Yoga to Open your Heart

Here is a yoga meditation exercise to open your heart to give and receive more love. It is from the book - "The Eight Human Talents." You can repeat the movement 26 times focusing on your third eye point.

The important thing to realize about heart opening is that it’s totally natural for our spirit and utterly unnatural for our body. The latter is due to the fact that we have so many heart-closing daily activities in our culture. The main problem is that we sit in chairs most of the time. We even sit in one as we drive! This chair sitting tends to cause us to tuck our tailbone under and that action the rounds us and causes us to hunch our shoulders forward. Using a computer mouse at a desk or looking down and texting on a smart phone also tends to have the same effect. We roll our shoulders forward and inward.

To get the heart open, you need to reverse this chest collapsing, You need to elongate the front of your torso upward away from your waistline and then draw your shoulder blades down your back. This takes the head of your arm bones back and let’s your chest open. It causes your collar bones to “smile,” that is, to widen.

There are many more active ways you can do this heart-opening action, but here I’m sharing the most restorative version, so you’ll have no excuse not to do it (sneaky me!).

Think you’re too tired? This supine pose is perfect! You do it lying down and you simply allow gravity to help you open your heart by using either a bolster or blocks to press into the back of your chest and elevate and expand the front.

If you need a little motivation, keep this in mind: heart opening exercises give you a kick of the happy body-produced hormone oxytocin. So don’t be surprised if, a little while after you’ve done this pose, you’re smiling for no reason.