THE HEART CHAKRA (ANAHATA) AND THE SELF-ESTEEM CHAKRA (VAJRAHRIDAYA)
Anahata, the Heart Chakra
• Function: connection to self, others, nature, life, spirit
• Attributes: love, knowledge, inspiration, trust, hope, joie de vivre, enthusiasm, empathy, confidence, desire, abundance, generosity, fullness, truth, passion, forgiveness, compassion, happiness
• Attribute paradox: “I can’t trust my heart.”
• Common issues in anahata: sadness, loneliness, lack of enthusiasm, confidence, or trust
A healthy heart chakra produces an abiding joy in being alive and a reverence for nature. It makes life worth living by connecting us to self, others, nature, and spirit. It provides a sense of fullness and buoyancy similar to the uplifted feeling we have when walking in nature and we come upon a beautiful landscape.
Our language reveals an intuitive understanding of the positive aspects of the heart chakra located in the center of the chest—“My heart leapt.” “My heart is full.” When the heart chakra is in its healthiest state, life takes on a rosy glow and there is a sense of joie de vivre and possibility. A samskaric heart chakra produces sadness, loneliness, and emptiness and if very samskaric, depression and hopelessness. The heart chakra is one of the organs where the subtle body energy can sometimes be “felt” and, again, our language reveals an intuitive association: “heavy heart,” “heartbreak,” “my heart sank.” With rejecting experiences, contracting, heavy, or squeezing sensations are felt in the chest contrary to the fullness and expansive warmth of loving experiences.
In the heart chakra, we leave the self-centered I-consciousness of the solar plexus chakra and step into “not two” consciousness—we move from duality to oneness. In the solar plexus chakra, we see ourselves as the center of the universe, and in the heart chakra we have a sense of oneness with everything.
The heart chakra element is air—the breath of life. It connects to the energy of life and the energy of spirit. The word “spirit” is derived from the Latin “spiritus,” which means both breath and spirit.
We all need to be respected, heard, understood, and to feel that we matter to the people in our lives. This empathic attunement strengthens the heart chakra and we feel a healthy sense of connection to and trust in others. When we feel loved and cared for, we are able to love and care for ourselves and others. As Francine put it, “Attention is the first currency.”
The opposite too holds true—when someone is not fully connected to themselves, they cannot fully connect to others. Connection requires interaction, engagement, and understanding. A parent may really try, but the deep mind cannot be fooled and it will pick up on any lack of “connection energy” and it will have an impact. Maybe the child will see that you are not really listening or fully engaged or you don’t quite love yourself fully, or you do not have passion for life and will pick up “disconnection energy” as a samskara or samskaras. You can’t pretend to really connect—either you have “connection energy” or you don’t.
Sara felt a lack of connection to others, so she tried to make up for it. This came up while working at the heart:
… My superpower is to be a chameleon and make everyone feel like I find them interesting. I am not connecting—I am just stroking their ego.
Marilyn was working on her lack of self-confidence. With Traya she realized that although her parents were enthusiastically supportive, it didn’t ring true:
… I couldn’t have been so wonderful at everything they said that I was. I knew I couldn’t believe them or trust them so I didn’t know what to believe about myself.
It is lack of connection with significant others, loss, hostility, betrayal, abandonment, and disappointment in people that most impacts the heart chakra.
Daniela generally focuses on the negative aspects of what is going on around her. She believes that people are trying to “get one over” on her. She carries a “fighting energy” as she often gets into minor scrapes with people and is in a relationship where there is frequent fighting. These memories came up at her heart chakra:
… I took part in every extracurricular activity in school and often stayed over at friends’ houses to escape the constant fighting at home.
… My best friend moved away when I was fourteen years old and then my aunt died.
… I felt alone without being alone. There was a general vibe of loss and melancholy weighing on me over the years.
Fighting is a disconnecting energy and so is loss. These were both samskaric in Daniela’s heart chakra. To experience loss, there doesn’t need to be a death. Even if the person is in your life or in your home, if they are inaccessible, then that is a loss of connection energy. Daniela’s fighting family was inaccessible and now her husband is alternatingly angry and shutting down. It is not that they choose to be unavailable; they are like Sara—unable to pull off connection because of their own wounded hearts. Sara struggles with her need for love and her conviction that she is not worthy of it. While working with the Traya techniques at the heart, she said:
… I feel that I am living just on the surface with people. I feel like no one is closer than arm’s length. I want to access a deeper level of connection but I am afraid that I am not there.
