Chakra Development
Part I: The Lower Triangle
Chakra Development
In this 3-part series, I’m exploring the chakras as a developmental map—less as traditional wheels or “energy points” and more as a practical way to understand how humans mature. Each chakra becomes a capacity we learn: to belong, to want, to act, to love, to speak, to see clearly, to surrender.
My goal is simple: keep what’s useful, drop what’s inflated, and translate the whole system into language that helps us live like ethical adults—grounded, honest, and awake as we navigate our lives.
Much like a captain navigates a ship, understanding the vessel’s capacities matters—because it shapes how much agency she can maintain over the journey.
Part One: The Lower Triangle lays the foundation—safety, desire, and power—how they form, how they get distorted, and what it looks like to grow them up without shaming them.
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Part II: The Heart Chakra
The heart chakra is the hinge. It’s where development stops being only about getting your needs met—and starts being about how you meet other people. Below the heart, we’re learning survival, desire, and power: how to belong, how to want, how to act. Those are necessary skills. But they’re not yet a moral life. The heart is where the lower capacities either get softened into relationship—or hardened into control. It’s where we begin to feel the difference between being right and being trustworthy. Between intensity and intimacy. Between love as a feeling and love as a practice.
In this series, I’m treating the heart chakra less as a romance symbol and more as an ethical engine: the capacity to stay open without collapsing, to care without rescuing, to hold boundaries without punishment, to let tenderness exist without surrendering discernment. When the heart is developed, the lower triangle becomes usable. When it isn’t, everything below it runs the show.
This part explores what the heart actually asks of us: grief, compassion, accountability, forgiveness, and the courage to be deeply affected by life—without handing over our authority.
Part III: The Upper Triangle
The Upper Triangle—Throat, Third Eye, and Crown—marks the movement from personal development into conscious participation with reality as it is. Here, expression becomes truthful rather than performative, perception becomes clear rather than reactive, and awareness begins to recognize itself as the quiet field in which all experience appears.
These centers do not ask us to escape the human condition; they ask us to speak honestly, see accurately, and rest in a humility that understands we are not the center of the universe, yet we are fully responsible for how we meet it. When the Upper Triangle is integrated, communication softens into authenticity, insight steadies into discernment, and the search for certainty gradually relaxes into presence.