W elcome to the heart of your energy system—literally. The heart chakra is the midway point through your chakra system and, because of this, tends to act as a mediator between the lower earth chakras and the higher ethereal chakras. This chakra sits in the center of your chest and affects your heart, lungs, and breasts. Obviously, we need our heart, as it basically keeps us upright and tethered to our body. It’s also pretty difficult to breathe without lungs, even though for an asthmatic like me, it can be difficult to breathe with them. I know what it’s like when your lungs aren’t doing their best work, but they are vital nonetheless. Last, both men and women are susceptible to breast cancer, yet another reason to give attention to our vital heart chakra. Inside this chapter, you are going to explore seven issues the heart chakra deals with on a consistent and ongoing basis. These seven issues each have their own section in this chapter, as they all have important information for you regarding the health and well-being of your heart chakra.
The sections are as follows:
1. Fellowship
2. Love
3. Empathy
4. Compassion
5. Forgiveness
6. Kindness
7. Gratitude
While the sacral chakra is the emotional center of your chakra system, the heart chakra, also known as anahata, is the feeling center of it. Through ongoing research from the HeartMath foundation, we know that “the heart actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.” 7 This makes the heart center our first brain, our feeling brain, which means we process the majority of the information that comes our way via feeling. What we feel about something affects how the rest of the chakra system reacts to it. This makes the heart chakra the center of mission control for our entire energetic body. It is important to point out here that feelings are not emotions, as they have no embedded memory and no ingrained trigger to them. You can feel something without ever having experienced it before. This may seem like a subtle difference between feelings and emotions, but it is an important one, especially considering that the heart is constantly talking to the other chakras and is always pulling information up or down to create a complete picture of how the body and mind should or should not be acting or reacting in any given moment. The heart chakra needs to filter all sorts of information and make sure that it responds in a way that serves your overall health and well-being.
The heart chakra is sensitive and empathic, while also being resilient and strong. Because we are feeling beings, our heart is an echo chamber for any pain and suffering we see outside of ourselves as well as any goodness and compassion. Random acts of kindness can light us up and expand us, just as hearing about another mass shooting can tighten us up and make us contract. The heart filters a world that is split into two, so it is constantly working with duality, and in order to find a way through this split world, it has devised its own language. The language of the heart is a simple one. What you send out you get back, because for the heart, there is no you and there is no world. There is only energy that goes out and energy that goes in. Send out love, compassion, and kindness, and see oneness, love, compassion, and kindness come back to you. Send out fear, hate, and anger while focusing on separation and fear, then hate and anger will come back to you. It is a simple and elegant communication system with no room for confusion or misinterpretation. Whatever feeling you send out through your heart chakra is the feeling that comes back in through your heart chakra. This means we are not communicating with the vastness of our universe with our minds, but rather we are doing it with our hearts. People spend a lot of time concerned about their thoughts when really they should be more focused on the messages being transmitted by their heart. The language of the heart dictates the language of the mind, so let’s explore what your heart is saying.
Exercise
What message is your heart chakra beaming out into the world each and every second of the day and night, and is it the type of message you really want to be transmitting? The answer to this question is the card you will select as your heart chakra significator. Grab your deck and place it face up so you can see the cards. You will need to be able to see this card in order to connect a feeling to it. Think about what sort of energy you want to start focusing on in your heart, as this is the energy that will affect all your lower and higher chakras, and this card will be the language with which your heart will engage. Before you select your card for this chakra, take a moment to just connect with your heart chakra.
With your deck spread out in front of you, place both hands over your heart, right hand on top, and take a nice, deep breath. Settle yourself into your heart space as you take another breath, and apply a small amount of pressure to your heart chakra area. Gently press the hands into the chest, and feel the breath as it moves in and out of your lungs. Close your eyes for a moment, and just surrender to this breath-heart connection. Now remove your hands, taking another nice long and deep breath, and select your card. Some recommended cards are the Star, the Six of Pentacles, the Ace of Wands, the Ace of Cups, the Hierophant, Strength, Temperance, the Queen of Cups, and the Four of Wands. When you select your card, take it to your journal and write about how you feel with this energy in your heart and how you see this card communicating out into the world and bringing energy back.
I recommend seeing if you can also come up with a list of words that this card might speak through your heart. If these are words you are used to speaking on a daily basis, make it a practice to start incorporating them. For example, the words for the Star might be wishes, dreams, true north, travel, journeys in the dark, and direction. If some of these words are not in your normal day-to-day experience, think about spending more time talking about your dreams and wishes and finding ways to take more journeys. This card is teaching you a new language, a new way of communicating that perhaps you have not considered before. Let this card guide you through a new way of seeing, exploring, and creating a truly heart-centered world.
