The Joy of having 'Self Worth' (The Heart Chakra)

Summary

The JOY Broadcast with Ali Mortimer
Episode: The Joy of Having ‘Self Worth’ (The Heart Chakra)
Date: April 25, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Ali Mortimer, life consultant and self-styled “JOY Coach,” explores the intricate and transformative power of the heart chakra. She unpacks how this energetic center—often conflated simply with love—is actually the seat of willpower, ego, desire, self-worth, and healing. Ali weaves together personal anecdotes, human design insights, and practical guidance. She also leads listeners through a meditative visualization to help open and heal the heart. The overall theme: true self-worth and lasting joy are rooted in love, compassion, and the courage to both give and receive.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Heart Chakra: Beyond Love

• Willpower & ‘Why-Power’ ([01:00])

  • Ali reframes the heart chakra not just as love, but as the source of willpower. “Whenever I speak to anybody about willpower, I talk more about why power. Because the why is what is going to drive you to keep on going with that will.”
  • Reference to Simon Sinek’s Start With Why for finding your true driving force.

• Self-Worth, Ego, & Desire ([02:30])

  • The heart is also the seat of ego, self-worth, desire, and even healthy competition.

• Physical Connections ([03:00])

  • Body parts linked: heart, gallbladder (“where your bile is created”), thymus (immunity), and breasts.
  • Illustrates the mind-body link: not tending to heart energy can manifest as physical illness, as in the case of a follower’s emergency gallbladder surgery.

2. Signs of a Healthy (and Blocked) Heart Chakra

• Traits of a Balanced Heart ([04:00])

  • Confidence and competence
  • Healthy, collaborative competition
  • Courage (“‘Courage’… comes from the French ‘coeur’—heart”)
  • Capacity to forgive, hold compassion, and love unconditionally

• Traits of a Blocked Heart ([06:00])

  • Obsessive comparison, resentment, judgment, arrogance
  • Overly materialistic or superiority complexes
  • Unapologetic or always needing to be right
  • “Overactive” aspects: relentless hustle, overcompensation, and proving oneself

“I told you it was complex. I told you it was complicated and often conflicting.” - Ali ([07:30])

3. Material Abundance and the Heart

• Heart, Money, & Crystals ([09:00])
  • Green and pink crystals (rose quartz, aventurine) are linked to both heart and abundance.
  • Reframes money as positive when pursued, given, or invested with love.
  • Shares a favorite quote:

    “Money isn’t the most important thing in the world. Love is. Fortunately, I love money.” ([09:43])

4. Practical Pathways for Heart Healing

• Foods & Elements ([10:33])

  • Green foods (alkaline veggies), green tea, strawberries (heart-shaped).
  • “Element” is typically air, but Ali also chooses music, dance, and movement as heart-healing practices.

• Intuitive Healing ([11:00])

  • Encourages tuning in to your own needs: “How are you going to move the energy within your bodies? …very much a soul thing, a soul knowing. Listen to your heart. What does it need?” ([11:20])

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On why self-worth is inseparable from love:

  “The heart is willpower, driven by love in my opinion.” ([02:00])

• On compassion:

  “Once you can have a compassionate heart for yourself…then you can start to have compassion for all. And isn’t that what we want? A healed heart creates a healed world, a healed home, happy homes, happy communities, happy workplaces.” ([05:30])

• On embracing complexity:

  “My husband often says to me, he says, ‘Ali, you’re so complicated…’ And I say, ‘Thank you, darling. Who wants to be boring?’” ([02:45])

• On vulnerability and openness:

  “To love unconditionally, to open my heart to love again after being hurt so much…this was a huge one for me.” ([05:00])

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Guided Heart Meditation ([12:13] - [22:59])

Structure:

• Invitation to find a comfortable pose and close your eyes
• Gentle breathwork
• Place a hand over your heart to connect

Key Imagery & Affirmations

• Visualizing the heart as a rose:

  “Imagine a beautiful rose where your heart is and it’s in a tight bud. A pale pink rose with a beautiful green stem.” ([13:40])

  • The rose is a symbol of resilience—strong, protective, yet delicate and always able to blossom again.

