Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:11] Welcome to Deep in your yoga practice. I am Lauren Leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today we will continue our chakra series. So we are deepening our yoga practices by diving in to the heart chakra, or anahata, the chakra of love, compassion, and integration. Just a heads up, I have past episodes that cover the chakra system as a whole, as well as the first three chakras. So you're welcome to go back and listen to those to bring you up to date, or you can treat this as a standalone episode. So anahata, located at the heart, is the fourth chakra, and it's considered this bridge. It's this bridge between the lower chakras, which we've covered in this podcast so far, and then the upper chakras. So it bridges survival and desire and creativity and power with expression, wisdom, and divine connection. So it's this very powerful bridge between our earthly selves and our more divine selves. Therefore, it's the center of integration. It's where humanity meets our divinity. The heart chakra doesn't mean just romance or positivity. It is layered and complex. It's about love with discernment, compassion with boundaries, and openness without self abandonment. So let's talk about the heart chakra and cultivating one that is healthy. So what is anahata? It's located in the center of the chest, so where the physical heart is. Its color is green, its element is air, and its symbol is a 12 petaled lotus with intersecting triangles. Every chakra has a seed mantra, and the seed mantra is yam, which I love because it sounds like yam. The literal translation is unstruck sound. And we can think of Anahata as love that exists without being earned or provoked. And when it's healthy, we feel this sense of innate worth and connection and presence. Some of the themes associated with the heart chakra are love, that's love for self and love for others, compassion, forgiveness, belonging, grief, boundaries, and emotional maturity. It has different physical correlations in the body, so it is correlated with the heart and the lungs and the rib cage. Therefore, it's correlated with our breath, also with the upper back and the shoulders, the arms and the hands, also with the immune system and our breath capacity. We can also associate the heart with the vagus nerve, which is this information superhighway for the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps with parasympathetic regulation, particularly the ventral vagal response, so bringing us into a space of connection. And support and rest and digest, as well as co regulation and safety. The heart chakra isn't something that we just focus on opening.
[00:03:14] It's something that we can build resilience with and even containment at times. And when it's too open without support, it can lead to a sense of burnout, of running around with an empty cup. So instead of just talking about opening the heart, let's talk about what a balanced and imbalanced heart chakra would look like. So signs of a balanced anahata or heart would be having a healthy sense of empathy for others, for the ability to both give and receive, for emotional regulation, for being able to set clear boundaries, and for being able to connect with others without being codependent. When the heart is imbalanced in an underactive sense, we might feel emotional numbness, we might feel isolated, we might have difficulty trusting others, and we might feel the sense of guardedness. And if it's overactive, we might feel a sense of people pleasing, maybe a lack of boundaries with others, perhaps a feeling of emotional overwhelm and maybe patterns where we are trying to save others or martyr ourselves for others. Know that if you identify with any of these imbalances, it doesn't mean you're failing in any way. This is just information for you to move forward with so that you can make healthy decisions that work for you. We can tie the heart chakra into some different aspects of yoga history and philosophy. One, it is very much associated with Bhakti Yoga. This is a form of yoga that is devotion or love in action.
[00:04:46] And we're not bypassing pain when we're practicing this, but we are offering it up to a higher power. We can also relate this to ahimsa. This is non harm toward the self and to Karuna, which means compassion. But this is particularly compassion without erasing the self. It's not giving so much to others that we get depleted. It's giving from a space of wholeness. We can also relate this to Metta, which is loving kindness in Buddhism. With Metta, love is a practice. It's something we actively do. It's not something that's like a personality trait. And it begins with the self and expands outward. So some of you who practiced with me before may have experienced the Metabhavana meditation. It's something I learned from one of my teachers, Jenn Yaro. And when you do Meta Bhavana in a traditional way, you start with giving love to yourself and then you start expanding that outwards. So it's a really wonderful practice. To help you embody love in action. We can also think of the heart as a bridge to courage, similar to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. The root word of heart is actually cor.
[00:05:57] Think corazon if you speak Spanish. And we can think of courage being this vulnerability and strength together.
[00:06:04] We do things even when we're a little bit scared. We pull our inner strength even when it feels vulnerable. Let's talk about some practices to strengthen the heart chakra on the yoga mat. Maybe we are heart opening. So I think any postures that open the chest and contract the back and especially heart opening with support. So maybe laying on blocks or a bolster can be such a nice and gentle way to open this space.
[00:06:30] Maybe back bends that emphasize lift instead of collapse. So that can be your wheel pose where the back body is deeply contracted and the front body is super open and you are strong and supported. This might be shoulder and upper back awareness or mobility. It might be breath led movement as well. Maybe using Ujjayi breath to move the body from one space to the other. Because the breath is heavily associated with the heart, we can also bring in more strength and balance through breath and meditation. So this is through different types of breath that bring a sense of coherence. That might mean Ujjayi breath, diaphragmatic breath, maybe square breath. Anything that helps you feel supported and safe. Maybe it's meta meditation. I spoke of that earlier. Maybe it's bringing the hand to the heart as you're meditating or breathing for extra awareness in that space off the mat. This might look like boundary work. Maybe notice where you have leaky energy in your life and can create you better boundaries so that you are fortified and giving from a space of wholeness. Maybe you need some forgiveness practices when appropriate. Maybe there's something you're holding onto that's blocking the heart and it's time to work through that and eventually let it go. Maybe this is grief rituals. Maybe you're holding on to grief and you're not sure how to process it. But it is something that you need to go through with support of a professional or with friends. Or maybe in your own private way. Maybe it is finding acts of service so how can you serve others more especially if you're feeling isolated. And this might be naming your needs clearly. So giving yourself love by identifying what you need and then being able to communicate that, whether it's with yourself or with others. We might also associate the heart chakra, like I said earlier, with grief and maybe with Heartbreak as well. We feel this in the heart space and know that grief is such a normal part of life and it is a sign of an intelligent heart. Know that the heart breaks because it loves and this isn't something that you have to fix in yourself. You can hold space and be present to the feeling and acknowledge it. That doesn't mean you have to fix it necessarily. We talked about grief rituals as a way to strengthen the heart off the mat. But again, that doesn't mean you're fixing it or getting rid of it. It simply means that you are going through it. And know that yoga teaches us to stay present with discomfort. So it's such a beautiful way to support your heart. Know that an open heart is not one that never hurts. It is one that is resilient and that's brave enough to feel. If you'd like to continue exploring these chakras, my book Embody youy Inner Goddess A Guided Journey to Radical Wholeness is such a great way to dive into each one and to its different aspects and to really love on yourself. It's a guided book with reflections and embodiment practices to help you feel more supported in each chakra and as a whole. We also have our 300 hour yoga teacher training at True Love Yoga for yoga teachers who are ready to hold space with depth and ethics and emotional intelligence. And we spend a full month with each chakra. The Heart Chakra month is really fun because we focus a lot on restorative yoga which is so healing. And know that many of our teachers at True Love Yoga offer chakra centered classes. You can't take probably 10 classes with us without hearing about the chakras. So if this is work that you want to dive more deeply into, we are here for you. So I thank you so much for joining me today, sending your heart so much love and you can look out for our next chakra, the throat chakra, in the next few weeks. Om Shanti Om. Peace.