We explored this limitation:
… Every time I feel accessed by others I get defensive. I am never comfortable being in the regard of someone.
Then we explored the origin of this defensiveness:
… I am articulate because my inner landscape is words. I describe things because I cannot feel them.
… With friends I was low in the pecking order. When I was myself it was so bad.
… I always walked around thinking they were right. How could so many people be wrong?
… My adoption was my original wound—unwanted. And everything just built on that.
… I always feared my adopted parents didn’t really want me. I wasn’t theirs.
Confidence and Trust
In his book The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey observes the importance of trust in all aspects of life.
There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization, nation, economy, and civilization throughout the world—one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love. … That one thing is trust.12
Just as important is self-trust. The heart chakra’s self-trust helps guide us through life. As noted, this develops from empathic authentic connections and a sense of safety with others.
The opposite of trust is distrust or paranoia. We are paranoid when we have an abiding sense or suspicion that people will harm us in some way. Sara had this: “I expect to walk into a room and people will whisper negative things. Kids did that in school.”
Kara is attending grad school interviews at three institutions. She is dreading the part of the process where she sits down with a group of professors and answers their questions. In anticipation, her heart beats rapidly and “I almost can’t breathe.” She says she has prepared well and can’t understand why she is distressed beyond normal interview jitters. We wanted to clear the way for a successful interview. We did Traya at the heart.
… When I was a teenager I fell off my bike and broke my arm. I had to call my mom to come and get me and take me to the doctor. Instead of concern, she was yelling, “Why aren’t you more careful? Now I have to drop what I am doing and take you to the doctor.” It becomes all about her and she unleashes her dragon anger. Whatever you are going through is nothing. I finally learned to stop going to her.
When you can’t trust your own parents to be there for you, you project that distrust on to other people—particularly authority figures. Not only did her mother abandon her emotionally in her time of need, but she also lashed out at her. The resulting imprint is that you cannot trust people to understand you and that something bad will happen when you are in a vulnerable position with people. Confidence and trust are interdependent. We must trust others to have confidence in them and we must trust ourselves to have confidence in ourselves. Kara’s “trust energy” is damaged so she can’t trust herself to do a good job even though she knows the material well. She can’t trust the professors to be pleasant and supportive. She can’t trust life in the sense of knowing that everything will work out for the best. So she is afraid. She felt better after the session for several reasons: First, she was able to understand where this free-floating fear was coming from; second, at the end of the exploration when bringing in positive energy, two words appeared in her mind—“fearlessness and confidence”—and they brought tears to her eyes. Most importantly, by surfacing this distrust energy she now has less of it in her mind to cause fear and interfere with the interview process and her interactions with the interviewers. This dynamic with her mother was intense and chronic, so it will take some more work to completely heal it, but she is on her way. The interview went well and she later received her acceptance letter into the graduate program of her choice.
The relationship with a therapist is particularly beneficial in healing the heart chakra. Positive imprints counter the negative ones when the therapist understands her and she feels safety in her vulnerability without judgment or criticism. She has a place where it is “all about her.” With both a healing relationship and the Traya work, she is well on her way to healing her heart chakra and activating its positive functions.
As trust, especially self-trust, is the key to maneuvering through life, I am providing another example of how trust energy becomes damaged and of the destructive results of that damage. This is an example from the memoir Holy Hell by Gail Tredwell:
In my youth I had been a loyal friend and had gone out of my way to please. I never gave up on friendships even when the loyalty I displayed was far from reciprocated. I had one girlfriend in particular who was fine when it was just the two of us, but when another girl came into the picture, she would turn on me. One day the three of us were out having coffee and I briefly left the table for a bathroom visit. Upon return I began sipping my coffee, and the sight of that sent my friend and her accomplice into a fit of hysterical laughter. I later learned that the new girl had spat in my drink. … Growing up I experienced many similar incidents, and I sometimes felt so lonely and dejected that I would head to the nearby park and play on the swings as I shed tears. … Despite my broken heart I didn’t have it in me to be mean in return, let alone to stand up for myself.13
She also describes a lack of connection to her parents and siblings at home. Thus, she was vulnerable and energetically “primed” for abuse in the external world. In not standing up for herself, she abandoned herself—another heart chakra wound. The abuse came from her “friends” and later, as she describes in her book, abuse from a guru to whom she had devoted her life. She wonders why she continued to abandon herself in her relationship with the guru and stuck around for twenty years. When trust energy is off, you can also trust the wrong people too fast because you don’t trust yourself to know who to trust.
