Sanctuary for Heart Magic

THE HEART OF THE BODY

Pain, bliss & vitality

We are all familiar with the physical heart. The organ that sits in the middle of the chest, beating and supporting the movement of blood throughout the body. Consciousness can’t live in the body without the beat of the heart. Within seconds the brain loses fresh blood and by 5 minutes brain cells die. This is considered clinical death. The heart is so vital to life in our body that we literally can’t be alive without it. While the heart is centralized in its position in our body, most people don’t centralize it in their lives. Many only think of their heart when something is physically wrong with its functioning or when they experience heart break. They might also notice their heart when something is sentimental or when they are in the initial stages of falling in love. The rest of the time our heart doesn’t get much of our conscious attention. We have decentralized our heart and given our awareness over to the vast landscape of our thoughts as our primary focus.

While we can’t be alive without the physical heart and heartbeat, we can be alive without feeling our heart. 

For anyone who has felt the incredible potency of either the pain or bliss of the heart, you know the aliveness and intensity that comes along with it. When we block, cut ourselves off, or are checked out of feeling our heart, life is lackluster. A faded, dull or flattened experience is the result. Even the pain of heartbreak is vastly better than the numb disconnected feeling we have when we aren’t able to feel our heart. While the felt sense of the heart often originates in the middle of our chest, its effects spread throughout our body. Just like the physical heart circulates blood to every inch of our physical form, the felt sense of our heart spreads to touch every cell. While the blood provides the basic nutrients necessary for survival of our tissues, the felt sense of the heart provides the basic ingredients for connection, communication and engagement with life.

I believe that the largest disease we have on this planet is disconnection from a felt sense of the heart. 

I see it as the root of most tensions and conditions we find in the body and in the world around us. While it seems blantantly obvious, most people keep looking for some other solution or answer. It’s as if the heart itself is viewed as not powerful enough, yet strikingly and paradoxically it holds the key to life. If we collectively recentered ourselves back into our hearts, connected to the pain and bliss that lives there and then went about participating in our lives, our bodies would behave in radically healthier ways. Our inner and outer environments would be alive, filled with connection and thriving.

HEART AS MEDICINE

Centered & connection in the heart

Reconnecting, centralizing and orienting to the heart is both not hard and not easy. Some likely haven’t felt the quality of pure heart connection since they were young children. That is the time in most of our lives when we were closer to our natural state. Many don’t remember what it felt like, so frequently there isn’t a clear reference point. While we might catch glimmers of the felt sense of our heart from time to time during moments when we view beauty, feel love, or are in rhythms of passionate expression, often these are transient and short lasting rather than sustained states of being. Some people might even wonder why a person would want to sustain such a state or even question if it’s really possible. The why is very simple. To sustain a felt sense of connection to the heart is to generate a very coherent field of energy within and around your body. Coherence means you experience everything working smoother, with more flow, function, vitality and aliveness. It means a fuller experience and expression of life. It also means that you have greater capacity to connect with more or yourself and therefore more of life.

It is very possible to sustain a state of connection and be centered in the heart, but it takes work. 

Why does it take work? There are a few reasons 1- It takes work because we have been operating in a state of disconnection for most of our lives. There are patterns at play within our nervous system that prioritize survival over felt sense connection. This is only an obstacle to resting into your heart if you don’t investigate those patterns and see how they are operating inside your psyche and body. If you leave them unchecked they will control your life. 2- The collective field of this planet is not functioning within a coherent heart field. This means you have to work harder to maintain it because you don’t have the support of the overall collective field. Establishing practices that can bring you in touch with the felt sense of your heart and finding places where these fields do exist (like here at the Sanctuary) is paramount. Without this you will likely entrain to the current collective field rather than to the beat of your own heart. 3- It requires more energy. The heart contains more energy then the mind and body. This means that you will need to get accustom to running more energy through your system. For most this feels taxing because they haven’t built up the bandwidth. In order to increase your capacity you will need to stretch yourself at times when you feel flat, heavy or dulled and reach towards your heart. It may feel impossible in those moments to find it, but just the mere practice of attempting to do so will open you up more into it over the long term.

The heart is the ultimate medicine. 

It is the destination we are seeking through the medicines we consume like pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, herbs and supplements, as well as the practices we engage in, such as meditation, yoga, physical exercise and the like. We are trying to get to heart coherence, a state of well-being, stable self knowing and harmonious alignment within. Because the heart lives inside of us, and because we can’t be alive without it, it is always there whether we are tuning into it or not. The heart never leaves because we can’t be without heart. It is only our awareness that focuses itself elsewhere. Regardless of the medicines we use to access our heart, the key is to use them to entrain ourselves to the beat and felt sense of our own heart. Here the medicine of our heart gets louder, clearer and more encompassing. We fall into deeper love with all of life because we realize it’s all just one big rhythmic, beating heart with an infinite expression of frequencies, which we call creation.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSAc, L.Ac

Network Spinal Chiropractor & Nervous System Specialist at the Sanctuary for Heart Magic, a Mentor for Heart-Led Healers at Soul Luminaries & the Writer of The Everyday Divine.