The heart likes to be around beings who have similar vibes. It will actively seek these beings out in many varied ways. This is not because it needs to belong somewhere but because it understands that there is no separation between itself and others. This is why most of us do better when we feel a sense of community, camaraderie, or fellowship. This could be the reason one of the catchphrases of the early twenty-first century has been “Find your tribe.” However, here in the heart, we seek these experiences to keep us in a specific vibrational state, not because we feel alone, left out, or alienated. This is a very important distinction to make. Fellowship itself does not necessarily mean friendly, nor does it mean you will be treated with open arms. Fellowship is a space where people come together for a common cause, a common experience, and a common sense of overall well-being. This could be done with one person or with one hundred people. There are no real hard-and-fast rules for how your heart will find fellowship. Conferences, conventions, expos, and festivals are places of fellowship. Offices, workspaces, board meetings, and Skype meetings are all spaces for fellowship. Churches, reiki circles, drumming circles, and meditation or yoga class are all places for fellowship. Hiking groups, sports clubs, and outdoor adventure clubs are also places for fellowship. Bookstores, author events, and book clubs are places for fellowship. I think you are starting to get the picture. Right now in your life, your heart has somewhere it goes for fellowship. You may not have connected the dots until now, but that is your heart chakra making sure it is around a vibration and energy it needs in order to assist you with optimal health and well-being. How smart your heart is!
So where do you go for fellowship?
Who are your people, and how do they make you feel?
Confession time. Until I started writing this section, I had not thought too hard about this aspect of the heart chakra. I had not really explored how the heart has its own call and seeks out its own likeness. I knew it on a theoretical level, but I hadn’t really thought about it seriously on a practical level. It has made me stop and pay closer attention to how my heart is connecting me to people, places, and things. It seems the heart bypasses the mind when it comes to fellowship. It is not so much interested in what the mind thinks we should be doing, based on the information the brain processes. No, the heart works with the deeper energy in all seven chakras to find us fellowship that will align us, balance us, and restore the chakra system. It does all this, without us even knowing about it, by sending out vibrational pulses, constantly matching us up with similar pulses, and guiding us into experiences that have the ability to heal us and keep us alive. That is quite extraordinary.
Exercise
Let’s take this another step and give your center for fellowship a significator. Recommended cards here are the Lovers, the Two of Cups, the Four of Wands, the Ten of Cups, the Ten of Pentacles, the World, and the Seven of Wands. I recommend you select this card intuitively, as it would give you the most accurate reading of how your center for fellowship is working, but you do not have to. Instead, you may wish to find a card that best aligns to how you want to see fellowship play out in your day-to-day experience, and that is perfectly fine. Once you have selected your card, take it to your journal and spend some time with it. Think about how this card is talking to your heart chakra, and see if you can write up a dialogue between them. See if you can let yourself imagine what a conversation between your heart chakra and this card would be like and what sort of topics these two like to talk about. There is obviously no wrong or right way to do this; just allow yourself to imagine and write.
Once you have done your journal work, place your significator card in front of you and find the connection significator card from the root chakra, the engagement card from the solar plexus chakra, and the pleasure significator card from the sacral chakra. Lay them out in the following spread:
• Card 1: Fellowship Significator
• Card 2: Connection Significator
• Card 3: Engagement Significator
• Card 4: Pleasure Significator
Here you will see how your heart is allowing you to connect, engage, and find pleasure in the realm of fellowship. This gives you a very visual picture of how your heart chakra gathers its intel and then sends you off on secret missions to find other beings with like vibes. With this spread, you can see all the communication between the chakras in living color, and it is fascinating to behold. So now that you are looking at these cards, is this conversation one you would have expected or is this all new information to you? Work with this spread in your journal and do the dialogue exercise with these cards, just like we did above with the fellowship significator card. Imagine how these cards are constantly chatting with one another. Think about the personalities behind the voices. See if you can imagine which cards are the serious ones and which ones are the cheeky ones. If you feel creatively inclined, you could even put these cards and their dialogue into a short story. Perhaps it could be a story of four friends conspiring to get a mutual friend (that would be you) back out into the world again. Place this conversation in a setting, like a coffee shop or at a sporting event. Get as involved with this story as you want. Just let your imagination play and see what bubbles out of you and onto the page. In other words, have fun, play, and let the energy of your heart chakra flow through you and into your journal.
Welcome to the most misunderstood issue and concept in humanity. I know that’s a bold statement—just bear with me. Love for the heart chakra is not the love you probably think about. This is an energy, a pure one, and an energy that doesn’t know good from bad but only how to give and receive. It does not judge, it does not question, and it has no condition of expectations. It asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. This is divine love, the love that flows in and out of your heart chakra day in and day out without you even knowing about it. The only time this love has problems is when you try to dictate who or what it should or should not flow to.
