The season of love is here! Most of us associate the month of February with the holiday, Valentine’s Day. This day is linked to the universally known “Cupid.” You know, the baby that goes around shooting people with tiny arrows to make them fall in love, a fictional character rooted in Greek mythology. Where did the tale of this cute baby come from?
Let us travel back hundreds of years to ancient Greece. Catholicism is yet to spread over the continent of Europe and the Greeks worshiped many Gods. You may be familiar with some of the more popular names: Zeus, God of thunder; Apollo, God of the sun; Dionysus, God of Art; or Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Another familiar name is Aphrodite, who is known as the Goddess of beauty who bore a son by the name of Eros. Eros was the winged God of love, known for shooting arrows at two people, making them fall in love with each other. Sound familiar? Yes, Cupid is the modern version of Eros. Eros is also sometimes depicted to be blindfolded; the Greeks believed this to represent the idea that love is blind. Eros is significant to the Greeks because he represented the connection between people. He also showed that love is universal in the fact that no mortal, God, nor even he was immune to the power of his arrows.
As a spiritual community, we learn to open up not just our minds but our hearts as well. This act drives us to go past our personal limits and allows us to connect with ourselves, others, and the universe. It is because of the heart chakra that you learn to trust in the pure form of life. This chakra controls compassions and all forms of love, and how to express it. Love is not instantaneous, as some of us would hope. Arrows do not shoot us to create an immediate attraction; rather, bonds are formed through time and participation in a true partnership where both parties are connected and share an equal capacity of vulnerability and control.
Now, what were the Greeks getting at? Well, we know that there isn’t a mythical being shooting us with arrows (at least I assume there is not) but what we do know from our vantage point is how our fourth chakra, or heart chakra, opens us up to not just self-love but to loving others as well.
The heart chakra allows us to experience and remembers our experiences; it pulls people together and focuses on creating a partnership instead of a lone force of energy. The arrow, which shoots to unite two people, is the symbol of the connections that brings us together to form what we term as energy connections. The cleaner the chakras the more the energy will flow within the relationship. In a relationship more than just the heart chakras connect, and the stronger the connection the deeper the bond.
