Please see an overview of the Chakras in the Chakra 1 post.

1. Chakra 4 is the heart and blood vessels, the lung and optimum use of the lungs. O2 and the yet-untranslated Sanskrit word “prana” and synonymous Mandarin word “qi” are the center of the understanding of the heart chakra.  “Life force” and “élan vital” are the most commonly used phrases to translate these two words into English and are worthy of more discussion in order to become normalized in our language the way prana and qi are for billions of people.

2. The emotional and mental awarenesses of the 4th chakra are: to be true, to love, to experience the opposite of hate. It contains/is non-harming and compassion as well. Compassion, as its own energetic current in the body, is the passionate, honored experience of the right to all coexisting life. It is misunderstood definitionally in modern society as a synonym for sympathy and/or empathy. Compassion contains both sympathy and empathy but is neither exclusively, and, through the recognition of the suffering/experience of the other, outside; of self, inside; within any given moment; it has an alchemy that makes it greater than the sum of the two.

3. The aforementioned negative-based connection running through chakras 2-4-6 makes chakra 4 more immediately accessible to those with a strong 2-4-6 channel; these are most often women. There is no intrinsic reason that any one group’s 4th chakra should be more meaningful or impactful than any other group’s, but we can consider through basic mathematics the functionality, connection, and efficiency of linking even numbers with other even numbers. If your basic makeup comes from a current managed from the ground up, it’s reasonable to see that this current could be a more natural, steady, and easeful way of expressing your natural energies. That love and non-harming are the central experience of the 4th chakra means that those with an odd or negative current may not immediately have as clear or strong access to this as those with the positive charge. The tragic darker side of this teaching is that those (often men) with 3rd chakra power imbalances stand to be the most harming communities in mankind, either to themselves (Steve Jobs’s pancreatic cancer) or to others (Hitler), because they become so “fed” by their own sense of self that they become blind (5th chakra) to the root source of internal harm or external harm as genocide or other social atrocities.