Heart

I was sweating through the demanding postures of a Bikram’s Yoga class when an inspiring teacher lent a proffering to the class, “Sometimes, we forget we have hearts,” she said. (“The human heart is considered as the source and center of emotional life, where the deepest and sincerest feelings are located and where an individual is most vulnerable to pain.” )
As I attempted to contort my body into the Camel’s Pose, the simplistic reality of the statement immediately brought tears to my eyes.
“Of course, that is exactly it,” I thought to myself, distracted from the moment at hand.
On a very personal level, I can all too frequently deny my body the physical motion it requires. I can neglect to dance. Dancing, a passion, a flame, which sets my heart afire and fills my soul with immense light every time I partake, is a must in maintaining a healthy balance in my life. It is a love, as in that butterfly swarming, knees shaking first kind of love, that fuels my being, and yet, I deny myself this craving as though it simply did not exist. I negate this nourishment as though it were not a need, the most basic and simplest of the form.
By physically moving my human form through time and space, I not only reawaken my spiritual life force, but I also biologically, at the anatomical level, elongate my muscles, get my blood pumping, sweat toxins out through my skin’s pores, propagate the flow of fresh air through my lungs and bile and waste through my small and large intestines, and circulate oxygen in the large, four chambers of my heart (encouraging me to reconnect), around my pulsing sexual organs (demanding that I feel), down my weighted legs (reminding me of my own strength), out my pointing toes and fingers (revisiting with all else found on the earth’s surface), through the soles of my feet (where it commingles with the globe’s liquid core), and back up and out through the crown of my head (reuniting me to the great cosmos). After all, life is a dance, - an enduring choreography of atomic and sub-atomic particles, of quarks and anti-quarks, of centripetal and centrifugal forces, of shifting from inertia to mobility and back again, and of shape and form found here on this planet to an amorphous coagulation of space dust floating millions of light years away.
The wizened yogi’s statement also had me ruminating on the way I can bottle up my feelings, either while I am at work or when the discomfort of revealing my weakness, my vulnerability, and my soft underbelly, to another is at stake. Yet one more prime indicator that I have forgotten I have a moral fiber. When I do not share what I am thinking, when I do not reveal what I am feeling on some deeply innate part of my psyche, I completely remove myself from a situation. I draw a blank. I go cold. The monitor registers a flat line. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee…