Episode 50: The Heart Chakra

Welcome back friends to Witchy Ways for Modern Days. They put gaspase where ancient wisdom meets modern living and where magic is allowed to exist right alongside you in everyday life. I'm really glad that you are here with me today, whether you are listening to me while you're driving or you're folding laundry, lying on your bed, staring at the ceiling, or you just need a familiar voice in the background. I want you to know that this episode was made with so much tenderness in mind. Today, in our Shakra series, we have arrived at the Heart Shakra, the Anahada, which is the powerful center, the quiet center of love and connection, grief, compassion and emotional truths. And before I go further on this, I want to say this gently. If your chest feels heavy, when I even mention the word and you hear the word, heart, I want you to know that you are not broken and you're also not alone, you are human in that. Now the Heart Shakra lives in the center of the chest. So it bridges the lower chakras, survival, pleasure, personal power chakras with the upper chakras, so the voice, the intuition, and spiritual connection. So this is the linchpin of the entire chakra system in my opinion. It is the one that you can't afford to lose. If this gets taken out, you've got a jumbled mess of energy. This is the place where the physical and the spiritual meet in your system. It's where the body and the soul shake hands. And because of that, it often carries much more than its fair share of emotional weight. Love lives here. Yes, absolutely. We all get that. Love lives in the heart chakra, yadda yadda, but so does grief. So does forgiveness and longing, heartbreak, hope, attachment and loss. The heart chakra does not discriminate. It holds all of it. In modern spiritual spaces, the heart chakra is often talked about in very soft ways, in like pastel ways. Green light, unconditional love, open hearts, compassion for all things living. And while that is not wrong, not saying that's wrong, while it's not wrong, it is, I believe an incomplete picture here. Because the heart chakra is not just about love as a feeling, it is about love as practice. And magical practice is messy. We can't deny that. It involves mistakes. It involves vulnerability. It involves showing up, even when your chest is tight and your instinct, your first instinct is to close off from the world. So anohada, heart chakra, it means unstuck or unhurt, which is a little ironic, I think, when you think about how much pain we actually store in this center. But the deeper meaning is not that the heart never gets wounded. It's that at its core, there is something within us that cannot be destroyed by loss or betrayal or disappointment. There's something intact beneath all that scour tissue, something still capable of love even after all the damage. The heart chakra governs how we give and we receive love. But it's also about how safe we feel during either of those processes. And in a world that constantly teaches us how to armor up, to be self-sufficient to the point of isolation, to not need anyone. It makes sense that so many people walk around with guarded hearts. We're told to protect ourselves at all costs. And while boundaries are healthy and I recommend them for everybody with every situation, we need to keep in mind that walls can become prisons if we're not careful about it. A balanced heart chakra does not mean you love everyone endlessly or that you forgive everything instantly. It doesn't mean being soft all the time or endlessly understanding. It means truly that you're honest with yourself about what you feel. It means you can hold compassion and discernment at the same time. It means you're capable of loving deeply without abandoning yourself in the process. When the heart chakra is underactive, love can feel dangerous. People may pull away emotionally, they might struggle with intimacy or feel disconnected even when they are surrounded by other people. There's often a weird sense of loneliness that just doesn't go away because somebody is physically present there. Even if somebody is there with you, that loneliness thrives and stays. That's because it's underactive. Now when the heart chakra is overactive, revibrating too high, love can become overwhelming. This turns into codependency and people pleasing, losing yourself and others, staying in relationship or situations that hurt you because the idea of separation feels unbearable. And both of these extremes, if you break them down, they come from the same root which is fear of loss. And here's a thing that we really don't say often enough, I think, in modern witchcraft if we're discussing the chakras. Many heart chakra wounds, unfortunately, do not start with romance. They start in childhood with caregivers who couldn't show up for you consistently or with love that felt conditional. With learning very early on in life that being yourself might cost you connection. So your heart learned to adapt. It had to. It had to close. It had to make sure it didn't overgive or make sure it did overgive. Stay quiet or loud or cling and none of that makes you weak. None of those coping skills made you weak. It makes you intelligent, really. It means that your nervous system created and did what it had to do in order for you to survive. The heart chakra is also deeply connected to grief when I do raky sessions for people. I'm not sure I've ever had a raky session where there wasn't some level of grief held in the heart chakra like energy gets stored. It builds up. A lot of people have heavier heart chakras solely because that grief has not been released and dealt with yet. It kind of just lingers in the corners of that aspect and energy. So the heart chakra is deeply connected to grief. We grieve. We grieve versions of ourself that never became what we hoped or we became. No grief doesn't necessarily come from just death. We grieve ourselves. We grieve relationships that never became what we hoped. We grieve safety, innocence, time, futures that didn't happen. And a lot of us were never taught how to hold grief gently. So it sort of just lodges itself in the chest. It