Matters of the Heart
It's said that removing clutter from our house frees us - not only physically - but emotionally as well. We can feel this. When we see a tidy space, we feel more free to move about, more free to create. When we think of spaciousness, it can mean this kind of openness - like in a room in our house, or if outside, expansiveness, but it can also mean free time, peace and quiet or relaxation in the body.
In a heart-centered yoga practice, that's the feeling we are trying to create. Instead of on the outside, we clear the inside. Most of us have barriers we've built up around the heart because of past experiences: betrayals, childhood wounds, past hurts, rejections, and on and on. Since our brains are hard-wired for survival, any time some new opportunity comes around to break down these walls, our brain screams "DANGER!" as we've trained it to recognize that opening up our heart again, letting someone in who just might hurt us, and trying to trust someone again as threats to our survival.
Do you ever feel as if you're wearing permanent armor? Do your shoulders feel tight? Your head and neck? Does your chest ever feel like it's caving in because you can't get your shoulders back enough? All this physical restriction of the upper back constricts the breath and can even shorten the connective tissue in the front of the body. The heart literally feels depleted. "Opening the heart...involves taking down those defenses to experience the love that is the natural state of our being." Anodea Judith
In our heart-opening partner workshop this weekend we'll be exploring matters of the heart more deeply. We will experience, when bringing awareness to the heart through breath and chest-opening postures, how to relax this amoring of the heart and find more spaciousness, more freedom, more softness. By softening this part of the physical body, we'll find more room for our natural state of love. And don't you think having more people in a state of love is better than the alternative? Imagine if our leaders were in a constant state of love. Our newscasters. Our family members. Our bosses. Our colleagues. Imagine if we consciously chose this instead of blame, timidity, scarcity, fear.
Starting with our own awareness of these things is the first step. It's the only step. The open heart can do wonders.
Won't you join us?
Om namah