Living from the Heart
I recently discussed unconditional love, the love we all house within, and the desire to be loved specially. Love is a beautifully interesting topic with many facets to explore. This is a follow up to that post to delve deeper into what it means to live from the heart, to live from a place of love.
A short recap:
Love is unconditional.
Each one of us is a being of love. And, we are our own key to unlocking love—this door can be opened at any moment with anyone and everywhere. Meaning, you don’t need another person to feel love, you are love in everything you do. This is the full embodiment of love. I am love.
Love is the highest vibration of being. Why? Life comes from love, life persists because of love.
One way to consistently access this love is to tap into it in its unconditional form that beats within you… your heart, your life force energy. How? Move your consciousness from the head to the heart.
To get into the practice of holding your consciousness in your heart, I offer the following meditation. I also created a recording of this meditation so that you can sink into the full experience. Listen along on Spotify!
Heart Consciousness Meditation
Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Notice how your breath feels in the body. What is the texture? Breathy and shallow? Deep and relaxed? Somewhere in between?
Breathing in and out through the nose, consciously start to deepen your breath—breathing into the belly first, letting it fully expand, then pulling air into the chest and heart space. Physically feel your belly inflate. Feel the space that’s created between each rib as every breath gets deeper. Feel your sternum lift and the breath swell into the base of the throat. Feel your entire body expand with each breath you take.
Notice what sensations arise. Is the breath stirring anything up? Are there any parts of the body that are holding onto tension… is the breath getting stuck?
Once you feel fully embodied with the breath… you can consciously trace the path of air flowing through your body, start to move your awareness, your focus, to your heart space. Continue to breath deeply.
Envision your heart. Feel it beating. What is the tempo of your pulse. What does it feel like to have blood emanating from the heart? What sensations arise in the body? What do the sternum, chest, and breasts feel like? What does the space right behind the heart, between the shoulder blades, feel like?
Every time your brain tries to interject and supersede the process, come back to the sensation of your beating heart. Explore that sensation with curiosity. What is the texture of the heart beats? How does it feel to have a heart beating within your body?
Start to widen your awareness to the entire body, feeling into the sensation of your flowing energy. Can you feel your pulse in your wrists and fingertips? Can you feel it in the throat? Behind the eyes? What does it feel like to have a fully alive body captured in your awareness? What parts of your body are you noticing now that you’re focusing your awareness? What new sensations arise?
Once you feel fully embodied with your life force energy, start to notice other sensations. The electricity emanating from your body. The quality of the air around you. The flow of the energy in the room. The unseen objects behind you.
Keep practicing holding awareness in your heart, it’s a deeply embodied sensation.
Overcoming Thoughts
Overcoming thoughts and moving consciousness from the head to the heart is one of the many obstacles we face. But, living from the heart is so worth it because you can access experiencing all life has to offer without judgement, just curiosity and wonderment. The heart doesn’t judge, it just experiences.
So, what does it actually mean to hold your consciousness in the heart? What’s the difference from being in your head? Depending on your perspective, that’s either a very serious or very silly question.
Long story short, when you are living in your head, your thoughts run the show. If you are always in your head, your attention is most likely focused on your thoughts—your thoughts supersede the experience. This isn’t always a bad thing, take being in an intellectual setting as an example. If you’re in the middle of focused work, identifying with your thoughts can be helpful and necessary.
But, we don’t want to live there all the time. For the most part, thoughts are repetitive, internally derived, and focused on either the past or future. Planning for the future is good, remembering fond memories is also good… but, being so caught up in thoughts that they take you out of the present moment is not so good.
Holding your consciousness in your heart enables you to be fully present in the here and now. It’s a deeply embodied sensation, so you’ll feel more comfortable within self and less judging of your actions. Living from the heart also enhances your intuitive faculty. Because your thoughts aren’t demanding all your attention, you’re able to have greater awareness of the nuances going on around you.