• Opening the rose (and your heart) with each inhale and exhale

  • Green and pink energies radiate from the heart

• Loving-kindness mantras:

  “May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I be loved.” ([16:59])

  • Offered for self, loved ones, and even those who may have hurt us

• Collective visualization:

  “Imagine you are in a rose garden, surrounded by all of the people with roses in their hearts, sending love and healing to the world around them.” ([19:40])

• Concludes with the invitation to “walk with the mantras of loving what you do, loving who you do it with, and loving yourself.” ([21:45])

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Closing Messages

• Ali’s Mission:

  “My mission is to spread love, joy, peace and abundance…so that every person knows that they don’t have to walk alone in their darkness.” ([23:02])

  • Invitation to share the episode and the “ripple of joy.”

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Important Timestamps

• [01:00] – Introducing the heart as willpower; willpower vs. ‘why-power’
• [03:00] – Physical associations of the heart chakra
• [04:00] – Signs of a healthy heart chakra
• [06:00] – What a blocked heart chakra looks like
• [09:00] – Money, material wealth & love; heart crystals
• [10:33] – Heart-supportive foods and elements
• [12:13] – Start of guided heart meditation
• [16:59] – Mantras for heart healing
• [19:40] – Rose garden visualization and collective healing
• [23:02] – Ali’s closing mission and message

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Tone and Style

Ali’s language is gentle, inviting, and nurturing, steeped in metaphors and personal examples. The overall mood is encouraging and compassionate, with a practical spirituality that is accessible and warm.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode dives deeply into how our heart—energetically, emotionally, even physically—is the source of willpower, self-worth, and our ability to connect, forgive, and thrive. Ali provides both conceptual and practical wisdom, tools for healing, and a lovingly guided meditation to help you open and nourish your own heart.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Joy Broadcast with me, Ali Mortimer. I was once upon a time an IT consultant, recoding systems in the retail industry to function better. And now I'm turned a life consultant and joy coach, where I'd like to think I reprogram and recode hearts, minds, souls and lives to feel better. This podcast, the Joy Broadcast, is a way to bring joy to your life, whatever the weather, whatever you're doing. So you feel a pocket of, of positivity in every single day. If, like me, you've once upon a time found yourself wondering whether you will.

[B]

Ever be happy again, or if you're.

[A]

Just staring at the kitchen sink wondering how you'll get through the next 10 minutes, this podcast is for you. Get you a glimmer of hope, a dose of happiness, or an infusion of joy right here, right now. Welcome to the Joy Broadcast. Welcome back to the Joy Broadcast and welcome back to Energyquest. Today we are looking at. I don't know how to describe this one. It's probably the most conflicting one, the most beautiful one, the most powerful one, the most heart wrenching one, because we're going to be talking about the heart when we look at the heart or when I look at people's hearts in terms of human design, when I look at my own heart, when it comes to human design and the energy centers, it's not what you think it is. It's a deeper feeling than just love. It is willpower. And I think for anybody who understands willpower, it comes really from a deep, deep, deep sense of love to give you that willpower. Whenever I speak to anybody about willpower, I talk more about why power? Because the why is what is going to drive you to keep on going with that will. And it reminds me so much of Simon Sinek's. Incredible. Was it Sinek? I never really know. Who knows Simon Sinek? Simon Sinek, his wonderful TED talk and his book start with why. And it's always about starting with that real driving force of why. And that comes from a deep sense of love for whatever that might be. I often find my willpower from the love for my family, my love for my boys. There is no greater love than the love of a mother of their child. And that's why I often do a lot of these things that I do. So the heart is willpower, driven by love. In my opinion. It's also your ego, it's also desire, and it's the energy of where your self worth is created. It's a fascinating, complicated, complex energy center. My husband Often says to me, he says, ali, you're so complicated, you're complex. And I say, thank you, darling. Who wants to be boring? Who wants to be dull? Who wants to be predictable? I want to be love. I want to be loved. I want to love is because we love all of the different facets of ourselves. I think this is the energy of this heart center. So when we think about the body parts that related to the heart, it's obviously your heart, it's your gallbladder. The gallbladder, which I didn't know and I had to look it up, is all to do with where your bile is created. So really, really important for digestion. And interestingly, as I'm recording this, I've just had a message from one of my followers who's just said that she's just had to have emergency surgery to have her gallbladder. So this I think is just such a prime example of when we don't look after the energies within our body. Sometimes those toxins can be so powerful that they create a disease in our body.

