To Be Held by One’s Heart
Over the years, through my studies, practices, and sharing, I have reflected on what’s been most impactful in supporting me to remain grounded and clear. It’s not a specific tool I learned from Yoga—not a special mantra or chant, doing nadi shodhana multiple times a day, nor eating a special diet. My greatest support has been the relationship which I’ve cultivated to my heart, my hrdaya.
This bond was established not because I reached out for something or someone. It emerged as I allowed my heartache to be acknowledged by my Kind Self, by atman. Through this process, I allowed in what was most needed: To look upon my actions and decisions with insight, where I didn’t seek to blame nor escape, but only to recognize the profound need to do my work to grow, and make a commitment not to allow transgressions for myself and others.
Perhaps the way of the heart has been most abused and taken advantage of on our small blue planet—a profound heartache for us all.
To feel our lives being lived is an intense experience.
To feel our bodies being breathed is an intense experience.
To feel our selves being embodied with feelings is an intense experience.
Individual and collective trauma have deprived many of us of the ability to live, feel, and experience. Trauma often separates one from the heart.
The heart can observe all the happenings and never be inhabited.
It can stay lonely while housed in a body full of doing,
its owner never getting quiet enough to hear its cry, nor its song.
We take time to be mindful, we make time to be good human beings and appreciate the little things in life. However, is this enough?
This is my inquiry, and from this interior space I write these words.
Expressing gratitude in a simple gesture, externally expressed or internally experienced, is fantastic. Making time for random acts of kindness is grand, and helps us realize that we matter. And yet, we can keep these practices active while still feeling a disconnect from our interior heart-space.
There are many paths to freedom. Some invite us to take off the shackles that our minds have created; some wrap a noose and suffocate the very concept.
Yoga aims to remove suffering and invite freedom. I perceive two paths toward this objective that modern practitioners have available:
1) Raja/Hatha: The path that embodies the dharma, the intentional living practice, of the yamas. The yamas are the five guiding principles of compassion, clarity, taking only what is needed, reverence for our energy, and the ability to release the need to live our lives with clenched fists. This path utilizes breath, senses, mind, and body to set aside the mind chatter.
2) Tantra: The path that utilizes this world, integrating all of its aspects, to expand consciousness to a place that is free from suffering and delusion.
What do they both have in common? It has to do with where the north star is positioned for each. It is easy to be fooled by the idea that the path of freedom is through the body/movement, meditation, breath, rituals, chanting…etc. The freedom proposed is not about being absorbed in an esoteric, far-reaching idea of samadhi/bliss. Rather, we are free from suffering when we can be held by our own heart. Yes. This is ultimate freedom.
Take a moment and move interiorly for a few breaths.
Have you cultivated the skill to be held by your heart?
I find myself often wandering to the edge of the interior lake and looking to the suffering I have experienced in my own life and that of the people around me, and I ask, is all this suffering necessary? I have never been able to make sense of the levels of suffering that permeate this world. However, I learned this skill:
Closing my eyes
Breathing with the quality of lahari
Moving interiorly and knocking on the door of my heart
I sought permission from my own heart to enter, peacefully and lovingly
As I arrive into the cave of hrdaya, I know the significance of this space. I recognized it wasn’t a space to be inhabited by anyone else. My freedom is here.
Being held so lovingly invited me to be loving.
Coming into myself with reverence and respect,
invited this to be mirrored in my relationships.
Love and the heart-space are not the same. We have an experience of falling in love with a human being as an invitation. The best love experience in this human journey is the one that returns us back to our own heart, where we release the gripping around ideas of how love is supposed to look and how humans are supposed to act when they love.
My jyotish guide often speaks of how relationships are to support us to do our karmic work. This work helps us understand love and how not to be attached so heavily to people/animals. Drop your strongest anchor into your own heart. Learn how to get there and be held, sit into the quiet serenity of your heart and you will never be lost.
The hrdaya is the central focus of Yoga, regardless the path or the name. It is named in the classical texts of the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali/Vyasa. If it isn’t your focus, I beg you to make it so.
Patanjali’s yoga sutra 3.34 makes it crystal clear:
hrdaye citta-samvit
{through samyama (tools of absorption)} you will become clear when you absorb citta/mind to the heart lotus.
(m.ovissi translation)
From deep within the heart, the chitta is fully realized(Dr. Graham Schweig translation)
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (300- 500 CE) are considered by some a central text of modern Yoga. The main framework of Ashtanga, the 8 limbed path, is articulated through Vyasa’s comments and is foundational in majority of yoga schools on our small blue planet. Metaphors provide us with a way of landing the idea. The hrdaye is seen as a lotus: two halves with hrdaya at the center of the lotus. Although the hrdaye does not reference the physical heart, the location of the heart is a powerful place to set your mind. If it resonates, using your mind’s eye, transform the heart into a lotus, and knock on the door (with an exhale) to enter hrdaye.
In the Vijnana Bhairava (950 – 1014 CE), a central Tantric text, 112 meditation invitations are offered to understand this life through inner experience.
Verse 49
hrdyakase nilinaksah padmasamputamadhyagah
ananyacetah subhage param saubhagyam apnuyat
One whose mind and senses have merged into the interior space of the heart, who has drawn its full awareness into the center of the two bowls of the heart lotus fully, acquires the highest gift. (J. Singh/M.Ovissi Translation)
We find both paths articulated above are calling the practitioner towards the heart, where you will find what you need to stay grounded and tethered.
I find so much separation these days in the world, including within the yoga world. We find people feeling the need to choose one way over the other. This path is better than the other. Perhaps more important is to understand what is the essence of the invitation.
In one of my earliest practices with my teachers Mohan-ji and Indra-ji, they spoke of the most advanced practice. They invited us to go to the mat and explore through our own experience to decide if it is true. I did, and that moment is etched in me. I remember every part of that practice and experience. What is the most advanced practice? It is when every asana, movement, or breath you take is an intentional path back to hrdaye. This is what makes Yoga, Yoga.
It’s all about finding our way to our hearts. Check in and see where your daily rituals take you. There are stations along our journey. Sometimes we need tools to gather the anxiety and quell its intensity; sometimes our lives feel dull and unhabituated, and movement and breath practices are needed to churn the waters. What happens from there? After you have quieted the chatter of the mind, detached from the pull of the senses, and the uplifted the heavy dullness of life? Where will you go from there?
After 20 years of teaching yoga, I have learned the greatest tool I offer practitioners—whether utilizing yoga and yoga therapy to manage cancer treatment, anxiety, or recovery from a hip surgery—is bhavana, one’s heartfelt attitude, behind the breath and movement that brings the whole-self back to the heart space for an intimate interior experience. Moving through one’s life with this anchor will transform all your decisions and relationships.
Love is a personal experience. All I can offer is a rememberance to find your way to your hrdaye/hrt/heart. When you lose your way, do everything in your power to get back home.
I share with you this meditation as one of the tools to support your journey. May you find the tools you need on your journey to hrdaya/hrt/heart.