Let’s take having a conversation as an example. If you’re living in your head, you probably aren’t fully paying attention to the present moment. You may be thinking about what you should say, or cringing about what you said earlier, or thinking about where you’re going after the conversation is over. This leads to a lack of connection with others and a disconnection from self—your body is in the present but your mind is somewhere else, ignoring the cues the body is giving. If you’re living from your heart, you are present in the moment. This means being present to what it feels like to be in your body and actively listening to the other person. Further, you have greater awareness of what’s actually happening around you, so you’re probably intuitively picking up on what’s not said and the flow of energy. A tendency of overthinkers is to worry about how to respond. When you hold your consciousness in your heart, responses will naturally come to you because you have so many more data points of information since you are not distracting yourself with your own thoughts.
As a recovering overthinker and people pleaser, I speak from experience. Understanding the difference is vital. Living from the heart enables you to be more in tune with your own needs while showing up fully for the experience. This also allows you to show up authentically.
Activity challenge: set up a conversation with someone where you are both actively holding your consciousness in your heart. This should be someone who you are comfortable with, can be vulnerable with, and feel very safe in their presence. Simply sit facing each other (I recommend on a couch crisscross with knees touching), maintain eye contact, and keep your heart open and directed at the other person. Start talking about something easy—something beautiful you saw, what you’re passionate about, what lights your being on fire. Every time your thoughts distract you or start to pull you out of the present moment, come back to witnessing and listening to the other person. Maintain eye contact and openly observe the other person. Notice what sensations come up in the body.
Reconnecting to Your Body’s Wisdom
As a society, we are very disconnected from our bodies. Intellect is heavily favored and prioritized. But, we forget that our bodies have been evolving longer than our minds and hold an intuitive wisdom of their own. Your body is so much smarter than you give it credit for—the heart has its own neural network, which is embodied intelligence that leads with love and purpose.
By giving yourself the opportunity to actually be present in your body, you open yourself up to deeper observation and knowing, i.e., more channels of data. Everything is energy, tapping into your body is another way to open that channel of access. This is as woo-woo as it is practical. Meaning, you will be able to perceive more in the moment, whether that’s energy, unspoken communication, intuitive insight, the flow of activity outside of the bubble you’re in, etc.
Enlightened teachings often reference the bliss state, a proverbial place we have all accessed at one point or another—maybe while dancing, or meditating, or while your was child being born, or while making love, or doing some thrill seeking activity. Tapping into the heart, fully being in the present moment, is how you access the bliss state—and you don’t need to go to extremes to find it. It is always within and accessible, you just have to turn your attention toward it.
Living from the heart allows you to be radically present in the moment. To be radically present, you are fully accepting what is in that moment, and not desiring to change it, to be somewhere else doing something else. This gives you the space to realize how blissful each moment can be and recognize that the world is full of wonderment, even the mundane.
If you feel like you’re disconnected from your body and don’t have an embodiment practice, holding your consciousness in your heart could feel the same as living in your head (if you’re saying to yourself why am I trying this or this doesn’t feel any different, then you’re still in your head)… just start by noticing the sensations in your body and allow your perception to slowly develop from there.
Or, this could be an emotionally overwhelming practice. Maybe your heart beats really fast when you start to pay attention to your heartbeats. The body can feel like a scary place when we are unconscious of what it feels like to be fully embodied. The body holds on to everything we’ve experienced and if we have yet to do the healing work, we’re probably still holding onto trauma in the body—and I’m not just talking about the intense, heavy trauma, not receiving affection when you needed it or people commenting on your changing body result in residual trauma in the body.
Integration of the body is a step on the path to higher consciousness. Stepping into your fully integrated being takes time. The healing journey is not linear and we are all at different stages. But, we are not meant to be always healing—we are not human healings, we’re human beings. In order to blissfully be, we need to heal (accept and integrate all aspects of self). But, we can always choose to be here now, regardless of where we’ve been and where we’re going. This choice is real-time integration.
