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Welcome to Roots of the Rise. I'm Sarah Hope, and today we continue our journey through the chakras, arriving at the fourth chakra, the heart chakra. The heart. This is where our core programming around love lives how we give it, how we receive it, and whether we truly believe or worthy of it. If you've ever felt like there's a wall around your heart, or maybe you've noticed you, let everyone in, even when maybe you shouldn't. This episode is for you. Here we are at week four of our exploration of the chakras. Reminder, you might want to go back to episode 42, where I gave an overview of the whole system, and possibly catch up on the first three chakras. Before you listen to today, I'll link all those episodes in the show notes, but today sorry, that was my cat. So today we're talking about the heart.

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The Sanskrit name for the heart chakra is Anahata, which means unstruck or unbeaten. The color typically associated is green, which I remember thinking was strange. At first. I expected it to be red, since that's what we always see red hearts but apparently that's from the Middle Ages, when red symbolized the heart because of its association with blood. Green, in contrast, represents balance and healing, particularly between the physical and the spiritual, and that actually makes sense, since the heart chakra is the bridge between the lower and upper chakras. It's the point of integration. You can think of the lower chakras as the lower gears of the system. They keep us grounded, motivated, active. They help us preserve our individuality and engage with the material world. The upper chakras, five through seven, connect us to the universal through communication, vision and understanding. The heart chakra sits right in the middle with its essential theme of love. But here's the key Without strong development in the lower chakras, without a grounded sense of self, love can easily become entangled with unconscious merging.

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We lose ourselves in the universal. Autonomy is essential. Without it, love comes from need rather than from strength, and when it comes from strength, the heart's true potential is finally free to emerge. The core issues of the heart chakra are love, balance, relationship. Through balance we find a stable center from which love can naturally flow. Through love we form meaningful relationships and through those relationships we're given the opportunity to transform the self-centered ego of the lower chakras into an expanded awareness of the greater whole we are part of. The heart both liberates and manifests. Love opens us to the beauty of others while also grounding us in our bodies. Desire connects us to the physical self.

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Some say the heart chakra should always be wide open, but I don't agree with that. I think it's not realistic. In today's world few people can tolerate such raw, wide open exposure. We need healthy boundaries. Without them, the heart can unconsciously shut down or we can become overwhelmed by the immensity of what we feel. When the inner self doesn't feel protected, it withdraws. Boundaries are not barriers. They're structures that allow the heart to stay open without being overwhelmed. We talked about this a bit back in episode 50. Go back and give it a listen. I'll link it in the show notes.

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The heart chakra begins developing between the ages of four and seven. Remember, it's not that we don't have all the chakras at all times. It's just there are certain stages, points in our life where they are more actively being developed than others. So at this stage, this is when we start to grow out of the stubborn egocentricity of the third chakra and begin to show genuine interest in relationships beyond mom and dad. I remember it so clearly like right around age five, a little bit before then, my son started asking for more and more playdates. You know love begins to take on a more conscious quality at this stage, you know, love begins to take on a more conscious quality.

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At this stage, behaviors are intentionally adapted to gain or express love. Rejection or loss during this time can be particularly painful, because this is when we begin forming our social identity. And really this is the stage when so much of our identity begins to form. You know, gender roles start to become really internalized Messages like boys don't cry or girls need to be nice. It's where we often see the early splitting of the masculine and feminine within us, because we all have both, but that'll be a talk for some other day. For better or worse, we begin developing our gender-oriented belief systems. We also start to internalize our family roles, you know. The eldest becomes the responsible caretaker, the middle child competes for attention, the youngest is coddled. You know these roles can follow us throughout our lives. What begins, as you know, kind of a conscious behavior mom likes it when I make her laugh can evolve into a lifelong role, like being the clown or the entertainer, can evolve into a lifelong role like being the clown or the entertainer. These roles often harden into identities the compulsive helper, the funny one, the people pleaser.

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At this stage, many of us also begin receiving the message, often subtly, that love and autonomy are mutually exclusive, especially in households where conditional love is used to shape behavior. Children learn what parts of themselves are accepted and what parts are rejected, what they need to do in order to be loved. If I get straight A's, I'm loved. If I get a B, I'm worthless. We begin to believe we have to choose. We can either be ourselves or confine ourselves to the expectations, or we can be loved, but not both. As a result, many people never fully transition into the heart chakra. They stay stuck in the ego gratification of the third even in their closest relationships, and that makes it really difficult to experience true empathy or altruism. This is the developmental stage when we form our core beliefs about our right to love and be loved. And while it's true that the heart chakra is especially vulnerable because it sits at the center and connects all the others, all the chakras are interconnected. All the others, all the chakras are interconnected. Damage in one affects the whole. None of them operate in isolation.

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During this stage, modeling healthy behavior is so crucial. Children internalize your actions as part of who they are, the parent's actions as part of who they are. It's not just about what the parent does. It's also about explaining like why do you do that? Like mowing the lawn for an elderly neighbor because they can't do it for themselves, or saying no to cupcakes before dinner because we need room for food that actually helps us grow. Like mowing the lawn for an elderly neighbor because they can't do it for themselves, or saying no to cupcakes before dinner because we need room for food that actually helps us grow. Another thing that helps is routine. Routine creates a sense of stability. It's a structure for understanding and operating in our world and when routines need to be disrupted, explaining why helps a child feel secure. Supporting relationships is also vital Encouraging playdates, social activities, time with peers.

