One of my friends recently took a beginning yoga workshop. She has practiced a little yoga at home and decided she would try it with experienced instruction.
I know she has a physical history of childhood heart surgeries and had recently been spending quite a bit of her personal energy healing some emotional childhood hurts. So I encouraged her to go, but suggested she tell the teacher about her medical history.
Not long after the end of the workshop, I met her for tea. She looked happy and relaxed.
“How was it?” I asked.
She said she felt great, that she had really enjoyed the workshop. Then she leaned in closer, “But I started to cry as soon as we started and cried all the way through the class. What was that about?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t surprised at all, and she could see that.
“Did you know this would happen?” she asked.
“I suspected it might.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Would you have gone if I had?”
The question hung in the air between us, and she shook her head.
As a yoga teacher and massage therapist, I’ve seen this happen many times – in yoga classes when poses open and activate the heart center, and on the massage table, when I work on the back of a client’s heart center, between the shoulder blades. Sometimes the reaction is related to a physical trauma to the heart center (like illness or surgery), but more often than not, the response is to an emotional trauma, which could be recent, or something that has been stored in the body since childhood.
Even without a cathartic experience like weeping, opening and stimulation of the heart center can make people feel melancholy, vulnerable, and emotionally raw.
So why does this happen? What is the energy of the heart chakra and what triggers it?
In her now-classic book Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, author Caroline Myss uses the vocabulary of the chakra system to describe the places and ways that we hold hurt in the body, and the ways those unacknowledged hurts can manifest physically.
The heart center, or Anahata Chakra, is the fourth in the system, and is commonly recognized as the body’s “love center,” with all of the complexity that implies.
Caroline Myss describes it this way:
The fourth chakra is the central powerhouse of the human energy system. The middle chakra [of seven], it mediates between the body and spirit and determines their health and strength. Fourth chakra energy is emotional in nature and helps propel our emotional development. This chakra embodies the spiritual lesson that teaches us how to act out of love and compassion and recognize the most powerful energy we have is love.
Bridging the emotional and the physical, the energy of the heart center is associated with the heart and circulatory system; shoulder, hands, and arms (the natural extensions of the heart center); the breasts, ribs, diaphragm, and lungs. Emotionally it houses love, forgiveness, hope, trust, compassion and dedication, but conversely – when that energy is blocked – it can give rise to jealousy, bitterness, anger, hatred, and an inability to forgive (one’s self and others).
Myss also lists primary fears associated with the heart center:
Fears of loneliness, commitments, and “following one’s heart”; fear of inability to protect oneself emotionally; fear of emotional weakness and betrayal.
Blocked energy in the heart center, in the form of unacknowledged or unaddressed emotional and physical traumas can manifest in physical problems such as asthma, arm and hand pain, problems in the breast tissue, and of course, the heart.
As a yoga teacher, I’ve often noticed that students with “floppy arms” – that is students who have a hard time fully extending their arms in poses, who have hands lacking energy – are often the same ones who have experienced trauma to the heart center in the form of illness, injury, or some sort of loss. There is tenuousness in the upper parts of their poses.
Often these same individuals struggle with pain and tightness in their upper backs, have a hard time moving their shoulder blades, and have adopted (unconsciously chosen) repetitive physical positions that “protect” their heart centers as they round forward (for example, hunching over while walking, or hunkering over work stations and steering wheels).
Opening out of these long-held protections can trigger the emotions that brought them there in the first place, and may trigger panic, crying, shortness of breath, and other emotional responses until energy starts to move and the body, and psyche, becomes comfortable in less defensive positions.
It’s not my job to make this connection for my students or to dig through their internal life, but I can help guide them to a more comfortable place. I’ve found that if I simply keep working with their form, encouraging their arms in the postures, they often take on a more vivid personal energy as they begin to heal on their own – a process reflected in their yoga practice, and often in their life, as they begin to make dynamic changes there, as well.
In this way, yoga provides access to the body’s secrets and a form of self-healing that helps to unblock “stuck” energy. More so than limberness, strength, or the media-hyped “yoga butt,” this ability to access and move energy is, without a doubt, yoga’s greatest gift to the body.
Last March, I attended a wonderful poetry reading at Copperfield’s Books in Santa Rosa, featuring the poet Kay Ryan.
(Here is a link to more information about the great WordTemple poetry readings at Copperfield’s.)
I keep Ryan’s book Niagara River in the yoga studio, and frequently read her tight, concise poems to my students.
I was pleased when she read this poem, one of my favorites, that celebrates the way the body integrates the emotional and physical:
Chinese Foot Chart
From The Niagara River by Kay RyanEvery part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock.
At the end of the evening I thanked her for reading the poem and explained that I often read it to my yoga students.
She smiled and fixed her eyes on me very intensely and said “Had I not started taking yoga, I probably wouldn’t have written it.”
Namasté.
Hmmn. Love the poem and haven’t heard of the poet before.
You may have made this leap already, but I have a theory that how we most feel turned on or want to be touched on any given day is actually related to whatever we are trying to release, heal, or enhance in our psychospiritual journey at that moment…
~Shams