The world may feel like chaos right now. There is a lot going on, and sometimes, when a lot is happening, it's easy to fall into an overthinking doom spiral. Our minds just want to keep us safe, but the mind is smart, not wise.

The heart is where we find wisdom and peace. If you’re losing yourself in the chaos of the times, it’s time to activate your heart chakra and get heart-centered!

You have two places to seek information: your mind and your heart. But in this knowledge-centric world, it can be easy to forget the wisdom of the heart. When you learn how to think with your heart while your head is in a tailspin, you find your intuition and yourself.

The heart is where your intuition lives—that inner place of knowing where sometimes that knowing doesn’t make sense, but it’s knowing all the same.

The mind likes to gaslight the heart's information because it is focused on the facts that it can see. But the heart knows that not all that can be seen is all that is there. The heart instead reads the energy, sometimes even downloading information directly from the source, the Universe, or God.

How To Tell If Your Heart Chakra Is Blocked

Your heart chakra is also known as your heart center. When things are hard, or you've had some trauma, you may find that you've built a wall around your heart center.

It’s natural to want to protect yourself from the heartache life can bring, but you’re not just blocking off the pain. You’re also blocking your heart from love, insight, healing, and overall chakra balance. A blocked heart can't give you the insights and healing that an activated heart chakra can.

So, how do you know if your heart chakra is blocked?

If you find it difficult to trust others or struggle to allow yourself to get close to people, you might have some blockages that need unblocking. On the other hand, if you experience a lot of negative feelings about yourself, such as self-loathing or overall low self-esteem, that can also indicate some imbalance in your heart chakra.

A balanced heart chakra allows a steady flow of love in both directions.

How Do You Activate Your Heart Center?

The first step to activating your heart center is to bring your awareness to it. However, sometimes, when you've spent a long time dwelling in your mind, it's hard to even bring your awareness down to your heart center, especially if you have a lot of air in your birth chart.

Having a regular or go-to grounding practice can bring awareness out of your head and into your heart. Spending time in nature, guided meditations, and tree-hugging (yes, literally hug a tree) are easy ways to get yourself grounded and connect to your heart center.

The next stop on the activation station is gratitude! Gratitude is a powerful heart activator. The hard part is, when the future feels bleak, how do you find gratitude?

List Your Favorite Things

The Sound of Music had it spot on when they sang “These are a Few of My Favorite Things.” When you list your favorite things, you bring awareness to what you are most grateful for.

We often think of making a list of things we should be grateful for, like family, clean water, and shelter, but sometimes we don’t feel the energy of gratitude in those moments. It’s normal to know you are grateful for those things but not deeply feel the gratitude when you think you should.

When you focus on the little things, like your favorite tea, book, or song, you take the first steps into your heart. It makes it much easier to grow from there into more significant feelings of gratitude, like for your family, home, and clean water.

Tap Into Some Crystal Magic

Crystals have energetic properties that you can utilize to heal, unblock, and open your heart. Rose Quartz is the general go-to crystal for the heart chakra. It’s associated with love, healing, and inner peace.

Just because it’s the standard doesn’t mean it's the crystal for you. If Rose Quartz isn’t your vibe, check out some other heart chakra crystals…

Emerald - This might be your crystal if you want to open your heart and connect to its deep wisdom.
Green Adventurine - For those needing recalibration and balance to their heart chakra, green adventurine is an easy-to-find and inexpensive option.
Moldavite - WARNING: Don’t use this stone unless you are ready for a massive and abrupt transformation! However, if this is your vibe, Moldavite will not only open your heart but also a lot of your spiritual channels and transform your life.
Rhodonite - Known as the rescue stone, Rhodonite balances the heart and root chakra and offers a stabilizing foundation to allow your heart to open and grow in your trust and power.
Green Tourmaline - This powerful stone grounds you firmly to earth while opening you up to universal wisdom via your heart. It helps you to connect with compassion, strengthen your heart, and raise your vibration.

Reiki Activation

Reiki is like massage therapy for your energy body. Unlike massage therapy, you don’t have to be in the same room to receive it. For those who struggle with holding on to energies or shadows, especially around the heart, sometimes Reiki can be the most powerful and easiest way to release and open the heart chakra.

In my Spiritual Baddies group, we do regular Reiki activation to balance and awaken different chakras. One of my members deeply struggled with connecting to her heart chakra after working for years at protecting and disconnecting from it. After our heart chakra Reiki activation, she had a flood of emotions. She grew spiritually at a significant rate from there because the heart chakra is the center point of the chakra system. Once it was open, energy could flow freely throughout her body.

How to Think With Your Heart

Once you’re firmly grounded, your heart is healed(or on its way to healing), and you’ve connected to an open and grateful heart, you’re ready to tap into its wisdom.

When you think with your mind, you ask a question, look at the information in front of you (or from your personal experience), and determine an outcome with the “facts” you have. However, when you think with your heart, sometimes the facts directly contradict what your heart is telling you. This is where many people override(or gaslight) their heart with “logic,” but the heart works on intuition, and intuition isn’t logical.

To think with your heart requires a lot of trust. Trust in yourself, your intuition, and in the Universe/Source/God.

But when things are hard, and the outlook isn’t looking so good, leaning into this heart wisdom and trusting it is the best way you can make the best choices for yourself and everyone around you. Because when the outlook is scary and the mind is panicked, you cannot make choices for your highest good and the good of all. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle in a storm. Pieces are flying everywhere, you’re surrounded by chaos, and you can’t find the right piece.

Heart-centered wisdom is calm even when there is a storm all around. In that calm, you can find the pieces you need to solve your life puzzle more easily.

Activating your heart chakra and tuning into the wisdom of your heart center takes time and practice. You’ve been using your mind for this your whole life. Switching to or finding a balance between the two will take some time, practice, and work. But the wisdom and world that opens up to you when you activate your heart-centered wisdom is well worth it.

How To Get Heart Centered In Chaos