Trust and love go hand in hand and if we are not trusted we will not feel loved. Marla feels that her distrustful husband doesn’t love her:
… He doesn’t trust me to have friends—I might cheat. He has missed the essence of me and doesn’t know me.
At some point in working with the heart chakra, the issue of man’s inhumanity to man is raised. When I worked with Francine at the heart chakra, the following came up:
… I want to believe in the basic goodness of people, but that is like a trap door. No hope that people will ever stop hurting each other.
Indeed it is a vicious circle; samskaras in the solar plexus and heart chakras create states of mind that drive people to justify hurting each other, and then new samskaras are created that then drive more hurt. It is urgent that we heal these energies in ourselves and free our positive energy to contribute to a healthier humanity.
Love
The sun transmits most of its energy in the green part of the visible spectrum where the heart chakra resonates. Therefore, it can be said that love is the dominant force in the solar system if not the universe. Love is an energy like every other state of mind. If we are loved as children, our love energy is strong and we feel self-love as well.
Jane has many people who like her and want to be around her as she has a good sense of humor and is attractive and considerate. Her abiding feeling that keeps her from closeness with others or herself is her lack of self-love. Her belief is that “people don’t like me and I am incapable of connecting.” Traya at the heart revealed the following:
… My parents didn’t like me. They treated me with disdain and annoyance. I didn’t do anything right. Everything about me is repulsive.
… Love can flip into hate.
She believes that she can only be worthy if someone else loves her, but if they know her they won’t love her despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. It is a trap that keeps her disconnected from people and supports her abiding sense of unworthiness.
When one feels important to significant others, one feels loved. Donna was under-employed but was unable to muster the effort to seek work more on her level:
… My job helps me to hate myself. I reject myself because I have been rejected by my father my whole life.
Inez grew up in a divorced family. Both parents remarried when she was nine. She is having difficulty finding a loving relationship:
… I feel like my father is just not that into me. He moved to another state with his new family after the breakup and when I wanted to be more included he would say, “You should be here more.” Like it was up to me.
… He always bitched and moaned that he was not spending enough time with me, but when I visited he would leave me alone.
… My grandmother would always visit my aunt and not us. I felt that we were the back-burner people.
Once the impact of the lack of parental love (or ability to demonstrate it) is understood, one can feel stuck. “How can I ever heal if I can never get that love from them of which I see they are incapable of giving?” The good news is that we don’t need to get the love from outside anymore. We just need to remove the samskaras so that the love energy inherent in the heart can bloom and we can feel the fullness and joy that comes with it abiding in our consciousness. Then we love ourselves and all beings and we will have better loving relationships in our lives.
Compassion
As our heart heals and we have a clearer understanding of why people suffer, compassion arises for those with heavy hearts and fearful minds. We have some distance from our own solar plexus chakra’s suffering and see how easily it trapped us. We realize that most of the problems human beings have with each other come from negative samskaras in the heart chakra and the solar plexus chakra and the resulting disconnection energy. We see that human beings are wired for love and compassion and that what is in us also permeates the universe. This is truly miraculous and answers Einstein’s question, “Is the universe friendly?”
Self-compassion takes the form of self-care. That means that we do everything we can to stay healthy through exercise, diet, and lifestyle. We take care of health issues without putting them off. We take steps to resolve difficulties in relationships and stand up for ourselves when necessary. We do these things for several reasons but primarily because we want to feel better.
One of the often encountered wounds at the heart is self-abandonment related to not standing up for ourselves:
Ellen: … I put up with mean friends.
Joe: … Kids in school insulted me and I didn’t respond.
When we have compassion for ourselves, we make sure that we stand up for ourselves because we know that we will feel better.
