The fourth chakra is the central power house of the human energy system. The middle chakra, it mediates between the body and spirit and determines their health and strength. Fourth 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.

Sacred Truth of the Fourth Chakra

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, passion, confidence, hope, despair, hate, envy and fear. As adults we are challenged to generate within ourselves an emotional climate and steadiness from which to act consciously and with compassion.

More than any other chakra, the fourth 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 tranquillity. 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 determined justice.

The challenge inherent in the fourth 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 fourth chakra focuses on our feelings about our internal world – our emotional response to our own thoughts, ideas, attitudes and inspiration, 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.

We are not born fluent in love but spend our life learning about it. Its energy is pure power. We are as 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.

Learning the Power of Love

Because love has such power, we come to know this energy in stages. Each stage represents a lesson in love’s intensity and forms; forgiveness, compassion, generosity, kindness, caring for oneself and others.

All three of the first 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 (think family of origin) and partnership (think significant other) love. With the advent of the spiritual movement, however, love is becoming recognised as a force that influences and perhaps determines biological activity. Love helps us to heal others and ourselves.

Life crises that have issues of love at their core, e.g. divorce, death of a loved one, emotional abuse, abandonment, and 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.

Loving Oneself as the Path to the Divine

The expression “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else” is commonplace. Yet for many people loving oneself remains a vague notion, which we often act out in material ways, through shopping sprees and outrageous vacations. But rewarding oneself with trips and toys is third chakra love – using physical pleasure to express self appreciation. While this type of reward is enjoyable, it can obstruct our contact with the deeper emotional stirrings of the heart that emerge when we need to evaluate a relationship, or a job, or some other troubled circumstance that affects our well-being. Loving oneself as a fourth chakra challenge means having the courage to listen to the hearts emotional messages and spiritual directives. The archetype to which the heart most frequently guides us for healing is that of the ~wounded child~.

The “wounded child” within each of us contains the damaged or stunted emotional patterns of our youth, patterns of painful memories, negative attitudes, and of dysfunctional self images. Unknowingly, we may continue to operate within these patterns as adults, albeit in a new form. Fear of abandonment, for example, becomes jealousy. Sexual abuse becomes dysfunctional sexuality, often causing a repetition of the same violations with our own children. A child’s negative self image can later become the source of such dysfunctions such as anorexia, obesity, alcoholism, and other addictions as well as obsessive fear of failure. These patterns can damage our emotional relationships, our personal and professional lives, and our health. Loving oneself begins with confronting this archetypal force within the psyche and unseating the wounded child’s authority over us. If unhealed, wounds keep us in the past.

Healing is possible through acts of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an essential spiritual act that must occur in order to open oneself fully to the healing power of love. Self love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us – for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us. Releasing our attachment to these wounds enables us to move from the childlike relationship with the Divine of the first three chakras into one in which we participate with the Divine in acting out of the love and compassion of the fourth chakra.

Our culture as a whole is evolving toward healing from its emphasis on wounds and victimization. Having entered into the power of our wounds, however, it is difficult to see how we let go of this negative power and move head to become ~unwounded~ and self empowered. Ours is a ~fourth chakra culture~ that has not yet moved out of our wounds and into spiritual adulthood.

Awakening the Conscious Self

We get out of the fourth chakra by going through it and learning its lessons. We may attempt to run back into the protection of the tribal mind, but its capacity to comfort us is now gone. We begin the formidable task of getting to know ourselves by discovering our emotional nature – not in relation to anyone or anything, but in relation to ourselves alone.

Prior to the 1960’s this kind of self examination was the domain of only the more peripheral members of society – the mystics, the artists, philosophers, and other another creative geniuses. Meeting the ~self~ activates the transformation of human consciousness and the consequences for many artists and mystics have included dramatic episodes of depression, despair, hallucination, visions, suicide attempts and uncontrollable emotional turmoil, as well as heightened started of ecstasy combined in both physical and spiritual manifestations. It was commonly believed that the price of spiritual awakening was too high and too risky for most people and was meant only for a ~gifted~ few.