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My own parents were essentially hermits. They socialized maybe twice a year, always with the same small group, and pretty much only saw extended family on holidays. They never went out, never needed a babysitter, and they certainly didn't encourage friendships or playdates. To make it worse, I went to school 30 minutes away from home, so regular playdates like weren't even practical. Add in my insecurities and I was far too vulnerable to put myself out there and really advocate for more social interaction. It took me a long time to learn what friendship is even supposed to look like. I'm still grateful for the women who, you know, showed me. Shout out to my CRBC ladies. You've been absolutely pivotal in helping my heart heal.

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And now I'm doing things very differently with my son. You know, when he asks for a play date, I do everything I can to make it happen. It's exhausting and definitely brings up my own, you know, layers of insecurity that I still have to work through. You know I still hesitate to reach out for myself sometimes, but I will do it for him, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me, because I'll be damned if I don't give him what I never had. You know, even though this is a stage of social development, the real emphasis needs to be on self-acceptance. Without self-acceptance we can't genuinely accept others. I've talked before about shame and how speaking or shame is essential to healing it. I shared last week how, early on in dating my current husband, I told him everything, every dark skeleton in the closet, and that was the moment I finally felt all in. Until then, in all my relationships I had always kept parts of myself hidden. And the truth is it's impossible for someone to fully love you if you are not fully sharing yourself, and that kind of openness requires a foundation of self-acceptance. That's why I was able to finally be all in, because I had finally fully showed up as who I am.

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Love truly does heal. It's such a cliche, but it's true, and so often we have to give ourselves the love that we are maybe never going to receive from the people we wished we would get it from, like our parents. When we offer loving acceptance to another, it creates the safety needed for the rejected parts of their psyche and ours for that matter to emerge. That kind of acceptance gives us the courage to express ourselves fully, which is the role of the fifth chakra. But we can only express ourselves authentically once we've learned to fully love and accept ourselves. In fact, one of the most common blocks in the heart chakra is the absence of self-love and, as we discussed last week, that absence is often rooted in the third chakra, where shame lives, keeping us from recognizing the sacredness of our own being.

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Being loved by another can deepen our sense of self because we see our reflection in their words, their eyes, their actions. We begin to treat ourselves better, we take better care of our bodies, we tidy our homes, we dare to reach for our dreams. I would not be doing this right now, without the unwavering support of my husband. Of course, all of this depends on the presence of healthy, supportive love, and unfortunately, many of us have experienced the opposite at some point love that was conditional, dysfunctional, damaging. All abusive relationships teach a version of love, just a deeply distorted one. Think about it. I'm doing this for your own good. I'm doing this because I love you so much. What does that kind of messaging do when it's combined with an abusive action? It creates faulty wiring in our brains, confusing love with pain, control or fear.

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Just as harmful, maybe even more so, is the absence of love. When love is withheld, we often internalize the belief that certain part of ourselves are unworthy of it. We begin to reject the parts we think drove love away the needy, the angry, the messy, the vulnerable parts of us. But in doing so we fracture our wholeness. All forms of abuse wound the heart because they betray the very essence of love. And what's even more painful is that many of these betrayals occur within the context of family. So we're not only hurt by the abuse itself, we're also forced to try to reconcile a distorted version of love within the very relationships that are supposed to protect us.

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A young child is an open, unarmored being completely dependent on their caretakers. Their first understanding of love comes through the fulfillment of basic needs safety, nourishment, attunement. When a child is mirrored and nurtured, when the autonomy is supported, they experience love as something grounding and secure. This becomes the foundation for trusting that the people who love them are the people they can turn to for help. Now, an adult, we have the choice, whether we see it or not, to leave an abusive relationship. A child has no such option. In fact, a child doesn't even have the capacity to stop loving. So abuse during these early years doesn't just hurt. It shapes the child's development, self-worth and future relationships.

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When love and harm coexist in the same relationship, a child has no way to resolve the contradiction. To keep their world coherent, they may deny the abuse or convince themselves that they deserve it, and this is often reinforced by the abuser. This hurts me more than it hurts you. I'm doing this because I love you. These are the kinds of messages that twist our understanding of love at the deepest level. Alice Miller says when what was done to me was for my own good, then I am expected to accept this treatment as an essential part of life and not question it. This is the silent agreement in so many abusive dynamics. You're just supposed to take it. Be grateful, don't question it. And this kind of coerced acceptance doesn't just hurt the heart, it damages the upper chakras as well. It suppresses the ability to speak our truth that's the fifth To see clearly the sixth and to question the beliefs we've internalized. That's the seventh chakra.