[B]

And what we want to do is.

[A]

Create ease by clearing and decluttering and bringing beautiful energy into those centers. So it's also the body part of the thymus which is really important for your immunity. And it's all to do with the area around our breasts. So for women of a certain age, especially my age, it's really important, obviously, as we know, to continue to check our breasts and to love and to use this healing if we feel any.

[B]

Fear around that area.

[A]

What does a happy, healthy heart look like? A happy, healthy energy centre in our heart area look like it's one that's competent. It shows up in our confidence. It shows up in healthy competition. Not the competition that means comparison where we are less than or more than, but this healthy competition of drive and fun. So I feel like, I want to say it's a bit like the egg and spoon race, which I always used to love and find really funny, or the sack race, when it's just like, let's see how far we can get. See, this is just fun. It's healthy competition that makes us better as an individual, but also better as the collective. It's about collaboration, it's about being courageous. I always love the word courage. I think I've talked about this before, but lacoeur is heart in French and that's the derivative of courage is having heart is being able to lead with your heart, being able to lead with your desires and walk with your fears and not letting them hold you back. It's letting desire lead you in a good way. The heart was also paramount and very instrumental in my healing because I learned how to forgive. A happy, healthy heart is a heart that has the ability to have the courage perhaps to forgive, to hold compassion for ourselves and others. Not to condone, but just for ourselves and be able to let go. And this brings in the ego. It's a heart that doesn't feel the need to be right all the time, that it's going to choose what's good and what's healing rather than being right. It's about choosing love over being right. It's about being able to love unconditionally, you know, without any fear of being hurt. That's another thing that I had to learn very much how to do to love unconditionally, to open my heart to love again after being hurt so much. This was a huge one for me. The heart center and healing around here, it's about having a compassionate heart. And once you can have a compassionate heart for yourself and show compassion for yourself and show compassion for others, show compassion for those who've hurt you, then you can start to have compassion for all. And isn't that what we want? A healed heart creates a healed world, a healed home, Happy homes, happy communities, happy workplaces. Very important. I told you this was a really important chakra, this one. So what does it look like when it's blocked then? A blocked chakra is that one that's in comparison mode. It's the one that says I'm better than you or I don't have enough as you. And we get trapped in that sense of resentment or judgment or arrogance. It can be overly materialistic, can be the energy of being overly materialistic or superior. That sense of self righteousness I talked about in terms of the ego, that need to I'm always right. The ability not to apologize or to admit when you've got something wrong. All of this comparison and ego and needing to be proven right can sometimes lead us into this really, really low energy of very, very low self esteem. But also flipping the other way. I told you it was complex. I told you it was complicated and often conflicting. That very, very arrogant, egotistical energy. It can also mean the energy of hustle. Because the heart in human design is a very, very entrepreneurial, spirited energy. It can mean that you're incredibly entrepreneurial. You'd love to be in control, you love to be your own boss. But watch out that this doesn't take you into that overworking to be Overcompensated mode in that proving energy to have to prove yourself right to not only yourself, but to prove yourself to others, to do more, to have more, to keep on that hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. No matter what. That's an overactive heart chakra. So let's dive into some of the colors then. I think this is really interesting because before I even knew very much about colors and the importance of colors and before I'd done the chakra healing my heal yourself happy original colors were green and pink. And that is the, the heart and heal yourself happy was often through this element of love and heart and the crystals. I'm holding a really, really beautiful big rose quartz crystal. I love it, it's really smooth and I love holding it all the time. I love also placing it in our family room because it brings such an energy of beautiful healing and love and connection. Also Aventurine is another beautiful one, but that's a green one and I think it's really interesting and I wanted to bring this into the conversation here because I've talked a little bit about materialistic, but the, the crystals, the green crystals that I use are often the same ones I use for heart as I do for abundance and wealth and money. And I do believe it's okay to want and to desire material wealth. As I said, as long as it's done in a good energy, it's okay to have money and to be motivated by money. And as long as you do it with love. Bringing love into the equation. There's a wonderful quote that I love to highlight what I mean by this. And do you know, I can't remember who said it and I can't remember which book I heard it in, but I loved it so much I wrote it down on a little post it note and it says money isn't the most important thing in the world. Love is. Fortunately, I love money. Don't you love that? I thought that that was wonderful. Brings a sense of light heartedness into it. But what I really understand is when you can bring love into the equation around money and material things, if you can bring it to understand that it's just simply supporting the life that you desire, that you want to live, that your soul wants to live, it's beautiful. It's about understanding that you can invest your money, you can spend your money, you can give your money joyfully and with love for not only just yourself, but also for others. That's beautiful, isn't it? And you can do it for yourself. You can do it for others, for your community. It creates a beautiful place to live. So bring love to your money and use your green crystals. If money is something that you're working with, this is a lovely one to open your heart to and to bring that beautiful energy around the material. What foods then?

