The Sixth Chakra and the Moon
Your Insight Center
by Nancy Privett, MA, EFTCert-I, BBSH
This article is part of the “The Planets in Your Chakras” Series
The Sixth Chakra
Do you know that one of the best ways of opening up your energy system so that energy can flow through you is to use your imagination? Yes, imagining something wonderful in your life is actually like medicine for your body, mind and spirit. Conversely, imagining horrible things is like drinking poison. Both get the energy running, but with very different frequencies.
The energy center that begins the imagination process is your sixth chakra. The sixth center is also called the “third eye,” and the tip of this energy vortex inserts in the forehead, just a little above the central point between your eyebrows. There is also a corresponding center on the back of the head. The sixth chakra governs the region of the physical body from right below your nose and ears to the middle of the forehead. It has provenance over your nose, sinuses, ears, eyes, the back of the head, and most of your brain.
The sixth center also accesses the “6 I’s:” intelligence and information, inspiration and imagination, and intuition and insight. The office space of the sixth chakra is shared by your logic (left brain) and your emotion (right brain). You use your logical, left brain much of the day to think and analyze and comprehend. Your left brain formulates plans and carries them out. Your right brain allows you to have moments of intuition and awareness, guides you to see the bigger picture, and to relate to life in a more sensual and perceptive way. When both sides of your brain are working together, they can emanate the quality of wisdom -- an exceptional intelligence which also recognizes the presence of a universal, unifying Force.
The Sixth Chakra and the Moon
The right brain characteristics that were just described employ the energies of the astrological Moon. In astrology, the Moon represents your inner life, along with your instincts and your emotional responses. It is linked to your subconscious and your imagination and sees the bigger picture of how everything is interrelated. In other words, it is grounded in the universal unifying Force that gives you a broader awareness of what is going on. We might say that the Moon represents the transcendent qualities of the sixth chakra. These qualities are essential to the transformative abilities of the upper chakras above the heart, where you truly have the ability to spin the “straw” of your experiences into gold.
The Moon runs on inner rhythms and tides. It fuels you with dreams and ancestral memory. It helps you use your emotions as guidance for noticing what is important. It helps you to imagine what kind of life you want. And it is the perfect backdrop for an important function of your sixth chakra – your ability to consciously direct your focus in order to shape your life in a way that feels good to you.
A Sixth Chakra Task – the Ability to Focus Your Thoughts
Creating a life you love starts with desire emanating from the Throat chakra. After that, your creation depends upon (1) your ability to imagine what that life would look like, and (2) on your ability to focus your attention and energy on those aspects of life that harmonize with what you have imagined. With the Moon’s emotional intelligence to guide you, you can tell immediately if the thoughts you are giving air time to are thoughts that will help you create the life you want, or if the thoughts you are giving attention to are actually helping you create a life you don’t want. It’s a pretty simple formula -- if your thoughts are aligned with what you want to create, your feelings are positive. If your thoughts are opposed to what you want in your life, you feel bad.
Energy follows attention. The Moon in your healthy sixth chakra keeps sending the emotional messengers that signal whether or not you are paying attention to the thoughts that are beneficial to you and in alignment with what you wish to create.
Here are some questions to ask yourself in order to determine the strength of your focusing ability:
Are you practicing being in charge of your thought patterns? Are you consciously choosing where you direct your attention? In other words, are you able to turn your attention to the thoughts that are in line with what you want, rather than what you don’t want? Do your thoughts run away with you, or can you corral them, and change your focus? Are you deliberately choosing which thoughts you are giving air time to? Are you entertaining more thoughts about what you want than you are thinking about what doesn’t suit you? All this is a process that takes practice. Some days/weeks/months/years/lifetimes! you are better at it than others.
Are you aware which thoughts serve you and which do not? Sometimes going on a rampage of thinking negative thoughts can feel very familiar and negatively comforting in the short term, but will do a lot of damage in the long term. A sixth chakra strength is recognizing when the thoughts you are thinking are beneficial to you, and when they are not. This is where you use your Moon’s emotional intelligence to help you with this process. Remember – if the thought is aligned with what you want to create, you feel good. If it is aligned with what you do not want to create, you feel bad.
A good exercise for opening the sixth chakra and learning to focus is the practice of meditation.
Sixth Chakra Initiation and the Transcendent Quality of Insight
In order to truly heal from certain experiences, you need to go beyond the limits of your experience of the physical world. Your sixth chakra is the source for the insights that expand your perception of what you experience so that you can view it from a higher vibrational perspective.
To gain insight and deeper meaning from something painful that has happened to you is not a path you take immediately after your painful experience. But as you successfully move the energy of the experience up through your chakras, when you get to the sixth center, there may be a gift waiting for you in the form of a different way to think about what happened. This sixth chakra experience involves not only a coming to terms with your pain, but also stepping beyond the limits of how you usually understand things.
The expanded view that insight provides rides on the energy of the Moon, which reflects your own inner light and brings it out in front of your eyes. Your inner wisdom is activated, and when that occurs, you have the ability to radiate that wisdom out to others, also. When you accept that there is a wisdom that can be gained from difficult experiences and are open to receiving it, you have passed your sixth chakra initiation.