Stuck energy in the heart chakra will hold you back from living fully and receiving the love and support you desperately crave.
If you’ve ever felt emotionally blocked, disconnected from love, or unsure how to receive help and compassion from others, you may be experiencing an imbalance in your heart chakra.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve helped hundreds of women tune in and clear out any stuck energy residing in the heart chakra. It’s actually my favorite energy center to work on because the outward shifts that happen in my clients lives are truly miraculous!!
I stumbled into this energy healing field myself after discovering the power of our seven primary chakras, and working extensively on my own heart center (more on that later!)
In the world of spiritual and energy healing, the heart chakra, also known as Anahata, is the center of love, compassion, and emotional healing. When this chakra is open and balanced, we feel at peace with ourselves and others. The way I like to describe it, is that we feel one with life itself, no longer an outsider looking in, but rather we “melt into” our environments and find it natural to connect with others.
When the heart chakra is blocked, we often feel guarded, resentful, lonely, or unworthy of love. This is a dark place to be, and I enjoy nothing more than seeing someone ascend out of this inner prison.
So, in this post, I want to lovingly walk you through what the heart chakra is, how to tell if yours is blocked or overactive, and how to begin healing and opening your heart again. You can do this gently, intentionally, and with grace.
đź’šđź©· What Is the Heart Chakra?
The heart chakra is the fourth of the seven main chakras in the body. It’s located in the center of your chest, right around your physical heart. I often ask my clients to place a hand on the heart when I sense it’s needing attention.
The Sanskrit name for this chakra is Anahata, which means “unstruck” or “unhurt.” This refers to the idea that beneath all our wounds and past experiences, there is a part of us that remains whole and untouched by pain. Truly, when the heart is healed we no longer feel like a victim or stuck repeating the same painful addictive patterns. Is that reason enough to heal it?! YES!
Traditionally, it’s associated with the color green, symbolizing growth, renewal, and healing. Though, I’ve always perceived it as light pink, as it’s intimately connected with our divine feminine energy and self-love. So trust your own intuition, whichever color you gravitate towards, that’s perfectly fine. I’ve also seen the two colors blended and they dance in complete harmony, so there’s always that option if you decide to integrate these colors into a heart chakra ritual or alter space.
The heart center is the bridge between the lower three chakras (more physical and survival-based) and the upper three chakras (more spiritual and ethereal). It plays a vital role in integrating our human experience with our higher self. Because in life, we NEED that balance. We can’t be too high on the spiritual realm, without being rooted into the physical materialized realm.
What you need to know is that our spiritual self can only prosper if our physical needs are met, and vice versa. We have been designed to enjoy both aspects of ourselves, without depriving ourselves of either.
✨ The Energy of the Heart Chakra
When your heart chakra is open and balanced, you tend to:
- Feel ever expanding empathy for others
- Have healthy, connected relationships
- Forgive yourself and others more easily
- Feel a sense of inner peace and calm
- Express love freely (both giving and receiving)
But many of us haven’t been taught how to open our hearts safely. We’ve been hurt. We’ve experienced rejection, loss, betrayal, or abandonment. That mean thing said to you in the school hallway, the time your mom ignored you when you desperately needed her to listen, the guy who you loved who you later found out invited another girl over to use his hot tub (you get the point, these type of things hurt!). This resentment, pain, and hurt was a common theme in my own life until I learned how to heal my own heart and let the pain go.
The heart chakra becomes a fortress if left unhealed, and while it may keep out pain, it also keeps out the deep connection we secretly seek.
🛑 Signs of a Blocked or Imbalanced Heart Chakra
Emotional Symptoms:
- Fear of reaching out to others (texts, calls, etc)
- Holding onto grudges or resentment
- Constant self-criticism or lack of self-worth
- Feeling emotionally unstable, numb, or disconnected
- Struggling to forgive
- Difficulty trusting others
- Crying when alone
Relationship Patterns:
- Attracting emotionally unavailable partners
- Over-giving or people-pleasing (ignoring your own limits)
- Fear of intimacy or vulnerability (not expressing your true thoughts/feelings)
- Jealousy, or wishing you were someone else
- Codependency, not feeling comfortable alone
- Intentionally isolating yourself (ignoring calls/texts/messages/invites from others)
What Causes a Blocked Heart Chakra?
