Week 3: Heart Opening

A common instruction in many yoga classes is to "open through your heart" or "lift through your heart." It means, literally, to push the chest forward starting at the back of or inside of the body, rather than just puffing it out like a rooster. But just reading this phrase or even seeing it be done by someone else doesn't quite convey the feeling it creates in the body. Heart openers, as some people call poses that call for this movement, are powerful asanas or postures that have recently been leaving me pretty sore.

This soreness, or heart ache, if you will has come as a big surprise to me. "But I'm someone who says "I love you pretty freely," I thought. Wouldn't this make my heart open already? Why am I suddenly feeling like an emotional teenager again, with every little feeling, good or bad, surging through my body so strongly? Then again, I can think of a lot of times when my heart has needed a little mending. Times when I've had to put construction tape up around it and curl my shoulders forward to protect it. Sound familiar?

I'm sure it started, as most emo things do, when I actually was a teenager. My poor heart, constantly in a state of unrequited love, needed somewhere to retreat when it was in danger of being hurt again so I dug it a little trench where it could sink down and sulk without the fear of being seen. Then there was, though I didn't admit it at the time, a huge pain in my heart when I moved away to college. And then the ups and downs of college ensued. Lost love, lost innocence, found out life isn't as simple as I'd like it to be, lost my favorite t-shirt, found friends, friends were lost to first jobs in far away places. Lots of mini-heartbreaks that certainly added up. Of course, I began to insulate it during those four years.

And, over the last couple of years as "an adult" its only intensified as I've put my heart out on a limb for jobs, for lovers, and as the distance between me and many friends and my family have pulled my heartstrings thinly across the country. Out of what often seemed like necessity, I've had to protect my heart, make it less vulnerable to all the ways it can be injured. I've built upon the teenaged trench, over the years, a ramshackle casing of brick and mortar, cynicism, fear and standoffish-ness. I've built it a little home that fills up space in my chest and is well decorated with only the happy things that I want to project out the the world. It has given my heart more weight so that it is heavy, serious and not so delicate. You have to knock before entering, too. Add to that the scaffolding I've built up - it is under constant construction - which keeps me so busy around the exterior that even I don't have to feel what's inside.

I'm a busy girl when it comes to protecting my heart and its only recently, when I started doing more "heart openers" that I realized how little of my heart I'd been showing for quite some time. I really believed all this work necessary, to prevent it from falling, cracking, being knocked loose or, heaven forbid, stolen. Yet doing these poses, pushing my heart out from its casing, I am breaking all of the molding loose and I am realizing that most of the strain is, in fact, from all this crap that is surrounding it. Each time I reach through my heart and chip away at its casing, the more I feel that it is much stronger than I remembered. Despite the heart ache these stretches have caused me, and perhaps because of it, I'm feeling much more love emanating from the center of my chest than I have in years.

It really hit home Friday night as a fellow student was being picked up from class by her partner of 17 years. He was waiting patiently for her as we filed out of the studio and when she put her mat down for a second, without saying a word, he grabbed it and slung it under his arm. They both turned to walk out of the building together and he had a huge smile on his face. I knew, just from a simple observation, that this was love. My heart lifted as I watched them for those few seconds. I haven't felt my heart lift for something so simple in a long time. As I told her about it the next day, she lit up and I knew I hadn't been mistaken. My heart had been open enough to feel, if only for a second, their love.

I'm looking forward to, 5 and a half months from now, sharing this experience of heart opening with my students. This ability, to take a phrase that doesn't mean much when you read it and turn it into a powerful action that enables someone to experience life differently, is something my heart is very eager to learn.