Shapes are all around us, but many of us don’t realize just how inundated we are with geometric patterns. In fact, geometric shapes are literally woven into the fabric of our beings.
Sacred geometry is the study of how shapes are present and foundational in our lives and how every part of our being relates and interacts with them.
If you’re new to the party, take a seat (which is probably square on the bottom). We’ll give you all the information you need to understand sacred geometry and use sacred shapes and symbols in your everyday life to promote balance and a deeper spiritual connection with the universe.
What Is Sacred Geometry?
Sacred geometry is the belief that geometric patterns, codes, and symbols are the building blocks of all creation. From the intricate designs in a snowflake to the very corneas of our eyes, everything possesses symmetry.
In sacred geometry, understanding symmetry and how patterns are found in nature is the key to understanding the universe, deepening your spiritual connection, and better understanding your own being.
History of Sacred Geometry Use
The ancients believed that geometry underpinned all movement and all materials and living beings in nature. Geometry itself is attributed to ancient Egyptians, who developed a rudimentary set of measurements to help them in architectural pursuits.
In the 6th century, Greek mathematician Euclid transformed the ancient Egyptian code into a practical subject matter, and geometry was officially “born.”
Years later, an ancient “think tank” called the Pythagoreans became interested in symbolism and sacred meaning of symbols in geometry, creating the foundations of modern-day sacred geometry beliefs.
Some of the most foundational portions of ancient sacred geometrical practice are still observed today.
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Triangle. The triangle is likely the oldest and most studied shape in terms of symbolism and sacred meaning. The Pythagoreans developed a particular triangle connected with dots that each bore a specific symbolic meaning.
The triangle is the foundation of all the platonic solids, which are thought to be the shapes that are building blocks of the universe.
The three sides of the triangle take on many different meanings depending on one’s own beliefs, but underlying the beliefs is the sense of balance, harmony, and completion.
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Platonic Solids. The platonic solids consist of five shapes that are thought to be foundational in every molecule that builds the entire universe. These shapes are three-dimensional and named after Plato, who ascribed different symbolic attributes to each. The shapes and their attributes are:
Tetrahedron: fire
Hexahedron: earth
Octahedron: air
Icosahedron: water
Dodecahedron: heavens
Plato’s theory of the universe is based on these solid shapes and their alignment with the various elements.
Ancient cultures appreciated symmetry and patterns in nature and the universe and understood the symbolism with which it was created. Based on their studies, we are now able to put sacred geometry into practice in our daily lives with relative ease.
How Does Sacred Geometry Work?
While sacred geometry touches every part of the world, using it in your daily life and spiritual practices centers around activating and balancing the Merkabah.
The Merkabah is a sacred shape made of two tetrahedrons that spin in opposite directions, creating a field of energy. Your own Merkabah is the pattern of light and geometry that overlaps, connecting your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual being.
Awakening, balancing, and harmonizing your Merkabah happens by:
- Using crystals and shapes in meditation and healing work to raise consciousness
- Focusing on specific shapes to align and open the Chakras
- Use of shapes to create laser focus on particular intentions
- Practicing on or among sacred shapes and patterns (also referred to as “grid work”)
Using sacred shapes can help you align yourself more closely with your spiritual being and the universe. It may sound complicated (or a bit like a high school class you never thought you’d use in real life), but it’s very easy to use sacred geometry once you learn the basics.
The Sacred Shapes and Their Significance
Each of the sacred shapes has a specific meaning and significance. Each shape is also found in numerous crystals and aligns closely with certain Chakras.
Understanding how each sacred shape interacts with other elements of your spiritual and physical body and healing crystals is the foundation for using sacred geometry in your daily life.
Seven shapes are generally recognized as sacred. The triangle is a sacred shape (as discussed above), and it is foundational to all other sacred shapes, so we are including it in our list as an eighth shape.
Triangle
The triangle is synonymous with a higher level of consciousness. Because the point aims upward, the triangle helps us delve higher into our spirituality. The triangle represents balance, as it is the most balanced of all the sacred shapes.
Each side of the triangle is necessary for the support of the other, representing harmony and completion.
Chakra Alignment
Because the triangle is so fundamental to all other shapes, you will find it connects to many of the seven Chakras. Each Chakra is represented by a symbol, and the triangle is central in five of them. The two exceptions are the crown and Sacral Chakras.
Crystal Alignment
Crystals all have a specific cleavage (or no cleavage at all), which refers to the geometric shapes that are present when a crystal is broken or how it appears in nature. The triangle is present in practically every crystal’s cleavage, so the use of virtually any crystal will complement a triangle pattern or grid.
Specifically, a Clear Quartz, which represents harmony between the physical, spiritual, and emotional being, will align perfectly with triangle shapes and patterns.
Healing Benefits of Triangle
Triangles help promote balance. Whether you are seeking balance in your spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical being, the triangle can help restore it. Using triangles in your spiritual practice helps bring your entire being back into alignment with yourself and the universe.
