Musings on the heart

Since I began doing yoga many years ago, teachers have directed me to bring attention to my heart.  I always found this difficult--I had a really clear knowledge as to where it is in the body (I took gross anatomy, after all) and I knew where the energetic center was (from years of working on people).  

But when I have been asked to tune into my own heart, I have often felt like I was pretending to tune into it.  I had this vague sense of "yep, this is where the energy should be", but I had a hard time feeling it.  I spent years meditating and visualizing this great big ball of energy that radiates out through my entire body and out into the world.  I occasionally would feel emotions around it, but it still felt nebulous and unclear.  How could I spend day after day feeling energy in other people, in my hands, over my head and around my body, moving up and down my limbs and my spine but not feel the expansiveness in the heart center?  Backbends weren't cutting it for me; they worked amazingly well at vitalizing me, but the energy just seemed to skip past my heart and went straight up to my crown.

I have spent the last couple of years doing a more introspective, gentle and watery style of yoga.  I kind of gave up on "opening the heart" in the traditional way.  I have long known that I have had an area right behind my heart that is held in extension and twisted--it's an area of my scoliotic spine that I have always thought was a compensation for my larger twist at the back of my solar plexus.  It's an area that hurt during inversions, collapsed in down dog and plank.  Since spending more time working with the connective tissue, doing a lot of forward bends and really going inside myself during my practice, I have realized that the back and sides of my heart are where I am tight...and that if I continued to push my heart forwards with backbends, that poor heart was never going to feel supported.  I was accentuating a movement that was possibly causing my inability to feel there--it was a position that offered me protection for many years--because when the heart center isn't really in your body, you don't have to feel it.  

This awareness also led me to realizing that if I have compensated in some way from feeling in some area of my body, the bottom line is that I haven't felt safe to be there.  Laura Tyree's workshop reminded me of how essential the root chakra is, and got me thinking that if I don't feel supported and solid on the earth, there is little chance that the rest of me will cooperate with this whole "living on earth" thing.  Maybe that is the key to unwinding not only the twist behind my heart, but perhaps all of the twists in my spine.  

I am starting to feel my heart more and more--I'm finally getting what my teachers were trying to teach me.  And I am starting to finally realize why sometimes I need to stand up during my yoga practice, feet solidly planted on the ground.  Safe.