When we try to dictate the energy of love, things can, and do, go horribly wrong. If you have ever read or seen How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, you know what I am talking about. That story showed us the innocence of love, how it is not something we have any control over, and how it affects one’s heart and, ultimately, one’s view of themselves and the world in general. When we try to control the natural state of our heart chakra, we become closed off, suspicious, and bitter, and we may become susceptible to chest infections, breast issues, and heart problems. Closing off or strangling the natural flow of love from the heart center basically turns your fourth chakra into a backup second chakra. You push your emotions into your heart and start making emotion-based decisions. The heart is not an emotional center, and this is very important to understand. It is a feeling chakra, and it allows feelings to pump in, out, and around without any need to attach meaning, context, or judgment to them. Your fourth chakra should never function as a backup second chakra, yet unfortunately, that is exactly the way many people are running this particular chakra energy.
When I used to see reiki clients on a regular basis, I would see how they had pushed energy from the sacral into the heart all the time. When my wife got her aura camera, in a photo we had taken we could clearly see orange, reds, and yellows around the heart center instead of greens or pinks. I still believe it is because we keep trying to mold the energy of love into a conditional, emotional experience.
Exercise
Now this begs the question, what does heart chakra love look like to you?
It is time to find a significator for this energy. Recommended cards are the Ace of Cups, the Six of Pentacles, Three of Swords, Eight of Wands, Strength, the Hanged Man, Temperance, and the Empress. You may see that I have placed the Three of Swords in this lineup. I believe it is a fantastic card to show the energy of love because, like heart chakra love, the Three of Swords is a very misunderstood card. It is, however, not for everyone, and it might be a hard energy for you to work with, so be mindful of that as you move through the cards to find the right one for your significator. You will select this card deliberately and intentionally, so spread your cards out and find your love card. Once you have your card selected, take it to your journal and discuss how this will benefit your life and what challenges it may present as you move out of emotional conditions into a judgment-free relationship with love.
It is important to understand that this particular function of the heart chakra is not an easy one, because we are not trained or conditioned to love everything and everyone in our lives. We are taught to hide our hearts, to save them for someone special, to set boundaries around our love, and to never freely give of ourselves in any way. We are strongly programmed to expect something in return for our love and told that if we do not get it, then we are being used, and this person is not worthy of what we give them freely. It is not easy to admit that love doesn’t turn on and off like a tap, but rather it just flows all the time, without us doing anything. Our interference, our mind, and our emotional throttle block and try to stem this flow, which in turn causes us pain, suffering, and sometimes disease. Our misconceptions of what love as an energy is can possibly harm us.
Once you have journaled with your card and you feel you have nothing else to discuss at this time, place it in front of you face up. Pick up the rest of your deck and just hold the cards for a moment. Take a couple of nice, deep breaths and imagine a beautiful green or pink light radiating out of your chest moving down your arms and into your cards. As this light surrounds your cards, begin to shuffle them slowly, asking, “What does love want me to know today?” Shuffle until you feel you are done, the cards are infused, and your question has been answered. Now cut the deck, take the top card, and place it face up on top of your significator card. This is a direct message from your heart chakra, so read it carefully. If you need more clarification, repeat the process again and add another card or two. I do not recommend more than three cards and highly recommend you stick with just one. Take your card or cards to your journal and ponder the following questions:
• What message does love have for me today?
• Where can I apply this message in my life right now?
• How had I been resisting this message in the past?
As you answer these questions, you will more than likely go deeper and collect even more information for the heart to use later. This is good, and to be encouraged, so keep asking, keep exploring, and keep the heart chakra love flowing.
True empathy almost feels like an impossible thing. “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” the saying goes, but can we really ever do that? Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings. In most spiritual teachings, empathy is about being able to identify someone else’s behavior in yourself, allowing you to see that empathy acknowledges no separation from the outside world with the inside world of self. All of these give different ways to approach empathy, yet all of them require a pretty large shift in the way we perceive ourselves and the world of our creation. It is a shift that we have not all been taught or equipped with. Empathy is one of those things that sound good on paper and seems like a kind and decent thing to aspire to have. I am sure most of us think we do act with empathy when the need arises. However, the more I learn about the heart chakra, the more I question if we really understand empathy at all.
