Heart Center / Heart Chakra / Fourth Bandwidth

Heart center

As humanity is still very much polarized in the emotional body, these writings about the energy centers reflect mainly the challenge of overcoming emotional imbalances.

The twelve petal heart center located near the heart between the 4^th and 5^th thoracic vertebrae, just below and in-between the etheric shoulder blades, affects the function of our thymus, immune system, heart, blood circulation, lungs, lymphatic system and breasts. It also affects the spleen together with the solar plexus. The center is divided into lower heart and higher heart – lower connecting with self awareness and higher with added group awareness. It connects us with the feeling consciousness of the soul and in the later stages of the heart opening anchors the energy of pure spirit. It transmits energy from the love petals of the soul. Love is a coherent force that makes all things whole, for where there is love no harm can come. 

Solar plexus has to do with personal desires and wants, whereas lower heart with personal love and higher heart with impersonal, broadly inclusive group love. This is where we bridge between the purely personal to the beginnings of soul influenced impersonal and seek connection and right relationship to the different spheres of life in a new more inclusive way. The heart center opens us to the awareness of love and group needs, and these can initially seem to be in conflict with the self oriented outlook that the solar plexus energizes.

As the heart opens the sense of who you are becomes bigger. As consciousness is a widening of light and expansion the open heart recognizes the “I am part of everything” and starts to feel the influence of existence itself. This brings for the first time a sense of going beyond your notion of pure physicality, emotionalism and mentality – you are something more. “I am not my body, not my emotions, nor my thoughts – I am an eternal soul and spirit having a human experience”. The perspective changes and expands remarkably and a whole new vast vista opens up.

The heart weaves and begins the integration and the healing process. We may ask ourselves “what would I be without my drama and my story, what would I be without all the “stuff” I have suppressed” and we start to develop a much more integrated view of ourselves. As we connect with something greater we experience a lot of release and relief, elevation, lightness and freedom and we become genuinely curious about life, truth, existence and God – a longing awakens to know who we really are and where we came from and why are we here. We are tapping into a source that is much more, is mysterious to our ordinary day-to-day consciousness and elevated.

We start to take others into consideration and develop kindness, compassion and care. Our understanding of life’s many relationships deepens and we enter the bridge between the purely human personality based expression meeting the part of us which is informed by our soul and our inclusive divine spirit.

Our beliefs reflect belonging and we get glimpses of understanding that our experience is our own responsibility – some of which chocks us, some of which we may delight in. Yet, life does become more trustworthy again and there is a strong longing for connection. We seek our own healing and this lower heart opening is a great sphere of self-development, inner growth and improvement. We may seek therapy, counselling, healing and spiritual groups to find like-minded people.  

The validation comes from how we experience our inner space. In the previous stages this did not yet enter, we were still in the outer world of matter, now we are curious of the inner world of feeling, sensations and soul, deeper causes inside. We look for ease, flow, rightness, softening of struggle and pain. We want an authenticity we haven’t sought before and we want to know ourselves on a deeper level.

Stress can unbalance the heart center, causing blood pressure imbalances and insomnia. Also greed and over concern or protection of one’s so-called “rights” can bring this center into an unhealthy state.

Ego identity is still present as the lower heart opens but it is behaving itself and seeking identification with a new sphere of meaningfulness, people and connections. We find current day spiritual materialism here, the jargon and the spiritual platitudes, all part of the group of people seeking a new sphere of belonging. The New Age market place, fairs of glitter, bumper stickers and paraphernalia of angels, crystals and incenses etc. You have to at least do yoga, although with mostly body preoccupation, to feel part of this new sphere of exploration your heart has invited you towards and you may seek a new way of feeling special, a trap of the ego, to feel the belonging you seek. Later your yoga practice may indeed become a real portal to the inner self-inquiry and deeper alchemy.

This is a huge bandwidth and encompasses all forms of spiritual seekers, some of which, if they stay in this sphere alone can develop real smugness, yet another trap on the way. As the soul influences already a bit, the heart would not open otherwise, we look towards going within to meet our needs. We are kinder towards ourselves and others, more accepting, humorous and philosophical. We are choosing and being more pro-active about what we want and how we engage with life.

The journey into the depths of our hearts is long and there is often a lot of healing needing to take place, of self-acceptance, potential overwhelm of emotions, looking at our defenses and melting and transmuting energies further. If we get past the lower heart to integrating the upper heart, deeper genuine work starts and humbleness enters, we remember and get glimpses of what the soul already knows and we enter a genuine spiritual inquiry, find our path and our calling, eventually reaching the point of no return. The heart starts to fully function after, what in the esoteric philosophy is called the second initiation or the baptism, where one ceases to think solely as an individual and in addition becomes attuned to group consciousness. By the time we have fully embraced this bandwidth, all upper centers would have opened to a greater degree in unison with the heart center and we enter into a life of service and dedication – a fairly high state of consciousness. The brow center and the heart become fully alive and the brow centers gland the pituitary body enters into activity. The long healing journey, which may take life-times, takes us through our childhood wounding to ancestral patterns and past life energies seeking healing and redemption, all depending on our souls purpose and stage of evolution.

When the deeper spiritual inquiry starts we would have embarked on a real conscious soul search, building through meditation practice our connection with the downward gazing soul. We seek the stillness; observe our witnessing awareness and engage in self inquiry. As the heart starts to open it awakens the soul and she starts to pay attention to what her reflection, the personality is doing. A process of infusion, invocation, evocation and integration brings us to greater soul infusion, magnetism, health and wholeness. We open ourselves to the unknown and surrender. Dedicated and disciplined spiritual practice and meditation enters and we do them regularly, daily.

