Open Heart

Many yoga poses are chest/shoulder openers.  I approached my journey of teaching of trying to come from a place of heart opening.  It really speaks to me the idea of living life with an open heart.  I often use the image of standing up with fully open arms and approaching difficult conversations that way. Whoa! It provides all of the feels!  Most of us spend our lives looking down at our phones or computers, we are living life with a literal closed chest and heart.  This is both physical and emotional.  We don’t breath fully in this position, our spine isn’t in proper position, and then we make it all worse by trying to do life in this position. So many daily activities in life are compromised and leading to shoulder injuries in some cases.  I will say this with an emphasis when we live our lives in a closed heart position we are not living fully.  Try this stretch, stand up and come to the inside of a doorway and place your hands on opposite sides of the door way and lean forward. That’s it just do that and breathe deeply while you do it. This is potentially a life changing stretch that I don’t even do enough.  I challenge you, and myself to keep some things simple and just do the doorway stretch every day.  But consider what it means to lead a life from the heart and consider taking that on as well.