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As adults, we may stay blind to abuse in our intimate relationships, not because we're weak, but because on some deep level we don't fully believe we're being mistreated. We carry the illusion of being loved and we make excuses to preserve it. We tolerate what should never be tolerated because we've been conditioned to equate love with pain, sacrifice or silence. Another major block to the heart is fear of rejection. It's one of the primary reasons we hold back our love and close ourselves off. Rejection tells us we're unworthy and it amplifies whatever shame we're already carrying. For children, rejection can feel like death. I mean. Their survival depends on connection, so any withdrawal of love feels existential.

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As adults, when we love deeply, we often begin to identify with the person we love. So when they reject us, if we're still over-identified with them, we may internalize the rejection and turn it inward. We begin to reject ourselves. It's essential to differentiate between being overly identified with the person who rejected us and the truths we may need to learn from the experience. And if there are lessons, we must face them with self-compassion, because there is no time when compassion is more necessary than when we are in the depths of grief. And that's the demon of this chakra grief. It counteracts the heart's lightness and expansion. Now, sure, this can happen when someone we love passes away, which is how we typically think about it. But grief occurs just as easily when a relationship ends, when a friendship fades away, during a major life transition, when our health takes a turn for the worse and we can't do what we used to be able to do, when we permanently have to say goodbye to a dream or maybe to who we thought we were going to be. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say they were quote, unquote, never the same after they suffered a loss? This is the demon coming out to play. This is how grief shuts us down and limits our capacity for love and joy.

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When someone's heart chakra is in a good place, a person is compassionate, empathetic, loving both to others and themselves. When the heart chakra has been wounded. It can manifest in a variety of ways. A person may become codependent, clingy, jealous, struggling with poor boundaries. On the other end of the spectrum, the wounded heart may retreat into victimhood, becoming overly self-focused, constantly needing attention, validation and reassurance.

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Withdrawal is another hallmark of a heart chakra imbalance. At its core, the heart may feel unlovable, so it shuts down as a protective mechanism. It might withhold love, not to protect boundaries but to manipulate, hoping the coldness will somehow make others love them more. There can also be a deep fear of connection or intimacy, leading to chronic loneliness. It's like living with a dead battery, always hoping someone else will come along to jumpstart it. People may dwell on old relationships that ended long ago because that was when they last felt loved. They may stay stuck in pain, anger, betrayal, a refusal to forgive, believing that holding onto the wound keeps them safe.

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Lack of empathy is another consequence. If a child's emotional experience wasn't met with empathy, it's hard for them to offer it to others, even to themselves. Same goes for compassion. Instead, they may become overly critical or judgmental. This becomes a wall. If others are never good enough, then they can't reject us. We feel righteous instead of vulnerable, but in doing so we distance ourselves from the very thing the heart longs for most connection.

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So I know you're wondering what do we do about it? The very first step is learning how to love yourself. That means honoring your individuality, every part of who you are, the part that strives for success, the part that is terrified of it, the one that longs for deep commitment, the one that craves wild freedom. It's not enough to just recognize those parts. We have to reclaim them, integrate them, invite them back into the circle of our wholeness. This is where practices like pranayama, yoga, somatic work, meditation can be deeply healing. They help us access repressed emotions, allowing what's been buried to surface, which frees the heart from the weight of all that unprocessed grief and trauma. It restores the natural rhythm, the balance between giving and receiving, holding on and letting go. Working with grief can be profoundly transformational. Breathwork is especially potent here, because unshed grief restricts the breath. So as we deepen the breath, the grief often begins to move.

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Forgiveness is also a key element. Blame acts like a barricade. It can feel like it's protecting us from being hurt again, but in truth it blocks the heart from healing. It keeps us walled off, not just from the one who hurt us, but from love, connection and the wholeness that we're longing for. Not to mention, we can always turn that blame inward, and that's how we trap ourselves in the past, frozen in the moment we regret, stuck in the helplessness of a wounded child or the chaos of an out-of-control adult. Self-blame breeds shame, and shame is one of the most powerful inhibitors to presence and healing Love. Who? You've been right. Ultimately, love is the key, but not love as a fleeting feeling or romantic ideal. I mean love as a way of being expressed through forgiveness, acceptance, compassion and so much more. That's what we'll be diving into later this week how to live a heart-centered life by cultivating the many facets of the heart.

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That's all for today. Thank you so much for listening. If something in today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to reach out by clicking the message me button if you're on Spotify or emailing rootsoftherise at gmailcom, and if you're enjoying the podcast. It would mean a lot if you'd subscribe, leave a rating review or share it with a friend.

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One quick logistical note starting today, I'll be shifting to a Monday, wednesday, friday release schedule With my son out of school. My already full days are about to get even fuller and I want to make sure I have space to really enjoy the season with him without the pressure of putting out five episodes a week. Honestly, I've been thinking it might be helpful for you to have a little more breathing room between episodes. It's a lot of content and an extra day might make space for things to settle in a bit more. So we'll try it out and we'll see how it goes.

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I'm also working on creating a space where we can connect more directly, whether that's a weekly Zoom gathering, a Facebook group or something else. Let me know what you would love to see. Until next time, remember, know who you are, love who you've been and be willing to do the work to become who you want to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope you find it beneficial and maybe it even encourages you to dig deeper and get the support you need to let go of limiting beliefs and step into the most empowered version of yourself possible.