Namaste,
I want to talk today about the concept of self-love and what it is to expand the heart.
This is constantly a big topic in our yoga communities,
The ideas of opening our hearts and sometimes we are taken quite literally in what that means when we experience yoga classes that are full of extension of the spine,
Lots of heart openers etc and backbends is basically what that means and it's all with the intention to create space,
To elicit an opening,
An expansion of our energy and ultimately the reason for this is to invite the opportunity for a sense of contentment,
A sense of peace and balance within ourselves that can then be emanated out into the world And so what does self-love really mean to you?
Well to me it means that I understand my worth and I understand that I deserve to be here,
That I am worthy of receiving love,
Of receiving abundance,
Of receiving all of the gifts and blessings in my life and I also am able to therefore understand that the relationship with the universe and with the entirety,
With the whole is in balance and so sometimes when we move through more challenging and difficult periods in our life there is a balance,
There is a flow of ups and downs and yet we don't lose our equilibrium because we are centered in a grounded space of self-love and self-worthiness.
Now this obviously comes to affect our self-confidence and how we act in the world and so the more that we anchor ourselves into the heart space and work on our own love and compassion for ourselves then the more that we are able to in turn find the groundedness and centeredness with which we're able to expand that love back out into the world which is the ultimate goal of our practice.
Our practice is teaching us how to find our center,
How to find and maintain equilibrium through the challenges on the mat as well as off the mat and then when that space of equilibrium has been established a sense of contentment naturally begins to arise and this contentment then begins to expand,
Begins to create openings that where we start to experience improvements in our life,
In our relationships,
In our day-to-day being,
In our reactivity and responsiveness to whatever the situations in life are and so this all comes about through a practice that is grounded in the heart space.
Now all of yoga is teaching us that ultimately it is meditation that is the answer.
Yoga ultimately is a practice of meditation of starting to find equilibrium in our own minds and our own psyches and when we find that equilibrium in the mind we are able to drop down into the heart and that is where we ultimately want to be living from,
That it is the heart's whisper that is governing all of our actions and when we find ourselves listening deeply into the whispers of the heart then we often find that the divine flow,
That the state of grace begins to appear more often in our lives.
When we're able to drop out of the busyness and the chaos of all of the workings of the mind,
The worry,
The judgment,
The criticism,
The analysis of all of the different opportunities and options in life and all the decisions and all the things that have to be made,
When all of that gets a chance to fall away which is the result of being on our yoga mats or being and sitting on the meditation cushion,
Then we start to cultivate stillness and spaciousness and in that stillness and spaciousness we find that the journey of descending from the head down into the heart is a much more accessible journey for us.
It is the work of a lifetime at the same time and so don't be discouraged even though it is perhaps the shortest journey of our life,
It is also the longest and therefore it is also the most worthy of our attention and of our dedication to choose to live from a space of the heart instead of a space of mental reactivity and the more that we do that we will start to begin to see openings and transformations beyond any of our wildest expectations of what life could possibly be like and then what we might start to experience is what we call the divine flow,
This state of grace where we feel that our actions are now in alignment with the universal flow,
It is in alignment with the whole and so everything begins to feel full and content and whole and that even though there'll be challenges arising and life's challenges,
Life's difficulties continue to arise because we're all human and this is a human experience after all but our practice on the yoga mat and on our meditation cushion is teaching us to cultivate a sense of steadiness and ease that helps us maintain this equilibrium,
Helps bring us back to ourselves time and time and time again and this is what it means to come back to the heart and so I invite you to begin to just feel deeply into your heart space,
What is it that your heart is whispering to you,
Take a moment now to close the eyes and to find your heartbeat and notice the sense of spaciousness or perhaps even restriction that you're feeling around the heart and how might that be softened,
If there is a sense of restriction or contraction how might that be softened in order to create expansion,
A few deep breaths,
A concentrated mind,
A softened heart,
Softness also in the body while finding steadiness and firmness in the seat and what we begin to discover is that the heart energy naturally wants to expand,
It wants to draw out and expand its light into the world and so I invite you whenever you remember to come back to the heart,
To ask yourself what would love do whenever there's a difficult decision to be made or whenever you're unclear of what the next step on the path might be,
What would love do?
