Heart Chakra
Sefirah of Tif’eret
Sacrament of marriage (as an archetype)
Anahata
The first three chakras focus mostly on our physical reality. This fourth chakra is our gateway into our emotional and spiritual realities. This energy pool will reflect our emotional perceptions of reality far stronger than our mental perceptions.
We see in this chakra, a mini reflection of the entire chakra system much like a crystal reflecting the light spectrum as a rainbow.

With that being said, this one can get messy and complicated not only because everyone’s reflection is different and personalized; also because as a culture we have only recently adopted the idea of ‘emotional maturity’ and really don’t have the universal vocabulary and support to analyze this subject at the depth we can for most of the physical matter we study. Obviously with time and persistence we have seen an improvement and are starting to have a better understanding in this field of study. Philosophy and its impacts on the sociological and anthropological levels. This can sometimes illuminate things previously seen as completely unrelated to having a path of convergence, effecting each other’s presentation to the greater whole. This is the juicy stuff that lights up my synapses 
̿̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ ̿'̿'\̵͇̿̿\з= ( ▀ ͜͞ʖ▀) =ε/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ ̿̿    ( ಠ ͜ʖರೃ)       ಠ‿↼

We have all heard at some point the notion that “Love is the most powerful emotion” and honestly, I have to agree. We see it in real life, in movies, shows, lectures, pretty much anything we create lol. Love can have a powerful effect and be and insane driving force or will. I challenge you to take this seriously and understand that your emotions hold more energy than your ‘mental energy’.
The challenge we are most confronted with when examining this part of ourselves, is focusing and balancing our feelings about our emotional self. There is a difference between self-care and self-love. Self-care may come from self-love, but it is generated from the solar plexus chakra and usually comes in the form of a reward or comforting action. Self-love isn’t always comfortable, its loving yourself enough to get uncomfortable for the right reasons.

We relate the Sefirah of Tif’eret to this chakra as well because it is the symbolic strength, beauty, and nurturing compassion within Yahweh. It also emulates the give and take nature of love, further understanding how it operates or flows. With this we can learn to balance the amount of energy we give and take to balance compassion and judgement. In order to house and exchange energy, this also serves as a place for transmutation of energy; where we can take one feeling and transform it to an emotion or thought , ideally to one that better serves us and the greater whole. Balancing self interest with loving kindness to others.             (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)

We also relate the sacrament of marriage as an archetype to this chakra. What I mean by ‘as an archetype’ is that I use the word in most basic understanding of the sense, no predisposition or culture means to it. Therefor it represents your bond with yourself, the union internally with yourself and soul. You cannot bestow and shower people with love if you do not first generate the love within yourself. “You can’t love anyone until you learn to love yourself.”
I know this can be a hard pill to swallow, and some of us have or still have a long way to go. Its hard to love yourself when most of the time we are frustrated with ourselves and nature. But the first step to heal these types of wounds is to let go. Let go of our emotional pain, and not as in throw it away or suddenly detach all and any emotion from it. I mean letting go of the need to understand why things are as they are or why this or that has happened to you. We release the need for self-determined justice or acting in an overcompensating way to cover or mask pain. Letting the them flow down the river, surrendering to that which you cannot control. Unhealed wounds will act as a slow toxin bubbling to the surface of your mind repeatedly until it is confronted and healed. Unhealed wounds stunt our growth and keep us living in the past. Love yourself enough to heal them.
“Life’s challenges is a lesson in some aspect of love. How we respond to these challenges is recorded within our cell tissues: we live within the biological consequences of our biographical choices” (Dr. Myss 199).

At the end of the day ask yourself, what will I do with all this left-over negative energy and pain? Am I just going to let it sit and season me to that flavor? Or will you use it as an excuse to allow fear more control over you life? Or can you let it go and release its authority over you with an act of forgiveness? Not gonna lie, HARDEST THING EVVVVVVVVERRRRRRRRRR. that’s why you don’t judge yourself for not being what you think you should be, but celebrate the baby steps you take towards what you would like to be.
BABY STEPS!
WHAT ABOUT BOB! LOL I love that movie


 (づ￣ ³￣)づ Much Love

So now that we have covered the first two chakras, we lay the foundation for this next chakra;
Manipura, Solar Plexus, Sefirah of Nezah and Hod, Sacrament of Confirmation, Honoring oneself.
The first two chakras place their roots in external soil, but this one shifts the focus to internal soil, acting as the mediator and final judge of energy received from the first two chakras.
This is where our personal power comes from, our ego. Self-esteem, self-respect, self-discipline and ambition
The power AND RESPONSIBILITY is now shifting to your unique self. 
Que uncle Ben from spider man (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)