Cube
The cube is the most stable of all the sacred shapes. It is a grounding shape and useful in helping you feel connected, present, and level-headed. The cube is also one of the five platonic solids, represented by the hexahedron.
The cube is deeply connected with earth elements, and as such, your connection with it. Cubes help us develop strong roots and ensure that we are planted in fertile, healthy soil.
Chakra Alignment
It’s no surprise that the cube aligns best with the Root Chakra, located at the base of the spine. The Root Chakra represents stability, structure, and grounding. The symbol for the Root Chakra includes a cube and creates a firm foundation for the entire Chakra system.
Crystal Alignment
Red Agate is a powerful grounding crystal that promotes stability, boundaries, and foundational beliefs. As such, it is deeply connected with both the cube and the Root Chakra. Red Agate has no cleavage and is a sturdy, strong crystal with a Mohs hardness level of 6.5-7, making it hard, rigid, and perfect for aligning your Root Chakra.
Healing Benefits
Feeling disconnected, depressed, or not “at home” in your own skin? Using cubes in your meditative practices can help restore your foundations and bring you back into your own center of gravity. Use cubes when you need to feel more grounded, level-headed, and connected to your own life and the earth.
Tetrahedron
The tetrahedron looks like a solid triangle, having four flat sides that all connect. The element connected with the tetrahedron is fire, and its meaning is personal power used correctly. It promotes acceptance of personal responsibility and initiative.
The tetrahedron also points you to higher levels of spiritual movement. All sides point to the heavens, which helps you focus on spiritual intentions and manifestations of your own personal ambitions.
Chakra Alignment
The tetrahedron aligns several of your Chakras together, bringing harmony among them: the Root, Sacral, and Solar Plexus Chakras. The Root Chakra helps keep you grounded, the Sacral Chakra is responsible for sexual energy and creativity, and the Solar Plexus represents personal power.
The tetrahedron balances and aligns these Chakras, ensuring the Solar Plexus does not control or interfere with the Sacral or Root Chakras. An interference between these Chakras could result in misuse of sexual intention, narcissism, or becoming overbearing.
Crystal Alignment
The crystal most aligned with the tetrahedron is red jasper. Red jasper is another grounding stone, which means it helps align the Root Chakra; however, it is also helpful in balancing personal power and ensuring that your own personal abilities are never misused.
Healing Benefits
The tetrahedron helps you channel your energy in the right direction. If you feel you have an abundance of personal power and responsibility, the tetrahedron ensures you are not drunk with your own power.
By comparison, if you often feel powerless, a tetrahedron can spark your ability to tap into your own power, restore your sense of self-confidence, and help you engage in more leadership opportunities.
Octahedron
One of the five platonic solids, this double prism has eight surfaces and best represents self-forgiveness and acceptance. This shape is highly reflective, which is represented by the connection of one prism to the other, as though one is peering into the other reflectively.
Octahedrons are synonymous with purpose and understanding. The element of air represents an all-encompassing knowledge and also the ability to allow things to easily pass in and out of your spiritual world without you becoming fixated or obsessed with them.
Chakra Alignment
The octahedron is most aligned with the Solar Plexus Chakra, ensuring you are self-confident, motivated, and accepting of your true self. Octahedrons help you balance the Solar Plexus so that you can experience your truest self with the freedom to accept it with positivity instead of negativity.
Crystal Alignment
The octahedron is perfectly complemented by Calcite. Calcite helps inspire creativity, build awareness that helps you differentiate between emotions and intelligence, and eliminate self-doubt.
Healing Benefits
The octahedron helps heal places in our spiritual and emotional beings that are injured from past trauma. If we have harmed ourselves with thoughts that do not serve us, the octahedron helps to draw them to awareness so we can eliminate them and accept ourselves fully.
The octahedron also promotes forgiveness of self so that when we become aware of our own part in situations, we can make amends and forgive ourselves, eliminating the need for guilt and shame.
Dodecahedron
The dodecahedron is a platonic solid with twelve flat faces. This shape helps with meditation and helps to bring your vibration level up to attune you with a higher spiritual plane. If you want to experience deeper spiritual experiences, more psychic abilities, and higher levels of intuition, a dodecahedron is the perfect shape.
The dodecahedron’s symbol is the heavens, which signifies the higher plane on which it vibrates. Communing with spirit guides and experiencing deeper connections while scrying is experienced while using a dodecahedron.
Chakra Alignment
The dodecahedron is aligned most closely with the Third Eye Chakra. The Third Eye Chakra is the center of true consciousness and awareness, and as such, it is deeply affected by this heavenly shape.
Keeping your Third Eye opened and balanced can give you finer attunement to your spiritual journey, deepen your connection with your spirit guides, and help you experience higher levels of spiritual vibration.
This shape is also close to your Heart Chakra, as the Heart Chakra is the center of all you hold most cherished and also the keeper of things you do not enjoy.
Crystal Alignment
When pairing a dodecahedron with crystals, we find that Green Aventurine works well. This heart-healing stone is great for aligning the Heart Chakra and also helping keep your Third Eye balanced. Green Aventurine helps the Heart Chakra and the Third Eye Chakra balance together synergistically.
