The Fourth Chakra – Emotional Power

The fourth chakra is the central powerhouse of the human energy system. The middle chakra, intermediates between the body and spirit and determines their health and strength. 4th chakra energy is emotional in nature and helps propel our emotional development. This chakra embodies the spiritual lesson that teaches us how to act out of love and compassion and recognise that the most powerful energy we have is love.

Taken from the book Anatomy of the Soul by Caroline Myss

Location: centre of the chest

Energy connection to the physical body: heart and circulatory system, ribs, breasts, thymus gland, lungs, shoulders, arms, hands, diaphragm.

Energy connection to the emotional mental body: this chakra resonates to our emotional perceptions, which determine the quality of our lives far more than our mental perceptions. As children, we react to our circumstances with a range of emotions: love, compassion, confidence, hope, despair, hate, envy, and fear. As adults, we are challenged to generate within ourselves and emotional climate and steadiness from which to act consciously and with compassion.

Symbolic perceptual connection: more than any other chakra, the 4th represents our capacity to let go and let God. With its energy we accept our personal emotional challenges as extensions of a divine plan, which has as its intent our conscious evolution. By releasing our emotional pain, by letting go of our need to know why things have happened as they have, we reach a state of tranquility. In order to achieve that inner peace, however, we have to embrace the healing energy of forgiveness and release our lesser need for human, self-OK I’m going to hope that it’s OKdetermined justice.

Sefirot/Sacrament connection: the 4th chakra corresponds to the sephira of Sif’eret, symbolic of the beauty and compassion within God. This energy represents the heart of the divine, an endless pouring forth of the nurturing life force. As an archetype, marriage represents first and foremost a bond with oneself, the internal union of self and soul.

The challenge inherent in the 4th chakra is similar to that of the third but is more spiritually sophisticated. While the third chakra’s focus is on our feelings about ourselves in relation to our physical world, the 4th chakra focuses on our feelings about our internal world, our emotional response to our own thoughts, ideas, attitudes and inspirations, as well as the attention we give to our emotional needs. This level of commitment is the essential factor in forming healthy relationships with others.

Primary fears: fears of loneliness, commitment and following one’s heart, fear of inability to protect oneself emotionally, fear of emotional weakness and betrayal. Loss of 4th chakra energy can give rise to jealousy, but it’s in this, anger, hatred and an inability to forgive others as one as well is one self.

Primary strengths: love, forgiveness, compassion, dedication, inspiration, hope, trust and the ability to heal oneself and others.

Sacred truth: the fourth chakra is the power centre of the human energy system because love is divine power. While intelligence or mental energy is generally considered superior to emotional energy, actually emotional energy is the true motivator of the human body and spirit. Love in its purest form, unconditional love, is the substance of the divine, with its endless capacity to forgive us and respond to our prayers. Our own hearts are designed to express beauty, compassion, forgiveness and love. It is against our spiritual nature to act otherwise.

We are not born fluent in love but spend our life learning about it. It’s energy is pure power. We are attracted to love as we are intimidated by it. We are motivated by love, controlled by it, inspired by it, healed by it, and destroyed by it. Love is the fuel of our physical and spiritual bodies. Each of life’s challenges is a lesson in some aspect of Love’s. How we respond to these challenges is recorded within our cell tissues: we live within the biological consequences of our biographical choices.

Learning the power of love

because love has such power, we come to know this energy in stages. Each stage presents a lesson in loves intensity and forms: forgiveness, compassion, generosity, kindness, caring for oneself and others. The stages follow the design of our chakras: we begin learning love within our tribe, absorbing the many expressions of its energy from our family members. Tribal love can be unconditional, but it generally communicates the expectation of loyalty and tribal support; In the tribal setting, love is an energy that shared among one’s own kind.

It’s the second chakra awakens and we learn the bonds of friendship, love grows to include outsiders. We express love through sharing with and caring for others to whom we are not connected through blood. And as our third chakra awakens, we discover love of external things, of our personal, physical and material needs, which may include athletics, academics, fashion, dating and mating, occupation and home and body.

All three of these chakras involve love in the external world. At one time in our civilization, these three practices of love were all that life required. Very few people needed more than tribal and partnership love. With the advent of psychotherapy and the spirituality movement, however, love became recognized as a force that influences and perhaps determines biological activity. Love helps us heal others and ourselves.

Laugh crises that have issues of love at their core; Divorce, death of a loved one, emotional abuse, abandonment, adultery, are often the cause of an illness and not just an event that coincidentally precedes it. Physical healing often requires and may demand, the healing of emotional issues.

Jack, a Carpenter, 47, invested a substantial portion of his life savings in a business venture created by his cousin Greg. Describing himself as a business rookie, Jack told me Greg always seemed to know exactly what he was doing with the investments and promised that this major investment would yield enough 4 jacks early retirement. Jack’s wife, Lynn, was hesitant about putting all their savings into a venture with no guarantee of financial return, but Jack trusted his cousin and felt that all would turn out exactly as anticipated.

Four months later the business venture failed, and Greg vanished. Two months after that, Jack suffered an accident on the job and injured his lower back. He developed high blood pressure and grew withdrawn and depressed. He showed up in one of my workshops because Lynn had forced him to attend with her, in her desperation to rouse him out of his incapacitated state.

Some disorders are so obvious that any outside person can connect the dots and figure out the course. Jacks financial stress, coupled with his feeling that his cousin had taken advantage of him, no doubt became a raging fire in Jacks psyche. This resulted in weakness in his lower back and sciatic nerve. His anger contributed to his high blood pressure, as he had been brooding over his gross blunder in believing his cousin’s promises of abundance. Jack was heart-sick as a result of Gregg’s betrayal and his feelings of having let down his wife.

When my lecture turned to the subject of forgiveness, Jack became so irritable that he asked to leave the room. I did not want him to leave because I knew that he needed to hear the information I was presenting, but as I looked at his face, it was clear to me that staying would only add to his discomfort. Lynn addressed Jack as if only the two of them were in the room, took his hand and told him that although he was punishing himself for what he now considered an act of stupidity, as far as she was concerned, he had acted out of love. “I will never believe that an act of love is rewarded with pain’, she continued, “I believe that if you change your perspective and hold to the truth that you supported someone you love because it felt right, then somehow, all this will work out just fine for us. I don’t want the anger you feel toward your cousin to ruin the rest of our lives, so I say we just keep going.”

Jack began weeping muttering words of apology and gratitude to his wife. The other workshop participants were also deeply affected and took a break to give Jack and Lynn some privacy. As I was leaving the room, Lynn asked me to join them, then told me, “I think we can leave now. Jack and I will be just fine.”

I contacted Jack and Lynn a few months later to check up on them. Lynn said that Jack had returned to work and that his back was still giving him problems but did not hurt as much. His blood pressure was normal and he was no longer depressed. Both of them were feeling remarkably liberated from their financial misfortune because they were both genuinely able to forgive what had happened and move on. “We haven’t heard a word from Greg” she added, “but we suspect that these days he’s thinking about this mess much more than we are.”

Couple is an example of the spiritual power of heart energy. The compassion that flowed from Lynn’s heart into jack’s body gave him the support he needed to forgive his cousin and himself and get on with his life.