Forgiveness
As we increase our connection energy, forgiveness naturally appears because you cannot feel connected and still hold resentment. Remember that this is a process of healing that is driven by truth. People sometimes too soon say, “I forgive him/her.” This is just an idea that is not backed up by real forgiveness energy. They have not healed their wounds in the heart chakra so cannot really forgive deeply in their hearts—only in their heads. I have heard it said that “premature forgiveness is like putting icing on a burnt cake.” On the other hand, when true forgiveness (the heart chakra attribute) arises as one progresses with Traya, it is most welcome.
Sheila had a distant and painful relationship with her mother who could sometimes be cruel. She is elderly now and Sheila after a visit said, “It is a great gift to feel unconditional love for my mother. Taking her out and spending time with her, I no longer want something from her and she can no longer hurt me. I can see her beyond her wounds and I feel my open heart where it was always closed tight. It is a true joy.”
The other side of this is when people sometimes feel they are blaming their parents unfairly and don’t want to “dump” on them. My response is that it is truth that heals and it is true that they were wounded by some of their parents’ behaviors even if their parents didn’t mean to hurt them. You cannot have healing without accepting the truth. Then you can let go and reconnect with them in a new and deeper way.
Abundance and Generosity
The heart chakra connects us to life. Saving money is a life-affirming behavior because we are trusting in a future for ourselves and we care enough about ourselves to be responsible with our resources—this enhances our abundance. This is done without clinging as trust in life encourages generosity. We trust that there is enough and that as abundance flows toward us we don’t have to squeeze our fists shut but rather open our hands wide. All of the heart chakra attributes bring joy, and generosity is one of the most pleasurable. Generosity is a sign of freedom.
Abundance comes from healthy heart chakra energy that is beyond the solar plexus chakra’s limited perspective of grasping and clinging. When the heart energy is healthy, we are connected to the exuberant abundance of nature and generous, limitless spirit. Selfless desire replaces craving and we desire what is best for both ourselves and others. If we are connected to ourselves, we take care of ourselves, and then we have abundant health, we eat well, we don’t smoke or drink to excess, we do yoga and meditation, and we don’t do things that are unhealthy. This is not a willpower issue. We eat healthy because it is good for us and makes us feel good. We find our true work, which we love, and earn money too so we are doubly happy. A healthy heart chakra attracts positive situations—we are connected to more people and have more opportunity. We trust ourselves and, therefore, make the best choices.
When we live authentically, we have the support of the universe and we find that we always have what we need in both quality relationships and material abundance.
When we have authentic abundance generated by positive energy within, it does not contribute to a disconnection from others who don’t have as much. Raina came from a wealthy family. Her father’s unbalanced relationship to abundance and lack of authentic connection produced samskaras in her heart chakra:
… I felt the hypocrisy in the home. Father was a business mogul and his thing was how he had achieved more than his family—better than others didn’t make sense. He was constantly comparing plus or minus.
Her father had abundance but it wasn’t authentic. It didn’t come from the positive heart chakra attribute, and, therefore, he used it to buoy himself up at the expense of others—a behavior resulting from negative samskaras in both the heart and solar plexus chakras.
This is an example of a phenomenon I call “empty opulence.” There is plenty of money and status but a significant lack of the connection energy that one really needs—leaving one with a sense of emptiness in the heart.
The solar plexus chakra too needs to be healed or it may interfere with our generosity and thus with the flow. Its clinging, grasping, overly rational, and limited perspective can get in the way. For example, when the earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, the destruction was overwhelming. I heard someone say, “Giving money to Haiti is like throwing good money down a hole. There are so many problems they can never be fixed.” The overactive, problem-solving, rational mind drowned out the heart energy. So we really have to understand our minds and how imbalances impact not only us but also the world.
Desire and Passion
The heart wants what it wants; do it with all your heart; devote your heart to it; wholehearted; my heart was not in it; in my heart of hearts … These are some of the terms that reveal an intuitive association of desire and passion with the heart.
The wanting in the heart comes from our deepest desire. Doing something to one’s “heart’s content” provides a deep inner satisfaction. The heart chakra moves us to live wholeheartedly. It gives us the strength of purpose to self-actualize.