The heart is a real choice point. Our relating to the world changes to that of compassion, respect for diversity and a willingness to be part of the solution rather than the problem and we desperately try and find how we can contribute. Yet we also realize that we are not yet a fully embodied divinity walking our solution, emanating divine Love continuously. Actually we become acutely aware of what still needs correcting, integrating and healing. Love, awe, reverence to all life, wonder enters and a willingness to do our inner work consistently. In esoteric philosophy it is said that aspirants do what they want, but disciples do what is needed, they are at this stage locked by the soul, the inner spheres of their aura and their etheric body, connections to greater streams of life, follow instructions and guidance.

Conceptually we may get glimpses of the oneness and the wholeness, have some experiential peak experiences, yet they are fleeting and we find ourselves still in separation. We know, but cannot yet embody nor take full ownership of the expanded, all-encompassing Be-ness or Absolute Truth. Knowing and living it are two different matters. Knowing God conceptually and living God are still miles apart. Yet at the top of this bandwidth, the wide open heart fully connected and the soul infused into our whole being the experiences of truth realized can come. At this point there is “no my soul or thy soul – only one soul of humanity”. A soul field currently in huge distress, yet for the individual reaching this stage it somehow bothers less. You may still engage in the suffering of humanity, it may even hurt more especially if you are a kinaesthetic sensitive, feeling the pain of the world, but you also understand that every individual soul is exactly where it needs to be in its own evolutionary journey. You realize that every soul is you, as you are them. You become a contributing emanation into the collective field and counterbalance some of that suffering.

A lot of courage is needed to reach truth realized, as the subtler shadow imprints in our soul field seek our awareness. We are both remembering and forgetting; when triggers come our way we may still fall back on our separation. The finer the energy we magnetize and attract, the more subtle the traps.

As our aspiration is to firmly connect with our soul, it may come as a surprise to many spiritual seekers that we have to work through every single resonance from the lower bandwidths to reach our ultimate goal. And as the actual remembering of our soul field doesn't start until the heart has readily opened, we find ourselves re-entering, re-capitulating some of the lower bandwidths to integrate the hurts, wounding and fear still lingering there.

We stand between worlds, often spacious, open, vulnerable and inquisitive. We recognize our egos, lower self story and see both our humanness and our divinity.

The challenge here becomes the legacy of old patterns of our many life times, how to grow beyond the initial realization and integrate more and more of who we truly are. There is always risk of ego claiming new ground, of getting too pleased with ourselves and our attainment. The shift between the lower heart to the upper heart is really asking for demonstration, spirit is requiring proof, embodiment and being real. We cannot take our baggage with us to heaven, nor bring an uplifting contribution by directing the beautiful vibration of heaven fully down to Earth unless we do the multi-generational, multi life-time work that’s needed at this stage.

Our responsibility now is to stay with and persevere with our meditation practice, be authentically present to what is real and arising in the moment and have the courage to go even deeper. We are sometimes left to our own devices, in the later stages of the journey, without a mentor, guide or guru in order to embody the demonstration needed. You are asked to use your heart to deal with everything you brought with you as your soul incarnated and your ultimate authority is your own soul and the divine God spark within you. Time and space are relative processes, all is present in the now. You work with both personal and Universal collective patterns.

Very slowly the triggers and tests diminish as you start to work more with existence rather than against it. Before the upper heart opening we use existence against ourselves in order to find our way through life experience, through the neither this nor that, we eventually find our path. Life becomes simpler and more joyous.

The burning ground,
To reach this stage we would have consciously and earnestly been surrendering and inviting our soul, the Divine Angel, to infuse us for a long time. Behind the slow opening we sense life, energy, spiritual embodiment and the fact of the soul, eternity living through us. Between lies what in esoteric philosophy is called the burning ground which has to be crossed. This represents all the karmic energies the soul has stored in its field since numerous lifetimes, since the divine spark set forth from Oneness. The question facing us now is whether our will and our surrender is strong enough to submit to the fires of the final purification. This is already a very high stage of development, the personality has become a useful instrument which the soul and spirit can use and it is a highly trained agent for service. It has, however, its points of weakness which are liable to present points of crisis and has likewise its points of strength, on the whole a dependable vessel or grail. The big question facing us here is whether we have the courage to cross this final burning ground to allow spirit full reign of our personality, allowing the divine total control. We have to bring the two aspects of our nature fully together, marry the divine feminine and the divine masculine in our hearts in full consciousness with clear intention. It is at this midway point of the heart where the great submission of the lower to the higher takes place. It is an "invocative decision" of the personality which, in time, produces and "evocative response" from the soul. This all takes place in the field of consciousness, the lesser light moves towards the greater light of your own being - a true light in its own right and the personality is absorbed into the greater light of the soul. The personality becomes lost in sight in the radiant aura of the Angel. 

The journey of expansion brings more and more light of presence, awareness, expansion and harmony into the mix and reverberates throughout your field into the collective field of humanity. Your soul would have brought its contribution to the whole and accomplished its task incarnating fully into all corners of your Universe. The body of the soul, the causal body dissolved there is only pure spirit flowing through the personality. It is Existence itself experiencing itself through your specific, unique expression and fully embodied here on Earth. This is the eye of the needle which asks a lot of faith and courage to step through into Oneness.

“An awake heart is like the sky that pours light” - Hafiz

It is all an inside job!

Inspired by my own journey, study in esoteric philosophy, the ancient wisdom tradition, especially esoteric soul based healing and notes from a recent workshop with Jeddah Mali.