[B]

So foods.

[A]

Green foods. So anything alkaline and healing. All of your green veggies if you want to heal your chakra. Green teas, also good. I'm going to add in some strawberries here as well because I think that they represent the heart as well. When you cut them from the side, they look like a heart. I love that. The element. Do you know what? In the books that I've read, it all talks about having air. But I love music. Music was so powerful for me to heal my heart. Beautiful music and feeling that and dancing and movement. I think with all of the elements in all of the chakras, I think there are those that you can read in a book and those that you're guided to. But I think it's very much an instinctive feeling. How are you going to move the energy within your bodies? And I think that's very much a soul thing. A soul knowing. Listen to your heart.

[B]

What does it need?

[A]

The heart chakra is a beautiful link to the spiritual and the physical. It's the energetic center of our subtle bodies. It's right. Right within us. You know where your heart is. I don't need to point that out, even though I have already. It's slightly left of the center of your body. And to have an open heart is to be open to life. And I realized that I could have so easily closed off my heart and closed the energies in my heart living with bitterness and resentment and anger. But I learned these beautiful healings in order to open my heart, to be open to the joy of life and feel it all. So I'm going to take you on a beautiful meditation right now. So if it's safe for you to.

[B]

Do so, please take a seat or lie down and start to close your eyes. So I'm going to take a deep breath in and breathe out. I'm recording this with Rocky on my lap, so I do apologize if he.

[A]

Snuffles in the background. One of the wonderful things about meditation.

[B]

