By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

You’re hiding your heart.  When your upper back rounds over, it crunches your neck and can cause a lot of pain.  It’s all because you’re hiding your heart – not only from others, but also from yourself.  When what you really want is for your heart to be open.  Open and safe, that is.

If you are currently living in circumstances that require you to hide your heart, I support you in necessary self-protection.  But if those circumstances were in the past, it’s time to begin unraveling the spinal tensions that you installed when needed.  Are they needed now?

While yoga poses and breathing practices do help, it is the deeper inner experience that makes the biggest difference.  When you use poses and yogic breathing as the ancient system recommends, they dissolve deep physical tensions as well as mental-emotional reactivity.  As these dissolve, your deeper essence is revealed, called svaroopa in Sanskrit, meaning your own capital-S Self.

Svaroopa is your own Divine Essence, the source of all healing, creativity, love and joy.  As you settle inward, the past dissolves and you become aware of being aware. Your own Self knows your own Self.  In this inner Knowingness, your body begins a cosmic reset, dissolving the old patterns that don’t serve you anymore.

Now your heart is full, filled from the inner source. From that fullness, you have a new level of clarity about your life and your own being.  From that inner fullness, you have something worth sharing.  Now you’re ready for your heart to show, for all you really ever wanted to do was to share from your essence.  Yoga empowers you to live this way.