Sometimes life throws us curve balls. In these moments, we have a choice – face the curve balls head on with an open heart or play the blame game.
Opening the heart takes a lot of courage. Most of us are content to hunch our shoulders and hide behind our collarbone. When we sit, type, argue, work, we’re mostly hunched over.
If you’ve ever taken a yoga class and done a heart opening pose, you might have felt a bit funny. Nauseous or dizzy. Opening the heart is so uncommon in our culture it actually makes us feel sick!
We can’t let this stop us.
As a whole, society could use some heart opening. We could benefit from living with our heart on our sleeves. When more people take it up as the standard way of life, less people will feel weird about being true to themselves.
It’s time we start doing heart stretches
We do a lot in this country to take care of our hearts – we eat “heart-healthy” diets to avoid heart attacks and heart disease. We try and exercise (well, some of us) and reach our cardio zones to get things pumping and to get the blood moving.
But what we don’t realize is that our emotions are hurting our heart maybe even more than our food choices and lack of exercise. The emotions we bottle up, the ones we don’t share. The times when we feel hurt but we keep our mouth shut and tell ourselves we’re stupid for feeling that way. This is heart abuse!
The emotional and energetic body is a powerful, invisible force. We can choose to ignore it since we can’t see it, or we can choose to embrace it, play with it and harness it’s power for more health and wellbeing. We can choose to do heart stretches and increase our ability to give, receive, love and enjoy.
Today, stretch out your heart. If that involves yoga poses, cool. If that involves a cathartic cry, that works too. Get rid of the emotions that are no longer serving you – that are clogging up your ability to live free, open and true.
It’s time to let the REAL YOU shine.
In need of some heart stretches? Try these three yoga poses to open things up.