Heart chakra wounds often form in childhood. That’s why therapy revolves heavily on past connections with caregivers, siblings, childhood friends, or perceived authority figures.
For instance, maybe you didn’t receive the love you needed from a parent, or a teacher mocked you for not understanding a concept. Maybe you learned that love had conditions or was unsafe, which is not true, because pure love (which we all deserve) is in itself free from conditions. Religious trauma, abandonment, betrayal, or loss can also impact the heart chakra. In my work, we even go into ancestral patterns of emotional repression that get passed down through the heart space.
You see, the heart chakra is this immensely potent space that holds energy both past and present.
The tricky thing is, we often don’t even realize how much our hearts are suffering. We haven’t been taught this stuff, especially if we have emotionally abusive or immature parents! They pass down the same painful treatment and we start to think it’s ‘normal’.
Our hearts can only handle so much mistreatment before we unconsciously shut down our hearts. I refer to this as our “heart threshold”. After being criticized, berated, or betrayed one too many times, we hit our heart threshold, and start going into protection mode. By closing ourselves off and avoiding intimacy with ourselves and others, we start believing we’re protecting ourselves.
But as you might already realize, what we’re really doing is cutting ourselves off from the very medicine we need most: real pure love.
It’s OK to need this, we all have a ‘needy’ side for a reason.
đź’“ How to Heal and Open Your Heart Chakra
1. Practice Heart-Centered Breathwork and Self-Directed Energy
Rub your hands together, generating heat in both hands, feel the vibrations or blood pulsing in your hands. Place one or both hands over your heart and take deep, slow breaths. Stay here, focus on the sensation of your hands and your heart connecting like a magnet. You might notice an impulse to cry, or yawn with relief, these are ways the body releases stuck energy in the heart.
2. Use Self-Love Journal Prompts
Try answering these questions:
- How are my past hurts holding me back from being fully self-expressed?
- If I loved myself completely, how would my life look different?
- Tell me how you feel before and after you forgive yourself.
- ✨ You can find 50 more journal prompts here. ✨
3. Do Inner Child Healing
Ask your inner child what love they didn’t receive, and give it to them now. Let your adult self become the safe, nurturing presence they needed.
I offer extensive inner child regression work in my 1:1 sessions, if you feel called to go deeper.
4. Try an Energy Healing Session
Work with an energy healer to clear stuck heart energy and restore balance. These practitioners are usually trained and extremely skilled in guiding you into the core wounds that will bring you the most relief.
5. Practice Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not approval. It’s release. Start with the intention to forgive, and let the process unfold by using this Forgiveness Letter Template. It’s going to support you step-by-step in releasing the person who wronged you in order to find your own happiness again.
🌸 Why the Heart Chakra Matters
Let me be frank with you, if you want to wake up each day with a lightness and optimism that only comes with a healed and happy heart, you need to clear out any stuck debris that lingers in the heart chakra.
Living a life you LOVE, surrounded by people who LOVE you, only comes when we have a clean and clear heart center. It’s a beautiful channel that allows all good things to flow in and out.
I will not rest until you feel this freedom and claim it for yourself. Because you deserve it, wholeheartedly, not because you earned it but because you ARE IT!
The heart chakra reminds us to slow down, soften, and reconnect with our true nature. Your true nature is infinitely worthy and the only problem you have, is that you’ve been convinced that it’s not true.
Let me remind you one last time, YOU being born was enough.
Healing your heart chakra opens you to this truth, and opens the door to aligned relationships and ever expanding love.
Final Goodbye for Now: Your Heart Is Sacred
No matter how many times you’ve been hurt or how guarded you’ve become, it is never too late to return to your heart. One step at a time, before you know it, you’ll be thanking yourself for doing this sacred work.
With love, always,
Laura
Want to go deeper, book a 1:1 spiritual healing sessions with me here.