All three of the covered chakras are like rivers that flow into a lake, that lake would metaphorically be your intuition. Your relationship with self , level of self-understanding and acceptance will determine the quality of water in your lake, the level of distortion in your intuition.
You always hear “follow your gut” and similar phrases, but the most important part of that concept is left out. It needs to be “check your gut before you wreck your gut”.  ┬─┬ ︵ /(.□. ）
But it's not all bad there is beauty in the struggle of learning to balance  (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)

The way you handle these challenges or obstacles on the course to obtaining your goals will reflect itself in your external world. I must stress that this is a ongoing constant cycle that will cause you to evaluate your ongoing relationship with your external world. Each time you will be given an option, to enhance your personal energy, or siphon it.

A lot of the times we have this misconception of that having an ego at all is evil. While we do live in a time of rampant, unchecked, destructive, and malignant egos, so naturally we have swung the opposite to compensate.  We need to make sure we don’t go too far to the other extreme. Because this too adheres to the law of balance, we must learn to maintain a healthy ego or level  of self-confidence.

Remember the question I posed “where do you pull your personal power from?”
When first asked it, I gave the imagery of  your internal looking glass and playing with what you might see in the reflection. I want you to do that again and hold onto that image of the reflection as you paint an accurate picture of your internal self. Be honest, but also be kind.  
See things as they are, not as you wish them to be, then build your reality from there.

Most of the time we always find something that isn't to our liking, we are after all our own worst critics. When in the process of cleaning or organizing our lives or ‘self’ the decisions or choices we make will either feed into placing your physical limitations on your ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ or using them to exercise your ‘self’ (much like the fact of actual home cleaning, in that it never fucking ends!)
“The stronger our spirit becomes, the less authority linear time can exercise in our lives” (Myss 175).

When this area is traumatized/misaligned you cannot act on intuitive impulses because when it reaches your conscious thought it is distorted or altered. This is much like placing your faith in something or someone only to be disappointed because you shouldn’t have been doing so in the first place.
Sometimes people can get stuck in the self-pity that can occur during this process. While you need to address yourself with honest love, staying in the self-pity will be far more damaging then anything anyone could ever do to you. Bringing home the point I nodded at earlier, “with great power come great responsibility”. Making the ego self-accountable and have the capacity to be held accountable.
This isn’t something that comes naturally or even easily, self-discovery is one helluva process but its probably the most important 'wright of passage' to reach.
Many like to use the metaphor of weeding the mind garden for this process, each weed representing hard questions we must ask of our internal looking glass and observe the answer that becomes self evident. Questions like “why do I keep secrets? Why do I have addictions? Why do I blame others for my own errors? Why do we find it so difficult to accept compliments? Why does ___ trigger such an emotional response? “ etc..

As you let these things unfold and address them honestly but with love, you will start to discover your personal boundaries and the make up of your character. At which each point you get to ask the question, is this strengthening or siphoning my sense of self?
If it is strengthening it, have faith in yourself and your ability to get through the storm.
If its siphoning then ask, what can you control? and what can’t you control?
What are little ways to impact the things you can control instead of giving up your strength and attention to the things you can’t control. Accept and Acknowledge that which you cannot control, but do not let fear of loosing control drive your decisions.
Absolutely nothing about this is simple, easy, or rigid but like data explained to his daughter Lal,
“The effort yields its own rewards”.

Personally, I had the worst time with this chakra, because from birth I was taught that my personal power was not mine to wield, only existing to surrender to someone who "knows better".
The consequence of this was being ruled by fear in all decisions and/or actions, then having to building a sense of self confidence from the ashes.
While I can definitely say I’m light years from where I was 7 years ago, it still isn’t easy to trust myself. Shit, I will forever be on the journey and you will never hear me say that I've  “made it to the top” or “completed” it.

Its much like the pain of a healed over injury, its not bad most of the time, but its still a weak point. Butttttttttttt not to sound like a broken record, (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)
on the positive side "The effort yields its own rewards."

