Choose Love: 6 Ways to Open Your Heart Chakra

Love is the closest thing to real magic that we possess. Love’s vibration can hold and heal your body and the planet. Love for yourself and others arises from the Anahata, or Heart Chakra, which sits right over your physical heart and is the center of your body’s energy. It’s also your center of compassion and generosity. When your Heart Chakra is balanced, love flows easily, and you’re able to maintain healthy and fulfilling relationships. When out of alignment, you may feel sorrow or heartache. I wrote this blog, Choose Love: 6 Ways to Open Your Heart Chakra, to help you invoke and experience ubiquitous, unconditional love – the kind of love that is liberated from fear or ego.

Summer’s here in the Northern Hemisphere, and July is the month of love, passion, and fruition. Desire and sensual pleasure, along with everything you create or birth, originate from the Sacral Chakra. Take passion to another level during this fiery time of year by exploring love and the Heart Chakra. The Heart Chakra is the center of the basic chakra system, and it’s where deep bonds are formed. It’s the chakra of union and like a bridge between the higher and lower self. It raises the question: Will you give in to your animal nature or look to higher guidance and align with Spirit? This year, I encourage you to focus on activating your Heart Chakra to consciously choose, feel, give, and receive love on a more profound and universal level.

6 Ways to Open Your Heart Chakra

1. Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy is one of my soul passions and talents – it’s the art and alchemy of working with scents and herbs, and a beautiful exercise in releasing our intellectual tendencies to venture into the vast knowledge of our sensual and spiritual selves. Scent carries and communicates the power of attraction. Your pheromones, in concert with the fragrances you wear, draw lovers, friends, and energy in a myriad of forms. Working with essential oils that correspond to the Heart Chakra such as rose, jasmine, cacao, cardamom, bergamot, black spruce, hawthorn berries, lavender, and marjoram help align your energy with pure, loving energy.

Pour your essential oils in a diffuser or bath, or rub them in your hands (always dilute essential oils with a carrier oil before applying to your skin) and take a big whiff. Visualize the love you’re capable of bringing into the world, and hold onto it as long as possible. Your body, and mind, will remember that feeling long after your meditation.

2. Work with Goddesses

Chakras are energy centers within and surrounding your physical body. You can think of them as your body’s vortexes, receiving and sending information from Earth below to the Spirit Realm above and vice versa. If you enjoy working with the goddesses, I recommend working with Quan Yin, Áine, Hera, and Venus to help open and activate your Heart Chakra.

What’s their medicine?

Quan Yin is a Chinese Bodhisattva. She’s the goddess of compassion, mercy, and kindness. Work with Quan Yin to help you show up in the world with love, empathy, and grace. 

Hera is the Greek goddess of marriage, family, women, and childbirth, and a symbol of power and devotion. Work with Hera to demonstrate commitment and care to yourself and others.

Áine is the Irish goddess of love, sovereignty, and summer. She also inspires hope and helps women recall pleasant memories. Work with Áine to remember good times, open your heart, and inspire hope within and around you.

Venus is the goddess of love, art, and beauty. Work with Venus to cultivate the art of love. She will also help you appreciate and value yourself more, so you can love and receive that love on the level you deserve.

3. Crystal Healing

One of my favorite ways to activate chakras is through crystal magic. Every chakra has its own unique color, reflective of the colors of the rainbow. And every stone has its own healing color, quality, and vibration. The Heart Chakra corresponds with green and pink. Working with crystals to activate your chakras restores balance and alignment and brings healing to the body, mind, and spirit. I recommend chrysoprase, rhodochrosite, mangano calcite, pink tourmaline, and rose quartz to help align and activate the Heart Chakra. 

Chrysoprase is a Heart Chakra crystal that connects you with compassion and love. It centers you in peace and helps you to heal old love wounds.

Rhodochrosite, also known as the Rose Stone, activates the Heart Chakra. It’s a healing stone of compassion, love, and self-awareness.

Mangano calcite activates the Heart Chakra and helps move stuck energy in that energy center. It’s connected with Quan Yin and promotes acceptance without judgment and unconditional love.

Pink tourmaline is a Heart Chakra crystal that embodies all the qualities of the Divine Feminine. Its energy is intuitive, nurturing, healing, and wise, and it heals the heart like no other.

Rose quartz is considered the universal stone of peace and love – love for self, others, and all of creation. It helps to open your Heart Chakra, reawaken trust, and dissolve negative energies.

4. Volunteer Your Time

Give love to receive love – volunteer at homeless shelters, nursing homes, or animal rescues. Assist your friends and family with projects or errands, or be the person who sits and listens to them talk about anything and everything, without judgment or advice. Devote your time to both strangers and loved ones, and you’ll feel your heart expand and your energy flow more freely. Doing this will also cause a ripple effect and inspire others to do the same.

5. Hug Yourself and Others

After more than a year of being unable to touch others in fear of contracting COVID, we’ve seriously been deprived of human intimacy. Extend your arms and embrace your loved ones. Research shows that hugging someone for at least 20 seconds causes your body to release oxytocin – the feel-good, bonding hormone. Go out there and hug your friends and family. Hug your pet – or even try embracing yourself! Repeat as needed.

6. Exercise

Anything that expands your chest and helps your heart open to receive aligns with the Heart Chakra. Go to the beach or find a pool and swim breaststroke underwater. Feel your heart swell and release any residual pain. And once you come out, take a deep breath and fill your chest with that beautiful, restorative air. 

If you’re not much of a swimmer, try yoga. The camel pose, in particular, stretches and strengthens the chest and allows energy to move toward the heart center, helping you feel more receptive to giving and receiving love.

In Closing

The Heart Chakra regulates all energy flow in the body. When it’s in alignment, it has the power to transmute unwanted energies into the highest forms of emotion, like love and joy. Love is a powerful force – because it’s limitless. It compels us to treat ourselves and others with kindness, empathy, and understanding. When a person is filled with love, they radiate warmth and joy from the inside out. And because love is the highest vibration there is – with it, anything is possible. Love, true love, has the power to raise the consciousness of the world.

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