Tela realized that she is focused more on what she doesn’t want than what she wants. Her wanting energy is off:
… I was never allowed to have any wants growing up. The ones I did have weren’t fulfilled.
Ellen’s artistic abilities were discouraged as a child while she was encouraged to focus on academics:
… Nothing that I ever wanted was ever acknowledged. No one ever wanted me to be myself.
She is now an adult but is still afraid to acknowledge her talents and her desires. Her deep mind is encouraging her to follow her heart and do what she really wants—creative pursuits to bring art back into her life.
Violet fears that it is futile to want things. Traya revealed that her brother and niece died before their last wishes could be fulfilled—each wanted to go on a cruise before they died. Her brother was in a difficult marriage and once said to Violet, “I don’t want to be with her until I die.” He was.
Violet once told me, “My mother didn’t want to be fat and play bingo either. I don’t want to be like them. I want to get the few things that I want. I want to help people. I feel that is my purpose.”
Aesthetic Sense
The desire for beauty is one of the most basic human desires. When we have the resources, we make ourselves and our surroundings more beautiful. Beauty uplifts the heart because the nature of the world is beauty and we connect to it in the heart chakra. If we are forced to live in an area that is not beautiful, there will be a negative effect on this chakra. When we encounter beauty, our heart leaps. The sense of awe and wonder we get when in nature comes from the heart. Of course, like any other attribute it can be unbalanced. Gold faucets are repulsive when there are so many in the world without.
Natural beauty is healing and connects us to life and spirit. As we saw in chapter 2, we are intimately connected to nature by means of the five natural elements in our bodies and our psyches. When in nature we feel this synergy and, if we listen closely, we can even hear spiritual messages.
Energy for Life
To find our way forward in life we must follow our hearts. This has been said countless times at high school and college graduations. However, having a want without the energy to back it up doesn’t work.
Like the dementors in the Harry Potter stories, samskaras here suck the life energy out and one can feel fatigue and inertia. Wanting many things but without the ability to put forth the energy to get it. John frequently talked about how hard everything is. We followed this dynamic to the heart chakra and Traya revealed:
… After my parents divorced when I was twelve, I was engaged in a constant effort to get anything I needed. I would ask my mother for new shoes and I would get, “Get your father to buy them for you.” I would ask my father and he would say, “Get it from your mother. I gave her money.”
… I would get angry and yell at them and I became an angry kid, and that is the only thing that gave me energy to go on. It pulled me out of my inertia temporarily.
When working with the heart chakra, one will come to a layer of anger. The heart is angry for not getting what it needs. This anger too must be healed. It usually comes up near the end of the heart chakra healing process because the mind, as noted by John, needs the anger energy to counter the sad inertia energy that comes from suppressed life energy in the heart.
Knowledge
The heart chakra is in the realm of spirit, and truth comes to us not as intellectual understanding but as a knowing. “I know in my heart that it is true.” This resonance with truth cannot come from the solar plexus chakra because it is time-bound and limited, and truth is timeless and limitless. The heart guides us away from that which is not good for us and toward that which is good. If we are connected to self we always know when we are heading in the wrong direction because the heart signals us by contracting and/or a sudden feeling of emptiness. (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the inner compass of which the heart chakra is a key component.)
Sara has been working on taking down her “defenses” while healing the solar plexus chakra and is now more aware of her lack of connection to herself and others. Now we approach the heart chakra by exploring her disconnection energy:
… It feels like I have no heart to connect with or stay true to.
Thus, she cannot trust the intuitive knowledge in her heart yet.
Hope, Motivation, Enthusiasm, and Joie de Vivre
One of my Muslim clients, while working with a samskaric heart chakra, said:
… There is a saying in Islam that if you lose hope, you don’t believe in God.
This is an interesting viewpoint affirming that both a connection to spirit and a connection to hope abide in the heart. In order to be motivated, you must have hope. Hope is life affirming. Muriel was struggling with hopelessness energy and maintained that she didn’t want to be hopeful because then she would be again subject to disappointment. I encouraged her by pointing out that if her fear energy can be healed (which we did by working with the solar plexus chakra) then her hopelessness can also be healed. She wasn’t having any of it because she maintained:
…. All the reading, talking, and studying positive thinking I did over the years—affirmations are crap!