Empathy practiced through the mind is an exercise in trying to understand something about someone that we perceive as different and acknowledge that we are walking different paths, making different choices, and creating different karma and consequences. Empathy via the heart, however, asks us to view everything as ourselves, with no separation. The battle between the mind and heart is where we fail to enter into a true state of empathy, for as long as we view it as something that is asking us to see the world through the eyes of someone different to us, we are not in the vibration of empathy at all. Perhaps this means the saying becomes “Can you walk a mile in your own shoes as a refugee, a homeless person, a murderer, a cheat, a thief, or someone else you previously thought was different from you?”
Ho‘oponopono, a Hawaiian practice of forgiveness, was adapted and popularized in the early 2000s by Joe Vitale and Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len as a problem-solving method. Vitale and Len illustrate this form of heart chakra empathy beautifully. In the book Zero Limits, they discuss how Len cured an entire ward of certified mentally unstable patients, to the point where they had to close the ward down.8 He did this by doing nothing but “cleaning” himself, or to put it another way, using empathy so he could see himself as all the other patients.9 Len also never saw any of these patients in person; he just read their files and asked the question “What is it in me I see in these patients?” and started the ho‘oponopono process. This process is four short sentences:
I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
I love you.
Thank you.10
These are the words of a heart filled with empathy.
Exercise
Using these four simple statements, you are going to select your empathy significator. Pick up your deck and hold it close to your heart, repeat the ho‘oponopono lines three times, take a nice, deep breath, and then fan the cards out in front of you face down and select your card. If you have not drawn this card in the reserved aspect, please flip it and make it so. What is slightly different about this card compared to some of the significators you have selected thus far is this card is showing you a version of yourself that is coming up for what Dr. Len calls “cleaning.” This is the self that you are seeing reflected in the world around you that is begging for true heart chakra empathy. This card will show up in people around you and, by doing so, remind you that this version of yourself still needs healing, understanding, and love. Take this card to your journal and write on this version of yourself for as long as you feel you can, making all sorts of notes on personality traits, behavioral patterns, social etiquette, and the like. See if you can create a profile on this version of yourself, because this is really you putting your feet in the shoes of someone you are now seeing as not separate from yourself.
When you feel you have written all you can for one sitting, place your card on an altar, on top of a bookcase, or somewhere you can see it as you sit in front of it. Set a timer on your phone for two minutes. Light a candle, burn some sage or palo santo, and take some nice cleansing breaths. Hit the timer and, while looking at your card, say the ho‘oponopono statements out loud, and keep doing so until your timer beeps to let you know the two minutes are up. If possible, leave the candle burning for some time. However, if you are going to be leaving the house, by all means blow it out, and make sure you have nothing else left burning on your altar.
If you have time, take your card back to your journal and write with it again. See if doing some of the empathy work on it has shifted the way you view it or consider it. If you don’t have time to do the journal work right after doing the ho‘oponopono, then consider planning a time when you can do the exercise again and allow at least twenty minutes for journaling afterward.
You can do this exercise with your card as often as you feel called to. Each time you do it, make sure you do the journal work so you can document any shifts in energy or perceptions you are having. As you continue to work with empathy, you will also work on the lower chakras as well, so be mindful of things bubbling up from below that will be connected or tethered to the card or issue that is the focus of your empathy work.
Empathy in and of itself may still be a strange and impossible thing, but at least now you have a tool to assist you with connecting to the heart energy that it truly is.
Unlike empathy, compassion doesn’t require you to identify with a person or situation to connect with it on a feeling level. You can be compassionate without understanding the experience another sentient being is going through. Compassion means you have chosen to not make that suffering any worse. Compassion is something that comes easily and naturally to us, even though in our dog-eat-dog
world it seems compassion is becoming extinct. It can seem hard to come up with examples of compassion in our day-to-day lives, mainly because we tend not to be very compassionate with ourselves. Sometimes it feels like our hearts have been hardened to the suffering of the world, because it just feels like there is too much to bear. The media flashes us with pictures of war, famine, mass shootings, and aggression on a pretty consistent basis. Not that these are not important social issues, but the constant stream of bad news can overwhelm us. It can harden us and make us feel like we need to withdraw from our communities for our own emotional protection. It can make being compassionate feel like a chore, something we don’t always have the energy to participate in. However, compassion is an essential part of heart chakra energy. We need it to keep the energy center open, flowing, and healthy, which means it is important to have compassion working at some level of your life.
Exercise
In this exercise, you will find your compassion significator and then move it into a compassion spread. Your compassion significator will represent what compassion means to you. Look closely at the images for this card and don’t focus too much on the card name or the meaning of the card. Instead, allow yourself to be drawn to the visual image. It should move you in some way and stir feelings around the heart center. Recommended cards to look at in your decks might be Strength, the Star, the Ace of Cups, the Empress, the Hanged Man, the Devil reversed, Temperance, the Six of Pentacles, and the Five of Pentacles reversed.