Healing Benefits
The healing benefits of a dodecahedron center on your ability to achieve higher levels of spiritual awareness. If you often feel blocked off from the light of the universe or separate and apart from your higher power, a dodecahedron can help bring you into harmony and reconnect you.
Sphere
The sphere is the only sacred shape that can contain all others. The sphere represents the perfect balance that can only be achieved when every area of your life (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual) is perfectly aligned and attuned with one another.
The sphere also represents completion. It is one of the most foundational shapes, and also the shape of seeds, the earth, and the atom. It represents complete truth and self-awareness.
Chakra Alignment
The sphere works closely with the Throat Chakra to produce balance. The Throat Chakra controls our ability to speak our innermost truths without fear of judgement or ridicule. The Throat Chakra says what the Crown and Third Eye Chakras know to be true, so it is important they are all aligned.
The sphere aligns the Throat Chakra so that you can accept your own being, stand firm in your convictions, and understand your truth deeply.
Crystal Alignment
The sphere’s conquest for truth works well with Lapis Lazuli. This beautiful blue stone is the stone of truth, awareness, and self-acceptance. Often referred to as the wisdom stone, this stone is sought after by all those who desire a deeper knowledge of self. It also helps give you the courage to face truths about yourself without fear.
Healing Benefits
The sphere makes us whole. If you feel fractioned, broken, or unable to pull together the meaning and purpose of your life, a sphere can help put you back together. Spheres help make order from chaos and form a sort of spiritual glue to make broken, unbalanced things whole once more.
Icosahedron
This platonic shape has 20 faces and is symbolized by water. It is characterized by the ability of energy to transform. Water is easily transformed from solid to liquid to gas. Energy, too, can transform from bad to good, negative to positive, and can even be transferred between people and objects.
Icosahedrons remind us of the law of impermanence which states that nothing is permanent but is ever-changing. As such, energy, both from you and extended to you, changes and enters and exits in accordance with its own vibration. Icosahedrons help you accept these changes and flows.
Chakra Alignment
The icosahedron is closely aligned with the Third Eye Chakra and its ability to see things for what they are, accept them, and remain open to new ideas and concepts. The ability of new concepts and ideas to enter your Third Eye and be viewed with neutrality is significant in how you relate to the world and operate within it.
Icosahedrons also help balance the Sacral Chakra, which helps you to flow with the rhythms of life. Instead of becoming fixated, you are able to ebb and flow with life in harmonious vibration.
Crystal Alignment
Amethyst pairs well with icosahedrons. A water crystal, this beautiful, calming stone is reflective of the icosahedron's ability to help you relax and accept people, places, and things as they come and go.
Healing Benefits
The icosahedron symbolizes transfer and transformation. It’s a great shape to have nearby when you are experiencing uncomfortable transformations or changes and can help you remain balanced and stable.
This shape is also helpful in keeping you relaxed and helping you feel less stressed and anxious. Many people enjoy practicing yoga or meditation among these shapes.
Merkaba meaning
The Merkaba shape is a collection of triangles within a sphere and is a magical shape that harmonizes opposing energies and helps you achieve a higher level of spiritual awareness and consciousness. It is the symbol of all other symbols, thought to be somewhat of a mascot of sacred geometry.
The Merkaba is also a channel of deeper spiritual ability. If you are looking to increase your psychic abilities, premonitions, and intuition, the Merkaba is a useful shape to have nearby.
Chakra Alignment
The Merkaba aligns your Crown Chakra, which controls your thoughts and your human experience. The concept of spiritual beings living within the confines of humanity is expressed and understood through your Crown Chakra.
The Merkaba awakens the Crown Chakra and keeps it open, helping to align body, mind, and spirit and deepen your level of consciousness.
Crystal Alignment
Clear Quartz is a wonderful accessory stone for the Merkaba. Deeply connected with awareness and the Crown Chakra, Clear Quartz helps you experience an expansion of your Crown Chakra that keeps you spiritually attuned and allows you to experience spiritual energy more deeply.
Healing Benefits
The Merkaba helps with mind and soul expansion. If you feel limited, trapped, or unable to accept new ideas and concepts, the Merkaba can help open you to these ideas so you can accept them.
The Merkaba is also thought to benefit every cell of the body because of its unique connection to balance and expansion.
The Takeaway
Sacred geometry is a great way to improve your spirituality, widen your acceptance, and broaden your mind to new concepts and ideas. Sacred geometry helps you learn and grow while also keeping you completely balanced and whole.
Using sacred shapes is as easy as keeping them near you as you meditate or simply placing them in areas of your home and work where you spend much of your time. You’ll immediately feel a higher level of balance and a higher vibration that attunes with increased spirituality.
All the world is founded in geometry, and these shapes vibrate in and among us. Using sacred geometry is a great way to heal the body, mind, and spirit and keep it balanced along these mathematically coded lines.