It is important, when working with “down energy,” to just keep going and not give in to the negativity that comes up. At some point it is going to switch to positive, uplifting energy and we just have to hang in there until it does. It is not like the solar plexus chakra where the fear keeps going down, down, down as you work with it. With the heart, as this down energy is surfaced, you are connecting more to yourself and, therefore, to the negative energy in the heart chakra and it will dominate the mind whenever you hook into it. When working with down energy it is helpful, in between Traya sessions, to disengage by focusing the attention at the pelvic chakra and repeat its bija vam as you would a mantra. This will help to keep the mind engaged there and its energy will dominate the mind and the “down” energy in the heart chakra will recede. Even though the negativity in the heart chakra is decreasing every time you work with it, it doesn’t always feel that way—until it does and the positive aspects of the heart chakra bloom, particularly hope, motivation, enthusiasm, and joie de vivre.
Spirit versus Religion
Whenever we see others as different or less than, we are projecting an unhealthy heart chakra. The religions of the world were begun to bring people closer to spirit but, being a solar plexus chakra construct (trying to impose structure on spirituality), they have the opposite effect and actually separate groups of people. Remember, the heart chakra provides a sense of connection to self, others, nature, and spirit.
Religious divisions play out in the heart. These wider patterns of grouping around religion or ethnicity impact all of us individually. This “separation energy” produces samskaras in all of our hearts as we all must live in this world. I recently saw a quote by Deepak Chopra that counters this separating energy: “Jesus wasn’t a Christian, Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Mohammed wasn’t a Mohammedan.” 14
Spiritual practice encourages us to escape our judgments, grasping, and striving and live instead from our hearts. That is our true heart’s desire: to put down petty desires for material things and live from the pure desire of our heart for connection with self. When we are connected to self, we are connected to everyone and everything, we understand truth and a real spiritual awakening happens.
Diamond Heart Chakra (Vajrahridaya)
• Location: at the sternum between the breasts
• Function: self-esteem
Vajrahridaya lies at the sternum between the solar plexus I-consciousness and the heart’s connection consciousness and governs self-esteem. I call this secondary chakra “Diamond Heart,” because when it is healthy, there is a sense of unbreakable strength—the opposite of the profound vulnerability which abides there when it is samskaric. When you think of the self-esteem chakra, think of feeling important to others. The feeling that abides here when samskaric is especially painful. This is, perhaps, the most vulnerable spot in the human psyche. For example, imagine that you are a child and go with your family to an extended family holiday party. All of the many children there have nice presents waiting for them—except for you! Imagine how that would feel. This is the feeling that one carries when this chakra is samskaric. Why not me? Feeling undeserving, it becomes difficult to seize opportunities and get one’s due in life. It makes you want to hang back. “Do I really want to be out there?” One is too willing to accept scraps without understanding why or even questioning why. So this small but key chakra has a major impact on how we live our lives and achieve our dreams or not. The following are examples of the types of experiences that diminish self-esteem energy.
Donna grew up with a chronically sick mother and an emotionally absent father:
… Feeling ignored made me feel unworthy.
Gloria was bullied as a child and in several emotionally abusive romantic relationships:
… My heart is bleeding from the inside. Low self-esteem prevents you from being able to defend yourself.
… What I went through wasn’t important to others. They ignored it and asked me to ignore it too.
Sara has been hard at the Traya work, sees many changes, and is now focused on bringing the right relationship into her life. The following came up:
… I am taking good care of myself now and I will be a super healthy person that no one wants to be around. I am only setting myself up to enjoy being alone a bit more.
We then traced this belief to:
… When I was a teenager, everything seemed to be going fine. I had a boyfriend and both of us were interested and then suddenly it was done. No explanation. He drifted away and slept with my friend. They don’t find enough in me to remain interested.
… I am a friendly, helpful person. Helpful substitutes for being wanted. Oh, I know where you can get one of those or you can borrow mine. It doesn’t help. I have no other currency—I am not funny, interesting, or attractive.
… I was sprayed with Eau de Unlovable. I felt dismissed by everyone around me.
Her adoption experience—the original wound to her self-esteem —set her up to feel unwanted, unimportant (to her original parents), and uninteresting. Then other experiences were layered on that, reinforcing her sense of being unlovable and unimportant to others.
