Why It’s Important To Lead With Your Heart During Your Yoga Practise

Lead With Your Heart During Your Yoga Practise. Whilst teaching my regular Monday class, I walked around during the sun salutation warm up and noticed more and more bodies leading with rounded shoulders and closed chests. Whilst I stood in the middle of the classroom talking them through their sun salutations I thought of different ways I could cue them top open out through their heart centre when opening out into these backbends. It also dawned on me that throughout my classes more and more people are rounding their shoulders and struggling to fully understand the importance of standing tall but also they’re unable to fully understand backbends and how to achieve them efficiently.

I understand it more than anyone why it’s important to lead with your chest as I have struggled myself within my own practise due to my previous active lifestyle of overtraining and maybe this is why I particularly like to draw people’s attention to it. It was only during my twenties that I nearly passed out in a doctor’s surgery through experiencing a tight chest. The female doctor immediately called the paramedics, alerting them to a possible heart attack. There were circumstances around this that added to my fate of being in an ambulance and rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack. I was a new patient to that particular surgery and whilst informing this doctor of my recent medical history and that of my family, I told her that at the tender age of 46 my father had died of a heart attack. I’m not sure that day whether or not it was my panic or hers that brought on the suspected heart attack but suddenly I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and the blood drain from my face. My hearing started to fade away like when you’re in hospital and being put to sleep. Suddenly I could feel myself fading away and falling into a sleep and a deep one at that. However, I didn’t and it wasn’t long before I was fully alert and in the moment. I was in an ambulance and they were checking my stats and trying to draw blood from me.

I found out that day that day that I was of full health however, the muscles around my chest had become so restricted and tightened that it was causing the heart attack symptoms. These symptoms have continued to crop up throughout my life every now and again since that experience.

This is why, for me as a teacher it’s so very important that people/students fully understand the importance of leading with their heart centre throughout their practise. However, to keep you the reader more informed I’ve listed below the top three reasons why I believe everybody should start to do this more and more throughout their yoga practise.

1) Lead with your heart and not you head.

Yoga is a science, an art form, it means many things to many people but it basically gives us a way to better understand ourselves from the inside out. Whether you chose to believe in them or not, we have these chakras located in the body. I often talk about seven of the main chakras during my practise that I share with my students. These chakras are swirling vortices of energy that you won’t be able to see even if a doctor opened you up but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist. We cannot see the air that we breathe but we know that it exits and that we need it in order to survive.

When one or more of these chakras becomes blocked or clogged it can really inhibit our quality of life and stop us moving forward. It can stop us from being the best that we can be and living the best life that we could lead.

The heart chakra – Anahata

is responsible for the emotional body. This is the centre where we’re able to give love from and receive love in return.

I can only talk from personal experience but one of the reasons that I struggle to open my heart centre is, like most people I have the battle scars from life but you cannot see them on me physically. I’ve given out my love and it’s been rejected and therefore it’s wounded me. I’ve closed my heart centre off, shielding it from giving out love willy nilly. Protecting it from further harm/rejection and in doing so it has also closed me off from receiving love. It’s made me look at the world through muddy tainted glasses. Only seeing the bad in life and focusing on all the depressing stuff in the news. This bad press then confirms to me more and more that the world that I live in is a bad one and so are the people in it and that I need to protect myself from further harm.

When I started practising yoga, I wasn’t aware of it at the time but even working with my physical body I was unable to open up my chest and shoulders. They were stuck. I thought the simple solution was to push myself more and more into my practise to open up these areas. What I eventually realised was if I wanted to progress further in my practise, in my heart opening sequences and backbends that I had to let out all of the hurt that I was holding onto in my chest.
Just simply being aware of this when I practised opened me up. Having compassion for myself more and more in my classes allowed me to soften and melt my ice queen’s heart.

I still have a long way to go but what I find now is that I no longer watch the news or read a paper. As ignorant as it may be I want to focus on the positive in life. I want to open up my heart to all the endless possibilities that life has to offer. All of those faults that I focused on in my job, life and in people I focus on the good now instead. I’m opening up my heart to love again. I know I have an abundance of love so should my love be rejected then I know that I can move forward from that as it’s not in short supply.
By leading with your heart in class it can heal a broken heart and open you up to receiving the treasures of life.

2) What becomes of the broken hearted?

I see the weight of the world on people’s shoulders in class. Not everyone but most if I’m honest. I see the pain that they carry in their bodies and I want them to take the weight off.
Our lifestyles often encourage us to fold forward, into the foetal position. We round our shoulders when; driving, cycling, carrying bags and simply sitting at home on the sofa. Gravity is pulling us forward and into our shell but we must defy it. We must stand up and be counted. Now I know sometimes this may be hard and maybe for females in particular and particularly if you are bigger chested. To lift your chest up and push it out there feels like your making this big statement “look at me” but you know what? That’s exactly what we must do no matter how ludicrous this may feel. Make it become a habit that you’re used to. Like in the olden days when they had finishing schools for girls and made them walk around whilst balancing books on their heads.

Suddenly any physical chest pain that you experience will slowly start to dissipate. Any injuries from this for example I had an issue with my shoulder that all stemmed from this issue in my chest, it’s slowly rehabilitating itself because I’m teaching myself to stand tall but also lead with my chest in most of my practise.

Mountain pose, cobra, seated forward fold. Whilst doing these start drawing awareness to your shoulders and chest. Use a mirror at times and make sure that you’re not rounding through your back .Think about your shoulder blades as a broken heart. Slide the two sides of the broken heart down you back and in towards your spine so that it brings the heart back together. You know that little “V” shape at the bottom of the heart, slide you shoulder blades down in the same way.

3) The power of speech

Again going back to my experience in yoga as well as the tight chest pain that I had, I also had a painful shoulder that took many months at the doctors surgery only to discover they were unable to help me, I started to lose my voice. Now there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this; I taught group fitness for many years and would often shout during my classes, over the music and especially when there wasn’t a microphone. It is because of this that I have damaged my voice box but sometimes when I’m anxious or nervous I literally lose my voice and it becomes tight. I feel a big lump in my throat.

Using yoga, using back bends and leading with my heart centre has allowed me to open my throat centre more. The throat chakra – Vishudi is responsible for our communication and so when this is blocked you will have issues expressing yourself or making yourself heard.

The amount of times I see people strain their head and neck within their practise it’s no wonder that we struggle to communicate with one another when we aren’t able to communicate with our own self. Your body will give you subtle little messages, so listen to it and don’t shout it down, putting it down to nothing. Observe that your head is attached to your neck and your neck your neck is part of your spine. Therefore aim to lengthen this out more in class as opposed to crushing it or simply craning the head or flopping it back. Look forward through some backbends and open the heart centre and throat centre.

Just think of how much better you’ll be able to express yourself from your heart and fully communicate that with your fellow loved ones. How better able you’ll be at receiving messages from your heart.

Listen to your heart.