Is Your Heart Telling You About an Energy Leak?

After seven years of thinking about stopping by Living Yoga Center in Urbana, I finally made it. I was very excited to catch a class taught by Deb Lister, the director. In addition to offering a fantastic, warm, inviting & challenging vinyasa flow class, she said some of the most beautiful words. During an asana that focuses on opening up the chest she said “be gentle with your heart”. Wow. When was the last time you told yourself to be gentle with your heart?

There are so many ways we can be gentle with our hearts and yet so often we find ourselves doing just the opposite. When was the last time you gave yourself permission to live completely from your heart, rather than from a sense of fear that we might look bad or be making the wrong decision. When was the last time you ignored the stomach ache you have when you talk with someone, or the backache that happens right after you complete a work project? When I’m living from fear I tend to be more likely to put forth a ton of effort, try to make things fit they way I want them to (like trying to fit in your skinny jeans the week after xmas), to swim upstream, ignore my body and listen to the mad monkey mind. Swimming upstream takes so much energy. In my life, swimming upstream has never been a sign that I am on the right track. It doesn’t mean I haven’t worked hard or put forth energy, lots of energy, but I have found there is a huge difference between putting forth energy and putting forth effort. Energy seems to be an exchange that is nourishing and effort seems like, well visualize my kapha self pushing a boulder up a very big mountain in one hundred degree heat. Not pretty.

Today I have been stuck in a hotel (a nice one thank goodness. Vince says I’m a princess when it comes to hotels.) because of the winter weather. I was telling Vince I thought I should go out and clean off and start my car. I was dreading it but thought that was what responsible adults do when it snows. Vince’s response made me laugh (at myself). He mentioned being a grown up doesn’t always have to be so effortful and hard. Going out in icky weather to start a perfectly fine (albeit glitchy) car might not be necessary. As it turns out, the Hilton Garden Inn cleans off your car as a “nice touch” (their words). I have these ideas of what it means to be responsible and honestly, they are almost all ideas that require me to not live from my heart and swim upstream. No wonder I sometimes find myself singing the Toys-R-Us song in the shower…”I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys-R-Us Kid” (I’ve done this for at least seventeen years).

A friend of mine was saying the other day that when she was in her early twenties she heard a minister talk about how if you are giving more than you are getting back in a relationship, maybe it would be wise to take a closer look. I suppose this can go for all kinds of relationships. We are in all kinds of relationships. We are in relationship with our grocer, our haircutter, our government, our spouse, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, friends, coffee-shop, gas station, and even our jobs. Is energy draining out of you without it being replenished? Is energy draining out of you leading to you living from your head and not your heart? When I was in private practice a wise therapist across the hall pointed out that if I was working harder than my client I had a problem. I had a problem. If I had known to listen differently, I could have heard my body yelling “Ami, your shoulders are tense, your chest is tight, you have no energy, your always thinking thinking thinking AND your tired all the time.” Our bodies don’t lie.

What does your body tell you? What do the physical sensations in your back, shoulders and stomach tell you? Are you exhausted? Are you spending all of your time in your head forgetting that if we are gentle with our hearts we will find all of the answers we need? We will find answers that will tell us what we need to know about the job, the partner, the grocer, the haircutter. I can recall a time when I decided to leave a relationship. It was a relationship with someone wonderful, but that someone came with some things that weren’t good for me. I would often feel really icky. I would feel tense and heavy and as if I was someone else. When it ended, I was feeling really sad. Really sad. As I left this person, I was crying as I drove down the road. I just happened to look down and noticed one of my hands was pushing into my chest, around my heart. It was honestly like my heart hurt. I was afraid the lightness of Ami had left for good. I’m grateful I was patient enough to listen to the messages of the body, because the lightness came back, even lighter.

I think this year I am going to pay particular attention to the sensations in my physical body. Then I can be alerted to the signs of a possible leak. May you be gentle with your heart and not be too leaky.


In or near Urbana? Check out
Living Yoga Center
www.livingyogacenter.net
707 West Main Street, Urbana - (217) 384-5829