Entering the Flow State
If you’re a creative person (and everyone is a creative person in their own way), you know how good it feels to be in the flow state. Why does the flow state feel so good? Because we are not thinking, we are just doing and creating. The mind drops away and the body just performs, whether we’re painting or writing or dancing or even running—we enter a state where it’s just automatic, as in no thought, and the outcome is so much better than the heavily labored thoughts.
Even intellectual tasks are a combination of residing in the mind and heart. I offer the example of writing, since that’s what I’m literally doing right now. Writing is a beautiful dance between the body and mind. You may be asking how? Writing seems like it’s all intellect. But it’s not, there’s composing and there’s editing. When composing, it’s necessary to enter a flow state. I’m not thinking about what I’m writing, I’m just writing whatever comes to me in the moment. The moment I stop to think does this sound good? I’ve entered the editing brain. This is super helpful, but it doesn’t get the writing done. Writing that connects speaks from the heart, so I need to be in my heart space to write that way… otherwise the writing will sound forced or real stuffy.
The flow state—why and how? We are simply in a different state of consciousness. In our modern society, we associate consciousness with the thinking brain. But consciousness is much more vast than just the human brain. Plants and animals have varying degrees of consciousness, land carries consciousness, the cells that make up all life have a level of consciousness. Consciousness permeates everything to different degrees.
When it comes to the flow state, the mind isn’t at the forefront, the body taking action is. Practicing living from the heart makes entering the flow state easier because when we are consciously in the heart, we are in a state of flow. The flow state is simply flowing energy, you are the conduit.
Like the ego, the mind is neither enemy nor master, rather, it’s meant to be a tool. This isn’t to say the body is the master. I’d argue your soul is the master of you here on Earth, meant to act as a guide and channel for your higher purpose. Similarly, the mind and body are not things to be discarded or tamed, rather, integrated with your divine purpose. The mind, body, and soul are meant to work in unison to shape your individuated experience.
But for the sake of this conversation, your attention is the master of your experience. You’ve probably heard the saying where your attention goes, your energy flows. Whatever you are paying attention to colors your experience, good and bad. So step into sovereignty and choose where your attention goes. Do you want to live from a place of being, a place of love? Or, do you want to act from a place of thoughts, always analyzing what was done and what there is to do.
Freedom in Love
Why live from the heart? Well, it’s straight up a better life experience. The heart is the internal guide to fulfillment. It leads without judgement and creates room for possibilities, the adventure of spirit with support from the embodiment of love.
“To be free means to open your heart and your being to the fullness of who you are because only when you are resting in the place of unity can you truly honor and appreciate others and the incredible diversity of the universe.” – Ram Dass
Living from the heart enables you to let go of the opinions of others, anxieties, stories of who you’re supposed to be, and protective mechanisms… These are all thought-based. While all these things had their time and place for serving you on this journey called life, at some point they become restrictive energy, keeping you small, “safe,” and part of the status quo.
We’re all on this journey, just at different stages, experiencing different paradigms, and using different language. You are a being of loving experience. Until you activate your heart consciousness, your brain will run the show… distracting you and limiting your perception of what is.
Love is abundant because you are it. You can always tap into it once your remember it’s inside of you. You can hold the power of love because you are rightfully claiming yourself a being of love. The heart is a manifestation of unconditional love, pumping life force energy through your being. When we choose to live the path of our heart, we are choosing to live in the love of the universe.
And, speaking from the contrast of my lived experience, what an amazing journey open heartedness, acceptance, and change has brought into my life. The most challenging/painful moments become opportunities to grow and reflect. The depth of feeling and observation enabling the joy to be all the more beautiful. To truly and deeply feel that total lust for life, to live in THE flow state.
If you would like to delve deeper into this topic, I highly recommend reading The Untethered Soul, which intimately discusses living with an open heart. If you’re just starting your soulful journey on the evolution of consciousness, this book is a must read!