Yet the revolutionary energy of the 1960’s led millions of people to chant ~what about me~ and thereafter the human consciousness movement drove our culture through the archetypal doorway of the fourth chakra. It unearthed the secrets of our hearts and articulated details of our wounded childhood that still shape much of our adult personalities. Not surprisingly, our fourth chakra culture has seen national increases in divorce. The opening of the fourth chakra has transformed the archetype of marriage into the archetype of partnership. As a result most contemporary marriages require a strong sense of ~self~ for success, rather than the abdication of ~self~ that was required in traditional marriages. The symbolic meaning of marriage is that one must be in union with one’s own personality and spirit first. After one has a clear understanding of oneself, one can create a successful intimate partnership. The increase in divorce is therefore rooted directly in the opening of the fourth chakra, which draws people into self discovery for the first time. Many people ascribe the breakdown of their marriage to the fact that their spouse has given them no support for their emotional, psychological and intellectual needs, and as a result they had to seek out a true partnership.

The Path to the Empowered Heart

Healing is simple, but it is not easy. The steps are few yet they demand great effort. Commit yourself to healing all the way to the source of the pain. This means turning inwards and coming to know your wounds. Once inside, identify your wounds. Have they become a form or ~wound power~ within your present life? If you have converted your wounds into power, confront why you might fear healing. As you identify your wounds, have someone witness them and their influence to your development. Identify the good that can and has come from your wounds. Start living within the consciousness of appreciation and gratitude, and if you have to ~fake it til you make it~.. or ~talk the walk~. Initiate a spiritual practice and stick to it. Do not be casual about your spiritual discipline. Once you have established a consciousness of appreciation, you can take on the challenge of forgiveness. As appealing as forgiveness is in theory, it is an extremely unattractive personal action for most people, mainly because the true nature of forgiveness remains misunderstood. Forgiveness is not the same as telling the person who harmed you “It’s OK” which is more or less the way most people view it. Rather, forgiveness is a complex act of consciousness, one that liberates the soul and psyche from the need for personal vengeance and the perception of oneself as a victim. More than releasing from blame the people who caused our wounds, forgiveness means releasing the control that the perception of victimhood has over our psyches. The liberation that forgiveness generates comes in the transition to a higher state of consciousness – not just in theory but energetically and biologically. In fact, the consequence of a genuine act of forgiveness borders on the miraculous. It may contain the energy that generates miracles themselves. Evaluate what you need to do in order to forgive others – and yourself if necessary. Should you need to contact anyone for a closure discussion, make sure that you are not carrying the message of blame as a private agenda. If you are, you are genuinely not ready to let go and move on. Should you need to share your closure thoughts in a letter to the person, do so, but again make sure your intention is to retrieve your spirit from yesterday, not to send yet another message of anger.

Finally, create an official ceremony for yourself in which you call your spirit back from your past and release the negative influence of all your wounds. Whether you prefer a ritual or a private prayer service, enact your message of forgiveness in an ~official~ way in order to establish a new beginning.

Think Love.

Live in appreciation and gratitude. Invite change into your life, if only through your attitude. And remind yourself continually of the message of all spiritual masters worth their salt, keep your spirit in the present time. In the language of Jesus “Leave the dead and get on with your life”..and as Buddha taught “there is only Now”.

The curious thing about healing is that depending upon who you talk to, you can come to believe either that nothing is easier or that nothing is more complicated. The fourth chakra is the centre of the human energy system. Everything in and about our lives runs of the fuel of our hearts. We will all have experiences mean to “break our hearts” – not in half but wide open. Regardless of how your heart is broken, your choice is always the same: What will you do with your pain? Will you use it as an excuse to give fear more authority over you, or can you release the authority of the physical world over you through an act of forgiveness? The question contained within the fourth chakra will be presented to you again and again in your life, until the answer you give becomes your own liberation.

The energies of the fourth chakra continually direct us to discover and love ourselves. This love is the essential key to finding the happiness that we are convinced lies outside ourselves but that spiritual texts remind us is only found within. Too many people are frightened of knowing ourselves, convinced that self knowledge would mean living alone, without their current friends and partners. Whilst the shortterm effects of self knowledge may well cause changes, its long term development fuelled by consciousness not fear, will be more fulfilling. It makes no sense to seek to become intuitively conscious, then work to keep that consciousness from upsetting our lives.

The only path towards spiritual consciousness is through the heart.

That truth is not negotiable, no matter what spiritual tradition one chooses as a means to know the divine.