the first place. By keeping the grievance alive in your heart, you are allowing the poison to grow.

I once had a client whose husband had committed suicide five years prior to our conversation. Even though they were separated when he took his life, she confessed that she was still furious at him for selfishly killing himself, as they had a young daughter who needed him.

I explained to her that by holding that anger she wasn’t hurting him (he was already dead), but she was hurting herself. I suggested that she write him a letter outlining all the reasons why she was angry, after which she was to place it on his grave or burn it to let go of all the negativity.

Letting go of hurt and forgiving are about keeping your heart space pure.

Healing the Spiritual Body

When man has love, he is no longer at the mercy of forces greater than himself, for he, himself, becomes the powerful force. — Leo Buscaglia

Human love is almost always conditional in at least one aspect or another. If you expect perfect, unconditional love from another human being you will constantly be disappointed. The only perfect love is one that comes from your spiritual Source.

The awakening you experience in the fourth through seventh chakras is through harnessing this unconditional love from your Source, and being able to use it in your interactions and relationships. In order to best achieve this, you will need to regularly practice balancing through letting go of the constant demands of the ego.

Those demands sound something like this:

“I don’t want to forgive him. He started it.”

“She hurt me first when I was being nice.”

“He doesn’t deserve a second chance.”

“She ruined my life with her betrayal.”

“I hate him.”

You will never lose your ego completely while you are alive. You can, however, hush it down a bit. This generally happens when you shift your internal conversation from “What’s in it for me?” to “What’s in it for you?”

Choosing Peace

The ego is always concerned about being hurt, affronted, and humiliated. It’s constantly in reaction mode. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer used to quote frequently from A Course in Miracles: “I can choose peace rather than this.”

When you’re confronted with expressions of hatred and fear, you can choose how you react to them. You can react with your ego or with your heart. It’s a simple choice. It’s not always easy to choose peace, but it’s a choice nonetheless. And you will be continually confronted with people who will give you opportunities to practice. There is no shortage of these people.

Choosing peace might mean you walk away with no comment. It might mean you answer with empathy and understanding. Or it could mean you no longer wish to associate with that person. Choosing peace means making the choice not to be offended or to let other people’s remarks harm you.

©2018 by Michelle S. Fondin.
Reprinted with permission from New World Library.
www.newworldlibrary.com

Article Source

Chakra Healing for Vibrant Energy: Exploring Your 7 Energy Centers with Mindfulness, Yoga, and Ayurveda
by Michelle S. Fondin

Positioned along the spinal axis, from the tailbone to the crown of the head, the seven main energy centers of the body are called chakras. Author Michelle Fondin explores and explains each one in the seven chapters of this book, demystifying their role in facilitating healing, balance, personal power, and everyday well-being. She offers meditations and visualizations, yoga postures, breathing exercises, and Ayurvedic dietary practices to learn about and work with the chakras.

Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book and/or download the Kindle edition.

About the Author

Michelle S. Fondin, author of Chakra Healing for Vibrant Energy  and The Wheel of Healing with Ayurveda is an Ayurvedic lifestyle counselor and as a yoga and meditation teacher. She holds a Vedic Master certificate from the Chopra Center and has worked with Dr. Deepak Chopra teaching yoga and meditation. Find out more about her work at www.michellefondinauthor.com.

Books by this Author

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