Once you have your card selected, place it face up in front of you. Pick up your deck and hold it to your heart chakra. Take a couple of nice, deep breaths, and as you do, imagine a beautiful pink light coming out of your chest and into your cards. See this light weave its way around your deck, infusing your cards with compassion energy straight from your heart. Now begin to shuffle slowly, just focusing on the connection you have to your heart space and the cards. When you feel the deck has been shuffled enough, you are going to draw four cards and lay them around your compassion significator like so:
• Card 1: Your compassion significator.
• Card 2: Your compassion energy flowing to your immediate family.
• Card 3: Your compassion energy flowing to your work colleagues or employees.
• Card 4: Your compassion energy flowing to pets, animals, or the animal kingdom in general.
• Card 5: Your compassion energy flowing to your houseplants, garden, trees, or the natural world in general.
This spread is not meant to make you feel bad about yourself in any way. It is merely to show you where you feel safe opening your heart and where you do not. If you see cards that make you feel sad, despondent, or uncomfortable, just know that these are areas of your heart that are stepping forth for healing. Honor them not by trying to select another “better” card, but instead see them, thank them, and let them know that you are open to showering them with more compassion in the future. Take these cards to your journal and write about what you see. Explore these parts of your life that you don’t seem to have a good compassion connection with, and just allow yourself to observe why this might be without the need to judge or fix it.
The trick with heart chakra healing work is to understand that sometimes we don’t always feel safe to open our hearts because we have wounds that live in our heart chakra. This is perfectly okay and normal, and it is one of the reasons you are reading this book and doing your healing work. You are finding the parts of yourself that need the most love, compassion, kindness, and attention. If, perhaps, finding compassion for yourself or humanity is just too much for you right now, then start with an animal, a plant, a flower, or even a tree, especially if they end up with cards that show a nice compassion connection. That is really what this spread is doing, showing you where you are streaming compassion and where it is streaming back.
So what is it? Once you have identified it in your spread, shower it with compassion every single day and allow yourself to receive compassion back from it, because you will. Letting another living being shower you with compassion can be the first step in allowing yourself to be gentler with yourself and to heal some of those heart wounds you are still carrying. Just set an intention to slowly and gently open the heart chakra back up to compassion.
Forgiveness is probably one of the more complex issues we deal with here in the heart chakra, mainly because there are so many schools of thought on what forgiveness is and how one forgives. It would seem everyone has an idea about how you forgive, who you forgive, and why you forgive. I have to admit, none of them were very compelling to me for the longest time. As a survivor of domestic violence, I was always being told that in order to move on with my life, I had to forgive and let go. This felt impossible to do. To forgive the person who intentionally and strategically hurt me over and over again, to see the person who enjoyed inflicting pain upon me free and clear of their sins, seemed such a wrong thing to ask of anyone. The greater the pain, the harder forgiveness becomes, which is why I am not going to tell you how you should personally form a relationship with forgiveness. It is much too intimate. Instead, I shall show you how I came to a place of peace with it and how I have taught it to my clients.
For me, forgiveness is about forgiving yourself. That is how I have been able to use forgiveness as an act of healing and an act of self-love and compassion. When I was coming to terms with the dark and horrific elements of my abuse, I slowly but surely started to forgive myself. I had to dig deep into forgiving the person I used to be, the person who allowed such things to be done to them, the person who thought there was no way out, the person who gave up their power, and the version of myself that I never, ever wanted to be again. That was where I directed my forgiveness. I had to stand in the shoes of the person I now am and send that forgiveness, kindness, and compassion to the person I used to be, even though it is difficult to see that version of myself, the version I pushed away into the shadows, because she was broken, weak, and unacceptable.
This act of forgiving myself has become a lifelong process, as there are so many layers to unpack. It has also become a lifelong process for some of my clients as well. My path to forgiveness may not be your path, and that is okay. Regardless of which path you choose to take, the following exercises will be helpful and show you just how well you are doing, and how much more work you have to do, with healing this part of your heart chakra energy.
Exercise
To begin or deepen your forgiveness work, you need to select a significator card. This card should show the energy of who you want to be as the person in the act and flow of forgiveness. Keep in mind that forgiveness is an energy. It flows through us, in us, and around us, so think about who or what makes you feel like you are being a vessel for this energy. Recommended cards are the High Priestess, the Hierophant, all the queens, Strength, Temperance, the Star, and of course Judgement, the ultimate card of self-forgiveness. Once you have selected your card, remembering you do not have to go with any of the ones I have recommended, take this card to your journal and explain why this card instills you with a feeling of forgiveness. Get into as much detail as possible. You have to be able to explain clearly how and why you see this card as a representation of someone who is good at forgiving, and why you want this card to assist you in your forgiveness healing journey. Take your time with your journal, and don’t rush it.