Sheryl was having difficulties in her relationship with her adult son.
… Mother used to badmouth me to other people. I was the only one of the children she did that to and my brother told me later how it upset him to hear it. I feel like my son is doing the same to me.
… I didn’t think I was important enough to feel my mother shouldn’t do it.
Carolyn was having trouble finding direction career-wise:
… It felt like other kids in school had normal homes and families but not me. So everything was for everyone else but me.
… In searching for a job the feeling is that there is nothing (that I would want) out there for me.
If you believe that having a job that aligns with your talents and interests is for others, then the likelihood of finding it is remote if not impossible.
Lorna, who is working to heal her fears and the idea that “I can’t trust that everything will come out OK,” was led to the self-esteem chakra in one of our sessions:
… My friend was over and hit her head on the swing set. My mother blamed me. With my mother you didn’t protest. My point of view was not important.
Gloria is struggling in a job where she can’t do the things that she loves. She has started writing for an online mystery magazine but sometimes doesn’t keep up with it. Working here regarding this procrastination, she said:
… My needs were trampled on. Now I need to value what is important to me.
Indeed, it was a great joy for me to discover the self-esteem chakra with its ability to reverse the low self-esteem that I still carried around despite years of spiritual practice.
••• Exercise: Traya Practice at the •••
Heart chakra (Anahata)
Grounding
Ground by sitting up straight, focusing on the soles of your feet, and breathing in and out of the soles of your feet.
Use of Technique
Remember the thoughts that you identified in the Chapter 1 exercise (Observing the Pain Body) and use one of them or use the basic technique in which you focus on a chakra and ask, “What memories are here?”
Step 1: Focus—Keep your attention on the heart chakra in the center of the chest and breathe in and out gently.
Step 2: Surface—Adopt the letting stance and ask, “What memories are here?”
Step 3: Release—Note the memory and start to let negative energy go out by visualizing it coming out of the chakra. Go back to step 2 and surface another memory. You are continuously adding to the outflow of negative energy memory by memory. After you are finished surfacing memories for this session, let all of the negative energy go out and wait until the outflow stops.
Step 4: Replace and Imprint—Visualize positive energy coming in (rays from the sun) and taking up the space that was taken up by the negative energy that went out. Ask, “What is this positive energy bringing in with it?” Note the words that appear in your mind.
Step 5: Scene from Nature (Optional)—Breathe in and out while focusing attention on the heart chakra and let a scene from nature appear in your mind. Note if the air (oxygen) energy element is strong. (See the list of chakra elements in Chapter 2.)
It is always good to ground yourself in your body by again focusing on the soles of your feet and gently breathing in and out, especially after working with the higher chakras.
••• Exercise: Traya Practice at the •••
Self-Esteem chakra (Vajrahridaya)
Let’s use the manifestation technique this time. You are aware that your self-esteem can use some improvement. You look on the chart and locate self-esteem at vajrahridaya. Then continue with the Traya practice. You ground by breathing in and out of the soles of your feet.
Step 1: Focus—Keep your attention at the sternum and breathe in and out gently.
Step 2: Surface—Adopt the letting stance and ask, “What memories are here?”
Step 3: Release—Note the memory and start to let negative energy go out by visualizing it coming out of the chakra. Then either go back to step 2 and surface another memory and then repeat step 3 or proceed to step 4. Keep surfacing memories and adding to the chain of negative energy going out.
Step 4: Replace and Imprint—Visualize positive energy coming in (rays from the sun) and taking up the space that was taken up by the negative energy that went out. Ask, “What is this positive energy bringing in with it?” Note the words that appear in your mind.
There is no scene from nature step with the secondary chakras. Finish by grounding.
12. Stephen M.R. Covey with Rebecca R. Merrill, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (New York: Free Press, 2006), 3.
13. Gail Tredwell, Holy Hell: A Memoir of Faith, Devotion, and Pure Madness (Maui: Wattle Tree Press, 2013), 46–47.
14. Deepak Chopra, “Powell’s Book Interview with Dave Welch,” West By Northwest, Marchq , 2001, http://www.westbynorthwest.org/springlate01/deepak/index.shtml.