Create the Life You Imagine ~ March 2019

Balancing the Lower Triangle

“What is Love? Love is the absence of judgment.”

~ Dalai Lama

As we enter our next power center, the fourth chakra, we are making our first connection to that higher operating system of the Soul Self. The fourth chakra is located in our chest and is associated with the element of air and the color green. It is directly tied to our breath, and like our breath, the energy of this power center is expansive, integrating and healing. The fourth chakra works with the energy of emotions. While the second chakra is the power center that processes emotional responses specifically tied to our relationship history with other people, the fourth chakra is the power center that carries more universal emotional experiences tied to living as a human being in a beautiful but messy world. It is the center where we experience wonder, joy, and awe, and it is where we process disappointment, loss and grief. It is the center where we touch the power of forgiveness and release the judgments we have held about ourselves and others around the suffering and trauma of life. It is the center where we escape the duality of the lower triangle and can hold the mystery of darkness and light together in a loving and healing embrace.

The fourth chakra is the meeting point between our lower triangle personality self and our upper triangle Soul Self. Its job is to help balance and integrate the lower triangle, and then to open the channel to the soul energy of the upper triangle. Let’s think about what happens in the lower heart center first. Remember that prior to hitting the heart center, the lower triangle is fully tied to the perspective of the small self operating in isolation inside the lower triangle. The lower triangle is where we initially plant all the small self stories about life and where we store all our wounds, regrets, disappointments, traumas, and limiting beliefs. It is also where we learn and perfect our fear-based, addictive, compulsive or numbing life patterns. The small self is busy operating from within this history and anxiously trying to make sure that nothing gets worse. The small self of the lower triangle constantly judges itself, other people and experiences as good or bad. The small self is completely fixated on the outer world and its focus is on avoiding pain and suffering and looking around the corner for the next threat to its identity. As Brené Brown says from her amazing research on shame, it is “that voice in my head that drives pretending, performing, pleasing and perfecting…[that] loves gold stars and craves acceptance and approval.” In the small self world of the lower triangle, any sense of contentment or satisfaction tends to be fleeting and short lived, because it presents a constant and changing stream of wants and needs and then experiences the resultant disappointment, irritation, frustration and anger at not being able to meet them.

The fourth chakra tends to open up in mid-life when we begin to recognize that our small self doesn’t have any real life-giving answers or strategies, or during times of crisis when the struggles and challenges of life overwhelm the small self and it instinctively reaches for help beyond itself. The task of the lower heart center of our fourth chakra is to awaken our need for wholeness and to use its healing power to integrate, calm and balance the lower triangle. Without this higher state of awareness or sense of larger presence, we are a prisoner of the lower triangle small self. The small self cannot be satisfied because it is not integrated. Our physical, emotional and mental processing centers aren’t connected and coordinated, and like the ball in a pin ball machine, the thinking of the small self bounces around between them creating highly reactive patterns and imbalances in our first, second and third chakra centers. The fourth chakra is the center where we can access that higher state of integrative awareness and use it to stabilize, redirect and balance the energy centers of the lower triangle.

The word healing implies wholeness, and only when we can fully integrate all of our parts and embody our Soul Self can we move into greater and greater states of wholeness. The lower heart center is where we begin to take all of our parts and join them together in integrity – in wholeness – because we begin to re-member who we are. Our heart center is where we can hold with love all the brokenness, woundedness, disappointment and struggle that comes from living in a difficult world. It is where we can bring together all of our parts without any judgment and recognize the unity within ourselves, with others and with All That Is. It’s where we can receive all the stories of our small self with compassion and care and let our Soul Self gently knit it all together into the wholeness of who we really are. Our Soul Self is always whole and ready to wrap our smaller parts inside of that wholeness. Our Soul Self will use every experience, every hardship, every disappointment or loss as a lesson in love for our own growth and evolution. This work begins when we are willing to surrender and accept the brokenness of the world, the frailty of the human body, the imperfections and imbalances in ourselves, the limitations and wounds of others, and present them to the heart for healing.

The healing possibilities of our heart center open with the breath. Wholeness starts here by breathing deeply into our body and opening our heart with full acceptance of ourselves and our current life circumstances. The small self closes up and locks down in the lower triangle with struggle, judgment, control, resentment and resistance during difficult times, cutting us off from the larger awareness and healing power of our Soul Self. If our fourth chakra is out of balance we may notice that we stop breathing or breathe rapidly or shallowly, that our heart begins to race or palpate, that we attract illnesses of our lungs like bronchitis or pneumonia, or that we develop tight muscles around our chest, mid back and shoulders. Breathing deeply into our heart center when we feel the small self contracting, reminds us to stay in open-hearted engagement with ourselves, with others, and with our Soul Self, even and especially when life gets hard.