Once you have finished with your journal writing, pick up your deck and remove the fives from it. Lay them out in front of you in a row in the following order: Five of Pentacles, Five of Swords, Five of Wands, and Five of Cups. Place your forgiveness significator card above this row of fives. Starting with the Five of Pentacles, say out loud, “I forgive myself for …” and then say whatever comes to mind. It might be something like “I forgive myself for not asking for help,” “I forgive myself for making life harder than it needs to be,” or “I forgive myself for keeping distance between myself and those who could bring me comfort.”
When you feel you have nothing left to say, pick up the Five of Swords and say out loud, “I forgive myself for …” and again say whatever comes to mind. It could be something along the lines of “I forgive myself for needing to be right all the time,” “I forgive myself for being bossy,” “I forgive myself for always being on the defensive,” or “I forgive myself for wanting things my way.” Keep going until you run out of things to say.
Then move on to the Five of Wands and repeat the process. You might say things like “I forgive myself for always being reactive,” “I forgive myself for needing to be combative,” “I forgive myself for feeling angry all the time,” or “I forgive myself for being hard on myself and others.” Again, just keep going until you feel spent.
Now move on to the last card, the Five of Cups. Repeat this process one last time. Things that might come up are “I forgive myself for being a bit of an emotional mess,” “I forgive myself for dwelling in the past,” “I forgive myself for not being able to let things go,” or “I forgive myself for constantly feeling overwhelmed.” Again, just keep going until you have run out of things to say.
If you feel inclined, you might wish to head back to your journal and write about some of things that this exercise bought up, and if you need to have a good cry, do that as well. Crying is deeply healing, as it allows us to release blocked trauma.
Working with the energy of forgiveness is never easy and is always messy, so remember to be kind and compassionate to yourself as you finish up this section. I recommend going for a nice cleansing walk after you have completed the above exercise to clean out your aura, ground your energy back into your body, and allow your heart chakra to feel connected to the vibrations of the everyday world.
The Dalai Lama is constantly saying in his interviews and writing in his books that even though he is just a simple monk, his true religion is kindness. As a heart chakra warrior, his holiness believes kindness to be so important that we should make it a devotional practice. The idea of kindness as a form of devotion is very different from kindness as an act. It pushes us to embrace kindness as a way of life, as a philosophy, and not as something we do because it seems appropriate in the moment. For most people, kindness is something that is done for other people. We see it as a bit of a choice, such as you can either be an asshat or you can be kind. However, if we take on the Dalai Lama’s devotional practice of kindness, there are no choices, and we just walk through the world as a beacon of kindness. In essence we would become kindness, much the way all spiritual devotees become a manifestation of their faith.
Like in all devotional practices, it would mean we have to start with ourselves first, and this is where the majority of us trip up. It is always easier to project out of ourselves than it is to be present and internally focused. It is interesting that gratitude journals have become such a big deal over the past few years but not kindness journals. Imagine how different your life would be if you recorded how many times a day you were kind to yourself. Contemplate for a second how your day would flow if you started it by opening up your heart chakra and automatically went into kindness devotion the moment you rolled out of bed. Think about how differently your internal script would be if the first thing you did each day was not check the news, not check your phone, not think about all the things that cause you stress, but instead do something kind for yourself and thought about how you would spread that spark of kindness throughout the rest of your day. Devotional practices are nothing more than perception filters, and they let us view ourselves and everything around us based on that practice. I can’t speak for you, but I for one am all for the Dalai Lama’s new religion of kindness and will gladly pick up this new lens to view the world and my place in it.
Exercise
The first step in being a heart chakra kindness warrior is to deliberately and intentionally pick your significator card. This card should represent either how you see yourself as a kindness warrior or how you would like to see yourself, a version of you that you are committed to growing into. Card recommendations for this are the Knight, Queen, and King of Cups; Strength; the Seven of Wands; the Three of Pentacles; the Knight, Queen, and King of Pentacles; the Emperor; the Empress; Justice; Judgement; Temperance; and the World. Make sure you select a card that you feel some sort of connection with on a heart chakra level, as this is the energy center the card works with.
Once you have your card, hold it up to your heart chakra and take a few deep breaths while you make a deeper connection to the card itself. Now take it to your journal and write about how you see yourself as this card, either in the present moment or in the future. Imagine yourself and the image becoming one. Feel the clothes they are wearing, and notice how they fit on you. Allow their heart chakra, kindness, and devotee energy to fill you, and write about how it feels to have that much kindness pumping through your body. Take as much time as you need with this journal work. There is no need to rush on to the next part of this exercise.