There is a yoga with Adrienne video on the solar plexus to compliment this nicely at the button below.
Like, Share, ya know all the normal shit you do to bring attention to things you like or resonate with
 (づ￣ ³￣)づ Much Love

I want to spend some more time on the sacral chakra again because I feel it is that important (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
You are working with natural opposing forces so do NOT take this lightly. Do NOT underestimate the polarity and strength of these forces. Meaning it can be extreme ends creating the conflict in the first place.
Also do not underestimate its ability to be both; two sides of one coin. I am sure everyone has heard the phrase ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. This conveys the concept that there are both intended and unintended consequences for every action. Toxic behaviors do not automatically implicate a terrible core person. Wrong choices do not automatically implicate ignorance. Our legal system even operates on serving justice based on the best interpretation of the ‘original intent’. We understand things can be complicated or just has too many unknown variables to form a theory. We have often look to the unknown with fear, causing our minds to slip into the black and white model of the world.

I like to break things down and simplify so let us break down and simplify
Our actions, moments, people, just everything, has both
yin and yang properties
night and day
negative and positive charges
exhale and inhale
depending on this balance/struggle/ratio, we see the physical manifestation of that balance
OOO! OOO! I just thought of a good example! The PH system in chemistry! We are semi-familiar with this right?

See reality as it is, not as you want it to be, then build from there. Get rid of this ‘good’ or ‘bad’ archaic concept. And start thinking of it like the PH scale and you will start to notice its properties/characteristics more. This will start to chip away at false perceptions you might have made about each side, equipping you with better tools to handle reality.
By the way, these are concepts that are far broader and do not give any definitive direction, it unfolds in your own life, specific to you. That is just how these things work.

As we start to handle larger and larger amounts of data (literally and metaphorically), we are learning to organize it in a more operation and/or computing friendly ways. it is an ongoing process that evolves as we learn more, its messy and is not perfect, get over it. Sometimes this requires us to look at the previous framework and evaluate, then change how things are labeled or what category they fall under to better serve the process as a whole. Change is natural, but there is an art to it. If you exert more force upon it, the more of a reaction you will get from it.

Say the example is this; you are looking to implement new business practices or just procedural changes. If you do not take into consideration that a change in one department will make changes throughout the ENTIRE business; you will have a rocky deployment putting stress on already weak points in the company. Cumulating a larger and more complex problem than when you started.

Ooooooo! Another good example/another metaphor to further this would be planning and thinking in a very strict “cause and effect” mindset.
‘ This change in responsibilities directly takes it off one person’s shoulders and puts it on to another and should fix the problem of the first person not having enough time to do it.’

While logically and ‘on paper’ it seems like a good idea, there is neglect to how it will affect the whole body. When a different person takes on a different responsibility there is an adjustment period while they balance out their new responsibilities. If this includes any interactions outside of their own department, it changes each of those individual interactions for both parties. Having this strict “cause and effect” outlook also neglects the entire process of implementing the change, it only highlights a very specific section of the process. When looking at the data to evaluate if the change was successful or not, they usually pull from a sample of time that does not accurately portray the effects, ie. Not inclusive of an accurate time frame.

I like the expression “nothing happens in a vacuum” because it gives credence to this concept of consequence’s ‘intended AND unintended’.
Once you can fully understand the opposing forces in everything, you understand the 2 most basic natural components to anything, again Literally and metaphorically.

There is a yoga with Adrienne video to compliment another aspect of this chakra nicely at the button below.
Like, Share, ya know all the normal shit you do to bring attention to things you like or resonate with
 (づ￣ ³￣)づ Much Love

The fun dualism you learn with this chakra is your internal relationship (that is the internal monologue you got going on up there) reflects onto your relationships with others.
Whether you like it or not; ‘as above, so below’.
The core lesson is to Honor One Another, uniting both ends of the scale to achieve a better understand of your relationship with others, and most importantly yourself!!
It also reflects our need for relationships with other people and our relationship with ourselves.
Most of us have seen a meme or post with a similar message as this “you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat others”. Depending on your understanding of symbolic language and its depth, the knowledge gained can be small or great by just observing these more natural encounters (not consciously controlled and scripted)
I feel Dr Caroline Myss puts it beautifully when she says, “We can more easily see the symbolic value of our relationships when we release our compulsion to judge what and who has value and instead focus on honoring the person and the task with which we are involved” (131 Myss).
While we cannot control others and their actions, but we can control our reactions.
For sake of imagery, newtons third law; we can manipulate and choose where to direct the equal or opposite reaction.

