Tag Archives: heart chakra and writing

How to Use the Heart Chakra for Deep Character Development

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This is the next in a series about how to utilize my Writing Through the Body Method™ which uses the chakra system as a practical tool for uncovering a character’s desires, wounds, and motivations. By exploring these psychological foundations, writers are able to portray their characters’ behaviors, reactions, and responses on the page with greater depth and emotional truth.

For example, the heart (fourth) Chakra rules Emotional Power. The heart relates to how your protagonist shows love, forgiveness, compassion, and trust. The Solar Plexus Chakra says I LOVE.

By considering how your characters connect to their compassion—or not—will give you clues about how they will respond and react to all situations and scenarios in your story, and especially those that hold big emotional impact.

Below is a brief explanation of the Heart Chakra, its traits and characteristics, and some ways you might integrate its attributes into your character development.

Fourth Chakra – Heart Chakra

Location
Chest

This does not directly apply to your character but is used for visualization purposes when doing certain exercises within the Writing Through the Body™ method, offered here as an FYI.

Primary strengths
Courage to take emotional risks (to trust, love, and feel loved), power to heal (oneself and others), ability to be inclusive and take responsibility for one’s life

This is about how your character responds to situations that require forgiveness, understanding, and empathy.

Primary fears and fearful expressions
Loneliness, commitment, withholding, jealousy/bitterness, anger/hatred, judgmental/critical

This is where you’re able to start seeing your character get in their own way, whether through self-doubt or self-loathing, or through their lack of willingness to forgive, and even experience/express self-love and self-forgiveness.

_____________________


Writing exercise

Take some time to sit quietly, and think about the aspects of the Heart Chakra as they relate to all your characters. 

Write a sketch of a character that may not be materializing as fully as you would like, and answer the questions below as fully and exhaustively as possible. 

Tip: Every time you arrive at a new place of understanding or identify a particular behavior or response in your character, ask “why?” Continuing to ask “why?” is how we get to the deep psychology of our characters. 

Example: Your protagonist has just learned about a betrayal by someone they know. This betrayal could have been intentional (a shop owner whose employee stole cash from the register) or unintentional (a shop owner whose employee who forgot to lock up at the end of the day because they had an emergency at home, and the shop is robbed and vandalized). 

Both are betrayals of a sort.

Depending on who the shop owner is and depending on their degree of emotional intelligence (the condition of their heart chakra), their reactions and responses to both situations will vary.

Questions to begin your exercise:

• Establish your character’s level of compassion, forgiveness, and self-love. What would their immediate response be?

• Do they take time to sit with what happened, or do they respond immediately?

• Do they stand by their response (immediate or delayed), or do they regret it?

• How does their emotional responses, actions, and their feelings about those actions inform the story’s trajectory and drive it forward?

Let me know what you discover in the comments.

As always… Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie
OOOOO

How Understanding the Heart Chakra Can Improve Your Writing

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After we gain an understanding our characters’ backstories in the Root Chakra, their sense of self-awareness in one-on-one relationships in the Sacral Chakra, and how they take action (or don’t) in the Solar Plexus Chakra, we can move to the Heart Chakra, which is about how our characters love – themselves and others – specifically, their supporting characters and antagonists.

As I wrote about in my Sacral Chakra blog post, in the case of fiction and memoir, these are the people or situations that support or impede the protagonist’s forward movement on her trajectory toward their deepest desire. In the case of non-fiction, self-help/how-to books, supporting characters and antagonists can take the form of friends, family, colleagues, of your Ideal Reader, as well as the Ideal Reader herself through various forms of self-sabotage.

It isn’t easy to write about antagonists without being inclined to cast them as one-dimensional. But hard as it may be to write antagonists with compassion – especially when we’re writing memoir-based stories – it’s essential if we want to connect with readers. (It’s not about writing to excuse bad behavior. It’s about exploring the complexities of the human condition.)

As the wonderful Ann Lamott says, “You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.”

Because like it or not, even our real-life antagonists are, if not facets of us, at least mirrors of us. Throughout life, we come up against people who serve to reflect ourselves to us. Think of it as spiritual checks and balances. This is the level of understanding and objective insight we want to impart on the page.

Do you have an antagonist you want to paint as evil and are having a hard time finding her/his humanity? Explore this character’s backstory, as we discussed in the Root Chakra blog post, and see what you can find in their history that might help explain (not excuse) their harmful behavior.

Please leave a comment below. I’d love to know what you discover.

How understanding the heart chakra will improve your writing

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When we get clear about each of our characters’ sense of awareness about themselves, their awareness of each other and how they interact and take action, as we discussed with the Solar Plexus Chakra, we can then move forward with writing authentic, round, dynamic supporting characters for our protagonist – even, and maybe especially – their antagonist(s).

We humans sometimes have a tendency to want to get revenge in our writing against people who have harmed us. But hard as it may be to write about our stories’ antagonists with love and compassion – especially when we’re writing memoir-based stories – it’s essential if we want to connect with readers and help them see the complexities of life and relationships in a new light. (And remember, this isn’t about writing to excuse bad behavior. It’s about exploring the complexities of the human condition.)

As the wonderful Ann Lamott says, “You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.”

Because like it or not, even our real-life antagonists are facets of us. Throughout life, we come up against people who serve as mirrors of us. Think of it as spiritual checks and balances. And this is the level of understanding and insight we want to impart on the page.

Do you have an antagonist you want to paint as evil and are having a hard time finding her/his humanity?

Go back to this character’s backstory, as we discussed in the post on the Root Chakra, and see what you can find in their history.