The heart center is a safe harbor during good times and during difficult times. It is the center where we find our balance and where we receive and transform the pain and suffering we experience as human beings. When we breathe deeply into our heart center it is like opening the door between our heart and our lower triangle and inviting all of our suffering parts in for a meeting. Imagine your body, your emotions and your thoughts coming together around a beautiful, round, jade green table in your heart with a wise and loving therapist who might ask each of them how they are doing today. She listens with patience and lovingkindness and lets each part express anything that was causing any fear, worry, pain or suffering. As our heart receives all those stories and breathes through them with deep acceptance and compassion, it dissolves and transforms the fear, suffering and resistance and restores the calm and balance in these centers.

Once the lower triangle energies are calmed, cleared and balanced, the upper heart center now opens the channel to the upper triangle, and the energies of our upper triangle and our Soul Self can begin to flow through our energy system. This fundamentally changes the flow of energy in our self-system and opens up entirely new ways of experiencing and responding to the journey of life. Instead of our small self struggling to climb up through our lower chakra centers to escape the anguish of the lower triangle, we let the energy of our Soul flow from the crown down—from our upper triangle, through our heart center, and into our lower triangle—to transform the way we are living. The power of the fourth chakra is its ability to meet the world with the transformative power of love and compassion. The shadow of the fourth chakra is its tendency to close down in protection when the heart center becomes overwhelmed by the grief of living in a broken world. If we close our hearts in protection, we close the channel to the powerful energies of our upper triangle and lose the connection with our Soul. This pushes us back into the suffering of the lower triangle.

If we can keep our heart centers open, we remember that love is the universal principal of the universe, the ground of all being, and the secret to a life of beauty, balance, joy and grace. We remember that love is inclusive and doesn’t exclude anything. We remember that life is a process of learning and growing and we have never done anything wrong. We remember that what happens to another, whether joy or sorrow, happens to us. We remember that we are never alone, that we are spiritual beings, and that our very essence is love. We remember that love connects us to each other and to All That Is, and that we are here to be a source of love in action. Love for the sake of love, that is why we are here. This re-membering not only transforms and balances our individual lives but has the power to transform and balance our families, our communities and our world.

Wishing you the blessings and light of the Soul, as you create the life you imagine.

Tracy

Stepping Stones:

This week focus on opening the energy of your heart center by using the power of your breath. It might help to play some quiet meditation music and to light a scented candle or burn some incense or use a few drops of a calming essential oil on your heart and under your nose. Now sit in a relaxed position with your spine upright and gently close your eyes. Breathe in slowly through your nose to the count of four, hold the breath for a count of two, breathe out through your nose to a count of four, and hold the empty space for a count of two. Breathe in for four counts, hold for two counts, breathe out for four counts, hold for two counts. Continue to breathe like this in a slow and steady pattern, feeling the space in your chest around your heart center relax and expand with each breath. Breathe in love, and breathe out stress. Breathe in love, and breathe out struggle. Breathe in love, and breathe out anxiety. Breathe in love, and breathe out control.

Now imagine that beautiful, round, jade green table in the center of your heart center and invite your physical body, your emotional body and your mental body of your lower triangle in for a visit with your Soul Self. Let your parts talk about their struggles and difficulties and continue to breathe around all the stories with love, acceptance and compassion. In this moment you simply accept all of the experiences with compassion and non-judgment and let your breath surround all of your parts with love. Continue to breathe for a few more minutes until you feel calm and relaxed. Bless all of your parts and thank them for their awareness and wisdom. Listen for any wisdom your heart has to offer and release the breath to its normal rhythm.

Here are some positive affirmations to power your fourth chakra this week:

I open my heart and breathe freely and fully. I am safe.

I allow myself to learn and grow through every experience.

I trust the process of life.

I love and accept myself fully in this moment. I release the struggles of this day

and the stories of my past. I bless the present moment and am at peace

with myself and with life. All is well.

I allow the love from my heart to cleanse and heal every part of my body and emotions.

I release myself from the limiting patterns of the past and forgive myself and others.

I choose to live with love, gratitude and joy.

I allow love to flow through my body, my emotions and my thoughts.

I align with the flow of love in the universe and let love flow through

my thoughts, words and actions. I am a source of love in action.

Our fourth chakra is where we activate the power of love. In every experience of life we can choose to live in love or in fear. Click below to find Kate's Living From the Heart to remind you to choose love, by going to the Products Page on my website and just scroll down to the Transcendence CD and click the track to inspire your journey this week. Both of Kate's CD's are available for purchase on that page.