When you feel you have written as much as you can with your card, pick up your deck, leaving your significator out and facing you, and hold the deck to your heart chakra. Take a few nice, deep breaths, and imagine pink and gold light coming out of your heart and enveloping the deck in your hands. See this light infusing the deck and filling it with the energy of kindness. When you feel your deck has received all the energy it can, place it down in front of you and close your eyes for a moment as you ground your body back into the moment. Keeping your significator card where you can see it, pick up your deck and start to shuffle, pulling a card for each of the following questions:
• Card 1: How can I be kinder to myself ?
• Card 2: How can I bring more kindness to my home?
• Card 3: How can I bring more kindness to my work?
• Card 4: How can I bring more kindness to my day?
I recommend doing more journal work with these cards, especially if you happened to get a card or cards that seem odd, misaligned, or confusing, such as the Tower, the Devil, the Ten of Swords, the Five of Cups, or the Moon, as they may require you to pause and dig a little deeper. Just do not reject whatever card or cards show up. Trust that it is the correct one, and it has a healing message for you regarding the devotional practice of kindness and how to bring more of it into your life. Explore why you think this card seems odd or why your first reaction is to reject it and draw another card. At this point in our work together, also notice if a triggering card keeps reappearing in the exercises. You might have a card or a few cards that have been stalking you all the way through the bottom chakras, and here in the heart, it is asking for your attention. If you feel inclined to take any triggering cards one step further, use them as a point of meditation and see what other messages these cards have for you and your healing work. Just remember, kindness does not need to be an act. It can be a way of living your entire life.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have heard of gratitude work. It has become the latest and greatest tool in the hipster New Age. Now don’t get me wrong, gratitude work is important and plays a role in keeping and maintaining the energy of the heart chakra, but as you have seen throughout this chapter, it is not the only area we should be focused on. One of the reasons gratitude has become so popular in the last decade is that it is linked to abundance. Many successful entrepreneurs have a gratitude story, the kind of story that gets people hooked on the idea of gratitude work as a quick fix to their financial problems. Allowing the money part to hook you means you miss the larger and deeper work gratitude does in all areas of your life. Gratitude is a way of looking at the world as if it is divinely blessed, and when we apply this lens to our own life, it helps us shift out of a lack lens into a more supported and abundant lens.
There is no doubt that the more grateful and thankful we are, the more we will see things to be grateful and thankful for. This is vital information for the heart chakra, for as the heart feels your gratitude, it sends a message to the brain telling it to be on the lookout for more things that make you feel that way. The heart keeps collecting information, the brain keeps looking out, and before you know it, your material world has morphed into a version of your perception. Gratitude is not the only energy that works this way, yet it is the one that has risen to fame in the most spectacular way. From a heart chakra perspective, gratitude is a necessary ingredient for health and well-being because of how it makes us feel and how it opens the heart center to receive more of that feeling. Gratitude is wonderful at opening our hearts, as it slowly but surely pries open our clamped and closed heart chakra and gets us to believe that we are supported and provided for.
Gratitude can be the first step to reconnecting us with our lower chakras, which we can cut off or throttle due to trauma. It is one of the reasons a lot of healers and therapists ask their clients and patients to either keep a gratitude journal or write a daily gratitude list. The very act of writing these things out connects us to the third chakra through engagement, the second chakra through memory, and the first chakra through connection. Drawing this energy down to the root and then back up to the heart is very healing as it keeps chakra energy flowing. This is really the reason I like gratitude work so much. It is because of the power it has to reconnect the bottom chakras and get energy moving again. Being healthy will top being wealthy any day, for as long as you have your health, you can achieve anything. Therefore, make sure that each and every morning, your health is on that list. Even if it is not currently where you would like it to be, put it on there anyway.
Exercise
Now it’s time to select your gratitude significator, keeping in mind that this card must relate to a feeling of what it is to be in a state of gratitude. You might pick this card visually, allowing the images to invoke a feeling, or you may select it by your understanding of the cards themselves. Recommended cards include the Star, the Hanged Man, the Magician, any of the aces, the Three of Cups, the Nine of Pentacles, and the Six of Cups. When you have selected your card, take it to your journal and write about how this card relates to gratitude and why you feel it is the best fit for your gratitude work. This card will play a key role moving forward in how you view gratitude and how you use it to draw energy up from your lower three chakras. Keep that in mind as you do your journal work.
