When your heart is open, you can feel your emotional flow of energy. You might even “feel the flow” of others around you. With an open heart, you can feel love, joy, and compassion, and you can feel more in tune with life. When your heart is closed, you experience feelings of anger, frustration and fear.
It turns out that love is an electromagnetic phenomenon!
The Power of the Heart
According to the HeartMath Institute the heart produces the body’s most powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field. This field can be detected several feet away by sensitive instruments, and perhaps in more subtle ways at greater distances. It turns out that love is more than an emotion. Love is an electromagnetic phenomenon!
The heart’s electromagnetic field is believed to act as a central synchronizing signal within the body. It is also an important carrier of emotional information. When the heart closes, you enter a place of contraction that walls you off from your deeper self and from the world around you.
Is you heart open or closed?
Leading with an open heart releases life energy into the world. An open heart can illuminate the darkest of places. It can increase vitality, help you regain emotional balance, and enhance your capability to meet the challenges of life with fluidity and grace.
The heart becomes blocked when stored, unfinished energy patterns (yoga calls them Samskaras) are activated during the normal course of life. But what exactly does that mean? For example, as you move through the day, you take in everyday experiences through your senses; not as form, but as energy.
This enables the heart and the mind to receive these experiences. When things are working as they should, you’re meant to take in information, experience it, and then let it pass through before moving to the next experience. However, if you have a personal issue with something that interferes with the flow a disturbance occurs and the experience gets stuck, clogging up energetic pathways.
The Issues are in the tissues
As you hold onto events, the mind tries to process these emotions and continually chatters. Memories may surface as you try to process the event and the deeper, unfinished emotional business. If not cleared, this emotional imprint gets stored in the body as a Samskara, or “impression.” In yoga these “impressions” are referred to as unfinished energy patterns that end up running one’s life.
There’s an endless possibility of emotional imprints you can have stored within the cells of your body. The question is: “How do I function and stay open when these imprints are constantly being activated, wreaking havoc with my inner and outer world?” There are steps you can take to release the hold these imprints have on you.
Practices to help open and heal your heart
Regular mind-body practices such as yoga and meditation open the physical body and the mind. These practices can bring awareness to patterns of thought or behavior that are being triggered and acted upon. Through that awareness you can begin to recognize when you’re closing. You can then stop, allow space, and leave room to re-pattern your thoughts and behaviors.
There are yoga poses that can help regulate and balance the flow of energy into the heart center. If you practice yoga you may have experienced the emotional and spiritual aspects of deep heart openers, such as Wheel Pose, which are sometimes subtle and sometimes profound.
What other steps can you take to connect with and open the heart? Here are some suggestions:
- Start each day spending a few minutes consciously breathing and drawing yourself down to your heart – as if all of your attention were resting deeply in the heart center – and then listen.
- Practice heart opening yoga poses, focusing on and breathing into the heart center.
- Practice self compassion and compassion for others.
- Be grateful for your existence and for all that you are experiencing in this life.
- When gratitude seems elusive, give. Give a meal, your time, or a smile. It’s your choice.
- Find ways of living more openly every day. Engage a person you would not normally make contact with. Stay open to what might happen; look into their eyes, listen to their voice, and watch their actions.
- Play your favorite music and dance! Sing in the shower. Laugh.
An open heart allows you to be more authentic and it allows you to experience the joy of love, peace and deeper connection. An open heart creates energy, vitality, and inspiration in your life while allowing you to feel more a part of all of existence.
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