The Heart Chakra or Anahata is best known for its association with love, joy, compassion, acceptance, connection, balance, and heart-centered spiritual and healing practices.
Given these associations, the chakra’s significant role in personal and spiritual development is easily understood.
Of course, it works closely with other chakras (e.g., sacral, throat, and crown) that also contribute to your expression and experience of these qualities and functions.
Learn all you need to know about the Heart or Anahata Chakra, including its meaning, attributes, influences, and five practices that promote its balance and healing.
For information on Heart Chakra blockage symptoms (poor or weak functioning) or signs of an open balanced Heart Chakra (healthy functioning) see my Imbalanced Heart | Balanced Heart blog post.
Heart Chakra Meaning
The Heart or Anahata Chakra is also known as the Fourth Chakra, the Green Chakra, or simply Anahata.
Anahata Chakra Meaning
Anahata is a Sanskrit word that, according to various sources, means “unstuck, unhurt, or unbeaten.” Other sources say Anahata means “infinite, unhurt, and boundless.” All of these terms attest to and depend upon its qualities of openness, curiosity, receptivity, and optimism when balanced.
What the Heart Chakra Does
Chakras work collectively, and your health and wellness outcomes express how balanced each center is and how well the system is working together or how it’s malfunctioning overall.
The focus here is on the Heart Chakra and its attributes and influence over your mind, body, and spirit. But, it’s important to be ever mindful of other energy centers working dynamically with the Heart. In other words, imbalance in the Anahata could relate to imbalance in another center. Some of these key alignments will be noted.
Finally, while all energy centers are powerful and vital in their unique ways, the Heart Center has the overarching role of balancing and integrating the system through its ability to create (entrain) coherence across the system.
Anahata and the Mind
The Anahata is associated with thoughts and beliefs stemming from trust and forgiveness of, or mistrust and the inability to forgive, the self and others. Thoughts such as: “I don’t trust …” or “I can’t forgive or ignore …” indicate Anahata’s imbalance. Ideas and beliefs that prevent you from loving, forming relationships, or empathizing typically signal an energy blockage in this center.
The Body, Emotions, and the Heart-Brain
Emotions are a product of the body, hence they’re discussed together here.
The heart-brain is not the product of thoughts associated with the heart, but rather the expression of the inner sense (felt sense) of your experience. It functions much like the gut-brain only the sense and its wisdom comes from the Heart Center.
The bodily parts and systems that your fourth energy center governs include the heart, circulation, lungs, respiration (breath), lymphatic system, thymus gland, immune system, arms, upper back, shoulders, and neck.
However, other chakras may contribute to how these organs and systems perform. For example, the Throat Chakra plays an important role in the functioning of the lymphatic and respiratory systems.
Several energy centers influence your emotions and self-assessments. The Sacral or Orange Chakra has significant control over your emotions and is tied to the emotional layer of your aura. Its planet is the Moon and its element is water, both aligned with emotions. It’s also the seat of your self-worth or how you value and thus love yourself.
Similarly, the Solar Plexus is most influential in the development of your self-esteem, self-image, confidence, and personal power.
Still, the Heart is paramount when it comes to love, compassion, hope, kindness, joy, understanding, trust, forgiveness, and connection.
It also contributes to feelings of grief, loneliness, jealousy, closemindedness, and hopelessness. And, of course, these sentiments play a role in your self-assessment and vice versa.
The Fourth Chakra and Spirit
Three key influences – love, spiritual connection, and coherence are perhaps the most significant spiritual attributes of Anahata. Here love refers to its non-ego-based expression rather than love, passion, or lust.
While lack of purpose or meaning can be indicative of thoughts and beliefs (more Crown Chakra), they can be a sign of Fourth Chakra imbalance. In this situation, you can’t simply reason your way out of the void. You’ll need to also sense into and listen to your heart.
Spiritual connection with the Self, Soul, and others relies on a well-functioning Heart Center.
Color of Heart or Green Chakra
Consistent with what we understand about energy waves, the light spectrum, and corresponding colors, each chakra possesses a color that indicates its energetic wave frequency. The frequencies of the overall seven-chakra system increase from the Root Chakra through the Crown.
The Heart Center is green, although, it’s sometimes associated with the color pink. You’ll notice this when looking at Heart Chakra crystals or healing stones.
Heart Chakra Location
The Fourth Chakra is located in the middle of the seven standard chakras, with three earth or dense matter-oriented chakras below and three spiritually-oriented chakras above. The seven centers are aligned along the Central Light Column (Sushumna) that runs the length of the spine.
You can see the heart indicated with the green dot on the adjacent illustration.
Its position underscores its centrality within the realms of the Self and the chakra system.
Heart Chakra Mandala
Green is the color of the Anahata Chakra symbol or mandala. As noted above, this energy center is sometimes portrayed as pink. However, pink symbolic representations don’t often maintain the detail and significance of the classic mandala such as illustrated here. Of note are the specific number of lotus petals and the two prominent triangles.
The two triangles are imported because they reflect balance and connectedness. The upper and lower points signify the “… decent of spirit into the body and ascent of matter rising to meet Spirit.” It also represents the unification and balance of feminine and masculine energies.
Judith Anodea notes that the six resultant points symbolize the six other chakras integrated within the Anahata, reflecting its integrative and balancing role. (Recall that both the energetic and physical heart entrain the energy and physical body and, in doing so, create coherence.
The twelve petals forming Anahata’s perimeter represent the twelve qualities of the heart: joy, peace, kindness, patience, love, harmony, clarity, compassion, purity, understanding, forgiveness, and bliss.
