10-18 Lesson 5 – Page 1

 

 

For PreTeens and Teens Ages 10 to 18 – Your Seven Energy Centers

Lesson 5, “The Heart Energy Center”

~Overiew ~

As energy passes through your heart it takes on the imprint of your heart center–your personal vibration and intent. If the motive of your heart is pure and you are intent upon giving love, kindness and compassion to others, then the energy flowing through your heart chakra will go out to bless and energize life. If your intent is not pure, if it is selfish or hateful, this energy will not bless life but will burden it.

 

At the heart we experience God as love. What do you think love is? The energy that comes through your heart is pure love. Love is the pure and powerful energy of compassion that does not leave a friend where he was, but helps the friend meet whatever challenge he or she is facing. Love can be expressed in the soft and gentle compassionate caring of a friend or it can be expressed as the fierce determination of a mother ready to protect her child. It can be many different things to different people.

 

Having compassion and appreciation for people is important. The love and appreciation you have for others can inspire them to follow a dream or change their life in dynamic ways. Your friends will respond to your appreciation for them and you’ll see them doing things they might not have done– because you believed in them and appreciated them!

 

Do you know who Mother Teresa was? She was a nun who moved from her home in Europe to India, where her vow was to serve the poorest of the poor. She took sick and dying people from the streets into her hospitals where she and her nuns cared for them with the purest love. For her, love was an essential part of the drama of everyday life. She used to say:”We do only small things with great love.” Because the heart center and its love fires are so essential to our physical, emotional and spiritual vitality, the initiations and lessons that involve the opening of our heart are some of the most profound that we will ever encounter.

 

 

Loving Yourself
Loving yourself is vital. The more you learn to love and appreciate yourself, the more love you will be able to give to others as well as put into your goals, plans and projects. As the famous television actress and comedian Lucille Ball said, “You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world!”

 

We also need to love ourselves enough to set boundaries with people.
If we are not comfortable with a situation, we can’t necessarily change other people but we can decide what we will do and how far we will go.

 

It is important to have the self worth to draw your own boundaries, especially when friends may want to involve you in illegal or dangerous things, or things you simply don’t want to do. It’s OK to say no. This shows that you respect yourself! You may have to say to your friend, “Hey Jim, I really like doing things with you, but I am not willing to steal.” Your friends may not be happy with your response, but it is a way of being true to yourself and they will probably respect you for it. What are some other issues that you need to set boundaries about with your friends or others – things like drugs, alcohol and sex?

 

The Source of Love Is Inside You
The source of love is inside of you. Inside of your heart is the place where you can pour your love and devotion to God and feel a connection. The intensity of this flame is determined by your own love. Through your heart you can ask important questions and through meditation, hear a response.

 

 

You can learn to contact your higher self in that spark of divinity in your heart. By simply putting your attention on this flame every day, by meditating and feeling your devotion to God and his flame inside of you, you will create a connection that can help you get answers and an important new perspective about life’s challenges.

 

Not Everyone Thinks or Feels Like You Do
One of the greatest universal truths we so often forget is that not everyone thinks, feels and acts like we do, and that is a good thing. Have you ever passed someone in the hall at school and heard them say something that offended you, or maybe their clothes or hairstyle seemed odd to you? We all have experienced thoughts in judgment of another person. Yet, who are we to judge? Maybe the person is just different from what you are used to. Maybe the person is from a different part of the country, a different ethnic culture or has different artistic taste. Opening our hearts to differences is a real key in learning to love. Accepting someone as he or she is opens our hearts, and opens the door for love and more authentic communication.

 

Sometimes people have judgments about us that we feel as heaviness or a sense of limitation. When we attune with our heart, we can more easily move beyond such incorrect and incomplete ideas about us. It is better to attune with your heart to find what is true than to react in anger toward another person.

 

The Trap of Anger
Anger is a trap. We become tied to those we hate. Remember the story of Luke Skywalker from The Return of the Jedi? Remember when Luke is trapped with the evil emperor and Darth Vader? The emperor is trying to lure Luke to the dark side. At one point, the emperor turns to Luke and taunts him with these words: “The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment, you make yourself more my servant.”

 

Luke realizes that his hatred will tie him to the dark side. He centers in his heart, reaffirms his allegiance to the force,and ultimately — by his own love — draws Darth Vader back to the light. But the emperor was absolutely right: Hatred brings us to the feet of the object we hate.

 

How Do We Handle Difficult Situations That Make Us Angry?
We often but mistakenly think that being hard is strong, yet spiritual adepts of both the East and the West tell us that softness is the greatest power in the universe. Hard, brittle things can break, while pliable things bend and bounce back. This is the essential principle of the martial arts.

 

Here is a story that explains how this works. A young monk in a Buddhist monastery used to climb over the wall at night and go into town to have fun. One night his Zen master noticed the stool he used to climb over the wall. The master waited late into the cold night where the stool was, and when the young monk climbed back over the wall, he landed on the head of his master! The young monk was shocked and embarrassed.

 

The master simply said: ”It’s quite cold this time of the morning. Take care so you don’t catch cold.” The young monk never again took off again during the night. The softness of his teacher changed his life.

 

Hardness of Heart and the Violet Flame
Many of us have experienced pain in this life or in former lives. This pain has left our heart feeling burdened. We may feel the desire to guard our heart so we will not be hurt. Perhaps we have been angry or selfish and these emotions have left our heart hardened. When we have misused energy, it stays with us, sometimes for many lifetimes, until we do something to remove it.

 

 

The Violet Flame
The violet flame is the key to transmuting all unloving feelings inside of us. We can invoke the brilliant, merciful light of the violet flame in our meditations and mantras to cleanse the darkness from our hearts so that the light can shine through us once again.

 

Try giving the mantra,I AM Forgiveness, in the activity section below.