Balance Trilogy: Balance for the Heart
Written by Larissa
What is a Balanced Heart?
Last month we looked at Balance for Your Mind, which is a part of Balance for Your Heart. Did you know that the original meaning of equanimity means “even and fair across your mind, body, and spirit”? Where does “heart” come into play here?
In yoga, the word chitta is often translated as “mind-stuff.”
It can be more clearly translated as “heart-mind.”
Chitta, or heart-mind, is the intersection where cognitive thinking and emotional awareness lives.
What is a Balanced Heart?
If you have a mason jar with dirt and water, and you shake it up, you won’t be able to see through it. If you let it sit for a while, let it settle, the water becomes clear again. Give it a shake, and suddenly it’s murky again. Slowing down the chitta, heart-mind, is very much like letting mud settle in a jar. Our mind and heart can get stuck in this murkiness because our mind is always churning and often brings our heart into the churn. We can also get stuck in the muck when we have a hard time witnessing the slow settling of whatever our ‘mud’ is (difficult feelings, rough memories, etc). We often keep ourselves busy, scrolling, and often too distracted to really allow any settling, and our mind gets used to the mud, even though it’s doesn’t necessarily feel good. Learning how to patiently, gently slow down is often the hardest part.
We’ll look at a Balanced Heart in 3 ways this month during our morning meditations:
✦ Permission to feel everything
✦ Slowing and quieting the mind-heart
✦ This is the foundation of yoga
✦ Yoga Sutra 1.2: Yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ: Yoga is the slowing/cessation of the whirlpools of the heart-mind
✦ Another way to say this with context of the surrounding text: Yoga is for your mental and emotional health, and we add to our well-being by slowing down the constant churning the mind and heart can get caught up within.
✦ Eventually, merging your thinking and feeling for the wisest action possible
You might peek at last month’s blog, where we looked first at the definitions of balance and equanimity if you’re curious about our foundations of balance and equanimity. For our heart (emotional center), balance here requires emotional intelligence: the ability to be aware of your own and others’ emotions, to respond wisely from both your thinking and feeling (instead of reacting from an emotional outburst or avoiding feelings all together), AND to process the full range of any and all emotions.
The true meaning of equanimity and balance is that we’ve done the work for our mind, body, and spirit/heart to connect and stabilize. For a Balanced Heart, it’s trusting your thinking and feeling centers together.
How do you get better at returning to a Balanced Heart?
First, find connection to your heart, then clarity can come.
✦ Do I really know what I’m feeling, or am I thinking about what I’m feeling?
✦ Do I really know what I’m feeling, or am I stuck in an old habit loop in my mind?
✦ Do I really know what I’m feeling, or am I trying to ignore, hide, or change how I’m feeling?
These are questions only you can answer, and there’s no wrong answer; you’ll find clarity, connection, and a better self-understanding as you practice. The invitation here is to answer them from the wisdom of your body and heart, rather than going straight to your mind. This takes practice, and good news!, we get to practice together. We’ll utilize tools like Tonglen, RAIN, Mindful Self-Compassion, and EQ (in simple form, feeling your feelings).
On Tonglen, Pema Chodron said, “As you do the practice, gradually over time, your compassion naturally expands and so does your realization that things are not as solid as you thought. As you do this practice, gradually at your own pace, you will be surprised to find yourself more and more able to be there for yourself, then others, even in what used to seem like impossible situations.”
All of these practices have evidence-based studies to show how they work in our brain and bodies for positive change, like better support for anxiety, increasing compassion, more effective social-emotional processing, and helping to reduce burnout. While all of these studies are incredible and so supportive to remind us why we meditate, our goal with our practice is to simply have the experience – and as Pema Chodra said, you might be surprised at your ability to show up for yourself in any situation or environment.
Did You Know?
Your heart has a Little Brain?? There are about 35-45,000 neurons in your heart that help regulate heartbeat, converse with your lungs, and stabilize itself without help from the brain. Your heart can also learn, remember, and make decisions independent of your brain (this information blew my brain’s mind!). Our hearts are of course not the only place we feel emotions in our body, but perhaps this information is helpful when considering phrases like “heartbroken”, “tugging at heartstrings”, “heart- rending”, and melting my heart”. Your heart literally has its own memory, and its own wisdom; in order to really witness and learn from this heart-wisdom, we need to listen beyond words and into sensation itself.
This is where our meditation comes in, and I can’t wait to support you as you learn from your Little Brain and give your Big Brain permission to rest.
Slow down and listen to your heart in our daily, live Zoom meditations to learn tools to support your heart-mind. And join us in-studio to move your body and take care of your anatomical heart as well!