becomes tightness. Becomes short breath. It becomes the feeling of fine when you're very much not. Energetically, the heart chakra is associated with the element of air, which I believe is so fitting. Air moves. It flows. It carries breath and breath equals life. When emotions get stuck in the heart chakra, it often feels like you can't breathe fully. Like, something is just sitting on your chest. Like taking of emotional space feels risky. Healing the heart chakra is not about forcing it open. It's about allowing movement again. Letting emotions pass through you instead of crystallizing inside. In which craft and folk magic the heart has always been considered to be sacred. So it's not just a symbol of love, but it is a center of truth. [BLANK_AUDIO] traditions believe the heart was where the soul listened, where intuition spoke, where oaths carried weight. To give someone your heart was not poetic, it was powerful. Dangerous yes, absolutely, dangerous. Because what we give our hearts to truly does shape us. And in modern life, we give our hearts away constantly without realizing it. To jobs that drain us, to expectations that don't really fit us, to people who only love us when we're convenient to them. And every time we override our inner knowing, for the sake of keeping peace, the heart chakra feels it. It tightens, just a little more. It learns not to speak so loudly the next time something like this happens. A healthy heart chakra allows you to feel without drowning in it, to care without self erasure, to love without losing your grounding. It allows you to say no, without fear, without guilt. It allows grief to move through you instead of becoming who you are. And it allows joy to feel safe again. Yes, vulnerability lives here as well. Real vulnerability, not oversharing, not bleeding emotion everywhere. But the courage to be seen just as you are. To say, this matters to me, to admit when something hurts you, to let someone know you care, even though they could hurt you, vulnerability is not weakness. It is a sacred act of trust. And trust is one of the heart chakra's greatest teachers. If your heart feels tired, if you've been carrying emotional weight for a long time, it doesn't mean that you are failing spiritually. It means you've been living, loving, losing, trying. The heart chakra does not ask you to be perfect or even not to harm it. It really just asks you to be honest, to acknowledge what you feel instead of just like spiritualizing in a way. Just stop pretending that you are healed in all aspects just because you understand the concept of healing. One of the most powerful shifts with heart energy. I believe happens when we stop asking ourselves, how do I open my heart more? And instead, we start asking things like, well, what made it close in the first place? Because closing off an energy center is a protective mechanism, it does have a story. And listening to that story, explaining and understanding why you've closed it in the past, is listening for and with compassion, not judgment. And that's where the real softening for this center begins. Like I said earlier, the color that is most often associated with the heart chakra is green. Which makes sense. First, it doesn't make sense to people, most people don't understand why it can't be pink. The green, the color green for this energy chakra, it's associated with growth. Green is associated with renewal with nature. It's not super flashy, it doesn't really demand attention the way that pink does. It's a steady, consistent color. It is healing and restorative. It's a color that reminds us that healing does not have to happen all at one time. Think of it as nature. It happens seasonally, it happens slowly with patience. Sometimes you're going to be in bloom. Sometimes you're resting beneath the soil, and both of these times are necessary. And if your heart feels numb, honestly that counts too. Numbness is not contrary to popular belief. Numbness is actually not the absence of feeling. It's the body saying it needs to pause for a second. It's the heart energy saying I've been holding too much for too long. And there is no shame in that. There is no failure there. It's just information. As witches, as mystics, spiritually curious people, any modern spiritualists navigating modern life. We are asked to balance softness with strength often. We're asked to care deeply without burning out, to love fiercely without abandoning ourselves. The heart chakra is where that balance lives, and it's not about being endlessly open. It's about being wisely open to things. So if the talk of this grief and openness stirred something in you today, whether it was warmth or sadness, longing, resistance, it's okay. Whatever it was, just let it exist. You don't need to fix it right now. You don't need to get rid of that feeling right now. I just want you to be aware. Awareness alone is a form of magic. Listening can be a form of devotion. And your heart exactly as it is in this moment without any work done is already worthy of care. As I bring this episode to a close, I really want to remind you of this. Your capacity for love did not disappear just because you were hurt. It adapted, and it can adapt again over and over gently in its own time. However the chakra feels to you, you are not behind. You're not too much, you're not too broken. Your heart has simply been doing its best in a world that asks a lot of it. I want to thank you for spending this time with me as we explored the heart chakra. If this episode resonated with you, I want you to let it linger. I want you to let it settle. And if it didn't, that's okay too. If the heart only opens when it's ready and if it's not ready, let's not force it open. Let it come to you. Let it request help in its own time. Until the next episode, friends, I really want you to try to take care of yourselves, move gently through the world, and remember, magic does not always look like spells and candles. Sometimes it looks like choosing softness when you have the ability to choose armor. This has been the Heart Chakra episode of Which You Ways For Modern Days. Have a wonderful, wonderful week, plus it be.