Once you have selected your gratitude significator, put it with your card for engagement, your card for memory, and your card for connection from the previous sections, and let’s see visually how they work together. One of the fabulous things about working with tarot this way is the visual mapping magic it brings with it. Put the cards in a row as follows:
• Card 1: Heart Chakra Gratitude Significator
• Card 2: Solar Plexus Chakra Engagement Significator
• Card 3: Sacral Chakra Memory Significator
• Card 4: Root Chakra Connection Significator
This is how the energy is moving up and down, starting at the heart and opening up a pathway down to the root. Then, it is bringing that root energy, along with all the information from the lower chakras, back up to the heart. There really is something magical about being able to see this in the images of the cards, as it allows us to see the story that is being told inside our chakras and is a story we would not normally have access to.
What’s your story? How are your chakras talking to each other while you are in the act of gratitude? This question can be answered in your journal or via meditation, though I recommend you start with your journal and see if you can come to any aha moments there first. Oftentimes, we have the most amazing breakthroughs when we give ourselves permission to just write and dump it all out on the page. Knowing how gratitude is working in your life is tremendously helpful, and now you have a visual map—a magical doorway, if you will—to how your heart communicates with your lower chakras just by finding things for which you are thankful. I think you just found something else to add to your gratitude list.
Now that you have worked through the seven key issues of the fourth chakra, it is time to do some energy healing work on all that you have discovered, all that has bubbled up, and all that has presented itself for cleaning and clearing. Grab your tarot deck and get out the significator cards for the issues covered in this chapter. Select your significator card for the heart chakra and place it in front of you. This card is going to be the middle card in your heart chakra healing mandala wheel.
Your card order is as follows:
• Card 1: Heart Chakra Significator
• Card 2: Fellowship Significator
• Card 3: Love Significator
• Card 4: Empathy Significator
• Card 5: Compassion Significator
• Card 6: Forgiveness Significator
• Card 7: Kindness Significator
• Card 8: Gratitude Significator
Your center card is going to be the energy you will see flowing in and out of the other cards, as if a beautiful pink or green smoke wisps out of the card and starts to tickle the other cards around it. As we move into the visualization part of this exercise, move your hands over the cards as you say the following affirmations for each of the cards surrounding your heart chakra significator. The tarot mandala helps anchor your energy healing work and allows you to engage more fully with the overall process. Your affirmations are as follows:
• Card 2: I am actively supported.
• Card 3: I am a vessel for divine love.
• Card 4: I am cleaning myself so I can be of service to others.
• Card 5: I am constantly seeing the world through a compassionate lens.
• Card 6: I am holding a space of forgiveness for myself each and every day.
• Card 7: I am practicing the devotional art of kindness.
• Card 8: I am truly grateful for all that is, was, and is on its way.
Find somewhere comfortable and quiet, where you won’t be disturbed for up to twenty minutes. Place your cards where you can see them and start rubbing your palms gently together as you focus on your breathing. Rub your hands together for about forty seconds, activating the energy centers in your palms. You might start to feel some heat in your hands, and this is good. Now place your hands over your heart and focus on your breath, inhaling through your nose. Feel the breath as it hits the back of your throat, fills your lungs, and expands your chest. As you exhale from the mouth, feel the breath leaving your body and deflating the lungs. Let the breath work become automatic, and shift your focus to your cards, starting with the center card, which is your heart chakra significator. Visualize the pink or green smoke gently rising from the card and twirling around the wheel you have created around it. Each time you exhale, the smoky wisps extend farther and farther. Sit like this for a few minutes, just doing the breath work and keeping your hands on your heart as you feel your chest rise and fall, and visualize the smoky pink or green energy infusing your spread.
When you feel ready, move your hands to your tarot mandala and move them along each card as you speak the corresponding affirmation statements out loud. Read through the entire list three times. Once you have finished, just relax and focus on the breath work, placing the hands back over your heart. As you inhale, feel the smoky pink or green energy coming into your nose, hitting the back of your throat, filling up your lungs, moving into your chest, and infusing the heart chakra. Relax into this, as you inhale all this lovely infused energy, letting it clean and clear your heart chakra as it embeds your affirmations into your chakra. When this feels complete, remove your hands and just breathe normally for thirty to forty seconds. Thank your cards, and you are done.
You can repeat this simple tarot healing session anytime you want, and by all means, journal about how the session made you feel or any revelations you had during the session. The more you know, the more you inquire, the more you heal.
7. “The Science of HeartMath,” HeartMath, accessed January 15, 2020, https://www.heartmath.com/science.
8 . Ihaleakala Hew Len and Joe Vitale, Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Health, Wealth, Peace, and More (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), chapter 2.
9 . Len and Vitale, Zero Limits, 31–32.
10. Len and Vitale, Zero Limits, 32.