As I have said before, healing is all about balancing. Its good to have personal power, but it can also be toxic if the scale swings too far one way.
In the muddled knowledge of our time it can be difficult to even view a state of healthy personal power and maintaining a healthy ego. At our root chakra we learn to find power in our ‘tribe’ or our social groups, in the sacral chakra we must learn to find our Personal Power within personal balance.
Power can be a dirty word, and no doubt we are not short of examples backing up this belief. But like money, it is only a tool used by people, and each person’s intent determines how it is manifested and used. The time is nigh for everyone to get real with their relationship to power; by simply observing and paying close attention to your thoughts and inner monologue when you bring up the idea of power. Work through the relationship like you were in therapy with it, because once you learn to understand its effects on you; it gives you the power (cause knowledge is power!) to know how and when you are being controlled by an external force.

Judgement is not to be passed on tools, it is to be passed on the people and their intent to use these tools. On their own they are neither malignant or good, simply benign. The challenge for us it not to practice abstinence, but “to achieve sufficient internal strength to interact comfortably with physical power without negotiating away our spirits” (Myss 161).

Like, Share, ya know all the normal shit you do to bring attention to things you like or resonate with
 (づ￣ ³￣)づ Much Love

 
So lets start at the Root Chakra
I love using the chakra system as a model because they coincide so nicely with the basic truths described in all religions, just in one form or another. As physics is just a model to understand the laws of nature, all these truths are a model to understand the laws of our emotional and spiritual ‘bodies’. But this can be an entirely different rabbit hole, so for today ill just leave it at that.
This is a core like the earth’s core, the energy of this directly and indirectly moving each layer of the earth, making earth as we know it possible.
See this https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/core/

Background on the Root Chakra

The root chakra that is, also known as the tribal chakra//the sacrament of baptism// the Sefirah of Shekhinah// Mūlādhāra in sanskrit// your primal nature// also could be compared to the 1st level  in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is the most important Chakra as this is the Fundamental Chakra, the core if you will. If you want to know more about the specifics be my guest, there are several in depth or brief descriptions of this chakra.
The primary fears are that of physical survival, abandonment, and loss of physical order
The primary strengths are tribal/family identity, bonding, the support and loyalty that give one sense of safety and connection
The scared truth associated with this concept is ‘All is One’.
 
Why am I bringing this up when talking about healing from trauma?
Because every healing (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual) goes through a form of this process and unveiling of truths. It could be easy, or hard, take 1 week, or an entire lifetime. We use it to help guide us and also as a mirror to self-reflect in. This might look ENTIRELY different from person to person.
When we talk about healing, we are also talking about balancing, taking what each chakra represents and sitting with it to see what it stirs up for each person individually. When you’ve been traumatized, you may have felt your safety or survival threatened. Fighting the despair and recovering from traumatic experiences reaches down to your primal instinct for survival and turns on the ‘flight or fight response’.

In sticking with the shank analogy, this would be stabbing your Common Peroneal Nerve, taking away your ability to stand essentially. Taking time to mend these types of wounds may enable you to uncover some of the limiting beliefs that determine how you experience life, as well as some of the false Identities that you've confused with your core self. When you can recognize and observe these coping mechanisms, it is possible to realize that they are not who you are; you created them in response to what you were experiencing.
 
Here are some examples of such limiting beliefs:
"I'm not safe." "It's not a safe world." "It's not safe to... (see, speak, know... etc.)".
The process of healing challenges us to retain self-beliefs that are for your highest good, and discard those that are not.
None of us are strangers to family issues. The family is where we learn to love and deal with all types of people, thick and thin, at least that is the model given forth. To put it into perspective I want to use it in a more sociological standpoint about the community as a whole. If we step back and examine the body, the last time we had such a shaking of our foundation in the roots would be the great depression. Not just the economic impact, but the aftermath of our collective feelings and views. The last time our collective body turned on its ‘adrenal glands’ to fight for its survival.
While the mindset adopted to survive collectively got us through what we were going through as a nation; there is always pros and cons. Now we are experiencing the downsides to this kind of mindset, living the truths of those who were unable to make it through. Whether its internal roots that have been damaged or the unrest of our collective roots being damaged, healing the wounds properly is a great place to start.

Some Yoga with Adrienne to compliment this nicely at the button below.
Like, Share, ya know all the normal shit you do to bring attention to things you like or resonate with
 (づ￣ ³￣)づ Much Love