Valentine's Day is this week, so this post is dedicated to loving-kindness and the heart space.

Happy Valentine's Day Eve

Valentine's Day is marketed as love for others. And yet, it can also be a day where we remind ourselves to practice love for ourselves. We practice self-love as we take care to open the heart space from within.

In yoga asana practice, we use the term heart opener to refer to poses that open the front of the upper torso via back-bending, chest-opening and arm-opening postures. Those are the basic visuals that we see and feel in most yoga asana classes.

Asana poses such as low crescent lunge, fish pose, cow (but not cat), and camel are all backbends that open up the heart area.

Yet there is much more to the experience of heart-opening than just the physical pose. As we open the heart space using these postures, we begin to increase our energetic and emotional capacities. Integrating the breath and meditation into the practice helps to more fully open the heartspace. Thus, we make more space available for love, compassion and gratitude for yourself and for others. (Yoga in Bowness, 2017).

Deep exploration of the inner self makes room for more love as you open your heart. This is especially true when we do the metta or loving-kindness meditation. (We will be integrating metta during Yoga Nidra tonight.)

In yoga, the heart space is the place in the body from where pure love arises from within. The heart space opens as you observe and listen to the nurturing love from within you Enabling you to better share the love with yourself and others.

Resources & Further Reading

Bowness in Yoga (2017) Opening your heart in through yoga.