I've learned is to just let the outside noises be and bring yourself back to you. So take a deep breath in here. We're going to do gentle breathing today. Just gently breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. And if you can, place a hand on Your heart. Take a deep breath in, breathe out. Can you feel your heart beating underneath your heart? In and out, in and out. What is your heart telling you at the moment? What are you feeling? Is it feeling blocked? Is it feeling hidden? Is it feeling dark and closed? Have you locked away the key to the cage that you've trapped your heart in? You shut the door to love. Have you shut the door to life? It's time to open up your heart. It's time to calm the dramas and the feeling of the need to always be right, to be the best, to be in hustle mode. It's time to know that you are enough as you are. It's time to let go of all the judgments that you have of yourself, the judgments that you have of others, and to bring some love into your heart, that compassion for yourself that will teach you so much about how you can be compassionate to others. Others, we often fear the judgments because it's how we are. We are sometimes judgmental, therefore we fear that in others. So the more we bring compassion into our hearts and into our daily lives, the more we see through the eyes of love, the more we will see that others see us too, through the eyes of love and with a feeling of compassion. Today, we're going to open up our hearts. We're going to start to see your heart, your true heart. So underneath your hand, where your heart space is, I'd love for you to start to imagine, feel, sense that your heart is a rose. Imagine a beautiful rose where your heart is and it's in a tight bud. A pale pink rose with a beautiful green stem. I love the symbol of the rose for the heart because it is strong, but with a subtle smell. It has the thorns to protect, but also has the delicate petals. You plant the rose in darkness and it rises to the light. So incredibly beautiful. And it doesn't just do this one time, it does it over and over again, shedding its petals to rise again. The shedding of the petals to fertilize the soil to where it grows again. To me, this is the resilience of the heart, yes, to keep on going and evolving and getting back up again. But more so, the ability to grow through the hard times, not to be hard or to harden your heart to what is happening outside. Feel your rose. See your rose. Sense your rose. I'm going to breathe in now. Start to smell your rose. So breathe in. Inhale the delicate smell and breathe out and keep breathing in and breathing out. And with every breath that you take from here on in, I want you to imagine your tight rose bud start to open and unfurl, petal by petal. Take an inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. Your rosebud is gently opening. It's flourishing and blossoming with every breath that you take, representing your heart opening, delicate and yet strong, beautiful and wise. Keep smelling your rose and letting it open. Smell the aura of freshness. See the pinks and the greens that start to emanate from your chest. A beautiful aura, a beautiful smell, a beautiful sight. The glow of the green and the pinks of nature starting to flood your whole entire body, radiating around you, swirling around you in a beautiful loving mist. And then start to see this radiating out from you, out into the world as your rose stands tall and strong and beautiful in your heart space. And as we're standing here, I want to lead you through some mantras that I found so incredibly helpful when I was opening up my heart. May I be happy, may I be healthy, May I be safe, May I be loved. Deep breath, let all the hurt and the pain go and open up your heart. May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I be loved. And if you wish, you can see in your mind's eye or even in your heart's eye someone who you love, who needs this level of love and healing too. Bring them into your mind and repeat the words for them too. May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, and may you be loved. Feel that energy for them now. And then, if you wish, you can now bring someone into your mind's heart who has maybe done you wrong in the past or in the present. Someone who has hurt you and will do the same again. May they be happy, may they be healthy, may they be safe, may they be loved. Take a moment here to feel the compassion for yourself, for others, and hold that in your heart. With the rose strong in your heart, I'd love to invite you to imagine that now you feel the collective of everybody who is taking this meditation right now. And imagine you are in a rose garden surrounded by all of the people with roses in their hearts, sending love and healing to the world around them. A beautiful rose garden, full of roses, sisters of the rose, who are all full and radiating peace, love and joy in their hearts, in your hearts and radiating from their hearts outwards. Feel that peace, the love, the joy in your heart, and feel it radiating outwards from you, from your heart to the hearts of all of the other roses in the garden. And walk with the mantras of loving what you do, loving who you do it with, and loving yourself, and sit with your hand on your heart for as long as you wish. Feel this beautiful energy and walk out into the world and I'll see you in the next one. Lots of love.

[A]

My mission is to spread love, joy, peace and abundance to as much of the world as I possibly can, so that every person knows that they don't have to walk alone in their darkness. So if you've enjoyed today's podcast and this episode, I would be so honoured and happy if you would support my mission and share this with your network, your friends and your family. Please feel free to leave me an honest review on Apple or Spotify. And until next time, remember, the ripple.

[B]

Of joy starts with you and within you sat.