{"id":47,"date":"2010-02-22T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T20:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/?p=47"},"modified":"2022-03-14T13:10:20","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T20:10:20","slug":"melt-your-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/2010\/02\/melt-your-heart","title":{"rendered":"Melt Your Heart!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend, Claire and I went to John Friend’s “Melt Your Heart” yoga workshop. John is the founder of the Anusara style of yoga<\/a>, which offers a unique blend of bio-mechanical alignment principles with heart centered tantric philosophy. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate how the alignment principles that are taught in Anusara are powerful tools for ones psyche, spiritual, and emotional life.\u00a0 Yet what is interesting is that the principles are primarily taught as physical alignment while practicing poses on the yoga mat.\u00a0 As touched on in an earlier post (“The Brain is For Motion<\/a>“) our bodies and minds and hearts are not really separable into distinct systems. We think<\/strong> with our bodies. We feel<\/strong> emotions with our bodies. So, if we want to learn more about how to manage our thoughts and emotions, we can start by learning how to manage and control our bodies.<\/p>\n

The first principle of Anusara Yoga is to open to grace — to soften and to melt your heart<\/em> all while holding a strenuous and challenging pose. This is a great thing to learn physically — how to be soft and fully engaged at the same time. At first it is very challenging — our naturally tendency is to tighten and push harder when trying to achieve a goal, and to become disengaged when softening.\u00a0 This dual action is reflected in the other alignment principles — such as hugging towards our midline while also expanding outwards with organic energy. The great thing about learning these principles physically is that when you do find the balance point you can feel<\/strong> it and it is an amazing experience!\u00a0 Suddenly, for a moment, a pose you have been struggling with can become easy and peaceful and your body expands unexpectedly deeply and your heart fills with joy!\u00a0 It’s a rush!<\/p>\n

And that is the magic of learning through the body — it gives you physical feedback. Early on I thought I understood the principles but I was still straining too hard and not able to feel the balance point.\u00a0 I ended up injuring myself a few times from the over-exertion and learned from those experiences how to soften and find the awareness of the balance point.\u00a0 We get similar pain\/injury feedback when we are out of alignment emotionally, but it is more difficult to recognize at first (largely because it is easy to mistakenly attribute emotional injury to external causes — like other people). The physical practice makes it obvious that we are the only ones capable of finding the balance in our bodies — no one else was involved in the moments when I injured myself — it was all me.\u00a0 As I practice finding the balance point between opposing forces in my body and relaxing into the effort, I find that I recognize more and more places in my social, emotional, and intellectual life where the same lessons apply.\u00a0 Once again, it turns out that our emotional balance is fully under our own control, and follows the same principles of alignment as apply to our bodies.<\/p>\n

If you have not yet practiced with an Anusara teacher, I can highly recommend it.\u00a0 The lessons offered are deep and have the ability to transform your life in ways deeper than the simple physical changes that come with the practice of physical poses.\u00a0 Below are links to some of my favorite teachers — each is magical in their own way and has a unique gift to offer their students.\u00a0 There are many other excellent teachers and yoga styles out there too, so go explore them all!<\/p>\n

Kenny Graham – http:\/\/www.kgyoga.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Laura Christensen – http:\/\/www.laurachristensen.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Stacey Rosenberg – http:\/\/www.namastacey.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Abby Tucker – http:\/\/yogabohemian.com\/home.html<\/a><\/p>\n

And, of course, the founder of it all:<\/p>\n

John Friend – http:\/\/www.anusara.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend, Claire and I went to John Friend’s “Melt Your Heart” yoga workshop. John is the founder of the Anusara style of yoga, which offers a unique blend of bio-mechanical alignment principles with heart centered tantric philosophy. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate how the alignment principles that are taught in Anusara are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,21],"tags":[28,6,29,10,27],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bodies","category-joy","tag-alignment","tag-anusara","tag-emotions","tag-experience-of-joy","tag-yoga"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pShAo-L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}