*Direct quotes from Anodea Judith’s Eastern Body, Western Mind on “The heart chakra.”


1) The work of the Heart Chakra

Why is love so elusive when it is so simple? The basic right of the heart chakra is to love and be loved. Nothing is quite as uplifting as the flowering of love, nothing so devastating as its loss. Without knowing what healthy love looks like, we have a hard time creating it in our lives. We hang onto the mere shreds of love, sacrifice ourselves on its altar, and run in fear when we find it.

​So why do we do this? Let’s look at the cultural myths that run our values in the West.


2) The power of myths

Myths are the cultural stories of our origin and our purpose. Unconsciously, these stories influence and may even rule our lives. They define what is possible and shape who we are, and lead us to what can be. Myths are a statement of the primal relationship that exists between archetypal elements in the universe and their counterparts in our own psyches.


3) What is lost since we do not honor our Divine Mother

In the prevailing mythos, we are children of divorce. The Great Mother, a fundamental archetype of the psyche, was worshipped as a living deity for at least 25,000 years during the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of human history. She is the archetypal ancestress to us all, her memory buried deep in the collective unconscious. She mirrors our early childhood experiences of our own mothers and embodies the archetypal imprint of the mother source- nurturing, nourishment, containment, and connection.

In the collective mind of the Western civilization, she has long been forgotten. Removed from our predominant mythology. She is only beginning to resurface through the growing Goddess movement, recent archeological research and the popularity of Jungian archetypal psychology. She is the mother we have lost and are only just beginning to find again.


4) We have inherited a myth of a broken home.

In her absence, the Great Father has become the sole protagonist in our dominant mythology. He is strong and powerful, but distant and ethereal. He is without a wife or daughter and is estranged from all that the feminine archetype represents. His immediate son has been crucified, ostensibly for the sins of the children. In the divorce settlement, we are the motherless children who were taken to live with the Father. In our new household, Mother was not be discussed and became forgotten.

We have inherited the myth of a broken home. We are the motherless children in our distant father’s house, trying to find wholeness in a world that is longing for the magic and mystery of love. This is our story. These are our parents. We are the children of an unacknowledged marriage.


5) The myth of separation

No wonder we have such a yearning for romantic love. No wonder the myth of man-meets-woman-and-lives-happily-ever-after pervades our collective fantasies, rendering other forms of love unrecognizable. If we were children of an intact and love mythical home, a partnership mythology, we might seek union from an experience of cooperation, rather than through a compulsive need to complete our diminished selves through another.

Our predominant myth is one of separation. We see ourselves as separate from Nature, separate from each other, and separate from the divine. Separations are created by race, class, gender, and age. Individuals are endowed with the moral right, even encouragement, to do whatever necessary to further their own individual existence.

We have created vast separation between men and women, and further separation between women and women and men and men. Love is the all-pervading glue of the universe, and is culturally restricted to the bonds of limited heterosexual dyads and their often lonely offspring. The model is obviously flawed, for our children are abused and our marriages repeat the pattern of our mythical parents- with epidemic divorce.


6) Back to love

Collectively, it seems we are falling out of love with the world. We all know what deep pain we feel when we fall out of love. It pierces the very core of our being, carves a deep hole in the soul, and wounds and cripples the living spirit.

We are being called to connect Heaven and Earth by consciously reconnecting the severed parts of the world. It is to anchor the myths of individualism in the necessary grounding of self, while simultaneously expanding that self into conscious unity with the world around us— socially, ecologically, and mythically. To access the divine and become as gods, we need to recognize our own divine Nature as a part of the mystery unfolding. To heal the heart is to reunite mind and body, the mystical and mundane, self and other into an integrated whole.

This is the task in the heart chakra as it is the task for every one of us that wants to heal this world and assure its future. We need love to hold our world together. This is our work now.