Anahata Planet
Anahata’s planet is Venus. The relationship between the two is obvious as this is the planet most closely associated with love, relationships (connection), and beauty.
Heart Chakra or Anahata Element
Air is the Anahata element. It is the least dense and thus least like matter, Earth, and incarnate beings (beings who have a bodily form). Given its spaciousness and flow, air is associated with breath (prana or life force), and that which has a numinous or spiritual essence.
Anahata Sound (Bija)
Each chakra is associated with a single-syllable sacred sound (seed sound) called the bija. When sung or played this sound improves energy flow to areas of the mind, body, and spirit governed by Anahata. The sound and its harmonic frequencies also tone this chakra. For the Heart Center, the bija is the sound Yum or Yam.
You can chant Yam or Yum or listen to a recording of someone else chanting or toning this sacred bija to encourage heart balance and system coherence.
Heart and Coherence Throughout the Mind, Body, and Spirit
An interesting aspect of the element Air and the fourth energy center is the quality of dispersal or suffusion. Like the gaseous Air element, heart chakra harmonic frequencies permeate the physical body, all the other energy bodies, and all the auric layers of your aura. In this way, it entrains all the various energy frequencies.
When the physical heart and Anahata are balanced and functioning well, they promote coherence throughout the whole human system, an expression of Anahata’s central influence on balance and integration.
The physical heart acts through its paramount electromagnetic force and influence within the body. It produces and emanates vastly more electricity (sixty times more) and electromagnetism (4-5,000 times more) than the brain.
The importance of this is coherence in your heart, brain, and energetic bodies creates a neuroplastic state, a state that offers infinite possibilities for change, including spontaneous change.
Using your breath (Air) to practice heart-focused breathing builds coherence. Similarly, you can create a connection and coherence between yourself and others through your Anahata and physical heart. Hence the expression “heart to heart,” which is used to connote openness, intimacy, honesty, and without reservation.
Heart Chakra Healing – Five Ways to Balance Anahata
As a Spiritual Life Coach and Healer, I always stress to my clients and students the importance of working in and through your heart. Personal development, effective self-reflection, spiritual growth and practice, energy healing, and mediumship stem from a strong connection to your heart. Offering healing originates in the heart as well.
For these reasons and more, clearing, balancing, and enhancing the functioning of your heart is not only important to the Heart Chakra but to your entire mind, body, and spirit health and wellness.
These five practices can help you achieve this. No attunements and additional skills are required.
1. Anahata Toning (Bija)
As mentioned above, all chakras are vibrational, i.e., exhibit subtle energetic wave patterns. When out of balance, blocked, or malfunctioning in some other way, the vibration becomes distorted.
You can create the bija (mantra or sound) through chanting, humming, tuning forks, singing bowls and even breathing and entrain your chakra back to its natural balanced vibration.
As noted above, bringing the Heart Chakra and physical heart into alignment and balance helps align and integrate the whole system – mind, body, and spirit.
2. Breathwork
Possibly thousands of heart-centered breathwork that can be combined with meditation or not to bring about balance, integration, and healing on all levels. My Mind Body Spirit blog post on techniques for tapping into your heart offers several suggestions on how to do this.
Bringing your breath and attention to your heart puts you in touch with your Heart Brain and can provide you insights into your truth and authentic experience and aspirations.
3. Heart Chakra Crystals
Heart Chakra stones tend to possess tones of green or pink (as noted in the Heart Chakra crystal grid in the photo)
Some Common Green Chakra Stones For Healing the Heart Chakra:
- Jade,
- Emerald,
- Malachite,
- Green Calcite,
- Chrysoprase,
- Peridot,
- African Turquoise Jasper,
- Moss Agate.
Popular Pink Heart Chakra Healing Crystals:
- Rose Quartz,
- Rhodonite,
- Rhodochrosite,
- Pink Calcite
- Peach Moonstone, and
- Pink Opals.
4. Yoga Poses for Anahata Chakra
Yoga poses for the Anahata Chakra commonly create chest expansion through the chest such as chest openers with hands clasped and arms stretched out from the back of the body in various expressions. Fish, Cobra, Thread the Needle Twist, and Backbend poses are good examples of Anahata Chakra yoga poses to open the chest and heart.
5. Essential Oils for the Heart Chakra
Both the physical (medicinal) and vibrational qualities of essential oils can treat physical, emotional, and mental symptoms of chakra imbalance or dysfunction. As a practicing certified Aromatherapist (or Subtle Aromatherapist) I often use these beautiful yet powerful aromatics to support healing of all kinds.
Heart Chakra essential oils are numerous and diverse. They range the gamut of volatility from highly volatile offering opening, release, and joy (Cypress) through denser low volatility for deeper support and connection (Rose).
Some common Heart Center oils are:
- Rose (Rosa damascena),
- Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis),
- Rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora),
- Palma Rosa (Cymbopogon martinii),
- Sandalwood (Santalum album),
- Neroli (Citrus aurantium),
- Bergamot (Citrus bergamia),
- Cardamon (Elettaria cardamomum), and
- Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens).
Using various aromatherapy techniques you can create different blends of your choices of these essential oils for inhalation, creams and balms, bath oils and salts, and acupressure point appointments.
Pick whichever of the five healing practices appeals to you. Blend the practices to create your special healing creation or ritual.
For More on the Heart Center, See:
- Starchaser Mind Body Spirit Blog posts related to the Anahata and Heart-Centeredness. In particular:
- Starchaser ebook on Aromatherapy and Essential Oils for the Chakras
