opening the heart

LANGUAGE OF THE HEART

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

LANGUAGE OF THE HEART

Opening the heart

Each of our hearts speaks a language.  The essence of that language is love, which gets shared and expressed in different ways.  Some hearts speak through vibration using words, tones or other sounds either written or spoken.  Some hearts express through art, movement and touch, and still others through just still being.  The heart does not need words, but it might use words to express itself.  It does not need to draw, mold, move or touch, but it might do so in order to share itself with others.  While the language of the heart can be interpreted by placing words, labels, definitions and meanings upon it, it is beyond all ideas and concepts.  The language of the heart tends to evoke feeling in us.  A felt sense that touches us in some way or brings with it a sense of connection, depth and beyondness.  

In order to both express and receive the language of the heart your heart must be open.   You might wonder what it means exactly to have an open heart.  Simply put having an open heart means that you are without personal agenda, not attempting to protect your personal identity from others, but rather that you have a desire to share, express or serve others in some way through being yourself.  It means not being guarded from potential threats or loses to your personal sense of self (i.e. ego mind).  It means being available to and for life rather than closed off from it.  An open heart listens rather than insists.  It shares without force or manipulation.  It feels whatever is present without judgment or story of any kind.  It’s inclusive and discerning.  It cares about the essence of you and others.  It can be strong and even passionately ferrous at times, while rooted in being of service to love.  It doesn’t tolerate b.s. and yet loves all nonetheless.  It recognizes or knows that while life includes you it’s not about you.  

The language of the heart also has a different vibrational quality than what our thoughts, emotions or physical body have.  If you think of it in terms of wavelength, our physical bodies have the longest wavelength.  This is why they appear more solid, gross or dense.  Our emotions have a slightly shorter wavelength than our physical bodies, but a longer wavelength than our thoughts.  This is why you often have to slow yourself down in order to recognize what you are feeling and also why when you do feel something you move at a slower pace than if you are thinking.  Thoughts have a shorter wavelength than our emotions or our physical body.  This is why if you spend a lot of time thinking you might feel ungrounded or find yourself in a fast pace.  The frequency of the heart or soul body is an even shorter wavelength.  It is the subtlest of the bodies described here. Just like you can change the channel of the radio and tune into a different frequency, you can change the tone/tension in your nervous system and tune into these different frequencies of you.  No frequency/body is better than the other.  The key is to have them all energized and accessible to you.  Network entrainments help you shift the tonal patterns of your nervous system so that you can do this very thing.   

HEART VIBRATIONS 

Clearing the channels

The language and frequencies of the heart open us into a more multidimensional nature of reality.  While the mind tends to keep us in a linear, logical and 3D view of life, the heart breaks and bends all of those supposed rules.  This is why attempting to interpret or put meanings onto the expressions of the heart never really works.  We can do it, but really we just end up with a whole bunch of projections and the essence of the thing is covered up underneath all of our ideas and meanings about it.  Yet this is what the human mind likes to do.  It flattens the heart frequency out to its frequency so that the world seems safe, ordinary and consistent.  It’s boring, yet it’s what we tend to do so that we can make “sense” of it all, so that our minds feel like they understand something and can accept it.  While this isn’t bad it does postpone or dampen our access to our heart.  Even though the language of the heart’s expressions are varied and infinite their core message is the same.  Unification and oneness is the beat of their drum.  Knowing this can ease the mind’s endless search for meaning.  All meanings will eventually cease to be relevant in this realization.  

When we are ready and available the language of our heart simply expresses through us.  It’s not something we have to figure out how to do.  Your mind will really dislike that, yet it’s the way it is.  You can’t figure out your heart.  I mean you can try, but good luck.  Now there may be skill sets you need to learn or worldly knowledge that you need to acquire in order to give form to your heart’s frequency, but the form is not the essence of your heart.  Rather only the means to share it.  Don’t get too lost in perfecting forms and rather focus on the heart frequency that you are.  If more people did this we would have a lot less boring or mind numbing jobs that people are just trying to get through.  It’s not about the thing you do, but who you be inside of what you do.

While you can’t figure out your heart, you can prepare for its arrival and clear out the vessel of you for its expression.  Preparation for its arrival is doing the clean up work of all of your personal agendas.  This means doing the inner and outer work of dismantling the need to protect your personal separate self, as if there really even is one.  Remember this is what it takes to open the heart.  When the heart is open, expression is natural.  Just like when the bladder is open you naturally pee.  There’s nothing to figure out, it’s mechanics.   However if there is a bunch of stones in your bladder it makes it harder for the pee to come out.  That’s the clean up work you need to do.  Clear out the stones that interfere with you heart’s natural flow.  

There is nothing too non-ordinary for the heart.  In fact you can kind of think of the language of heart as non-ordinary.  If you are still self-conscious about looking weird, not being accepted by others, being judged or failing, then you know where to begin your clean up work.  When you are in your heart’s frequency you honestly don’t really care about that stuff anymore.  It’s just a non issue.  Your only intention is to be of service in the ways that your heart desires to express.  Your mind frequently won’t know what any of it means or what will come of it, but again you care less and less about needing to know.  You will find freedom in being you.

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

NEUROLOGICAL DEFENSE

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NEUROLOGICAL DEFENSE 

Moving away from pain

Much of how we operate, move, behave, perceive, think, feel and sense is learned and habitual.  We develop strategies, patterns and ways of being through our experiences.  We learn to perceive and move about our world based on internal and external cues.  If we do the same thing over and over, or see something the same way over and over, we learn to create wiring or neurological patterning in our nervous system based on our perceptions or behaviors.  If we repeat the same thing enough times then the way we perceive something or how we move about becomes automatic or habitual.  This means that there is very little “registering” or conscious awareness that happens as we engage with life.  Life is simply a series of habits and reactions, that is unless we create novelty inside of our perceptions. 

If something hurts we instinctually move away from it and if it feels good we move towards it.  Hurt can be physical such as if we place our hand on a hot stove, or it can be emotional or mental such as feeling rejection or like we aren’t good enough.  Regardless of where the hurt hits us we learn early on how to protect ourselves from the pain of feeling it.  We might flee or run in order to move away from it.  We might fight back in order to push something away from us.  We also might freeze in place or go numb in attempt to avoid the hurt or pain.  On a neurological level there is a response to this avoidance of pain, which is commonly known as the stress response.  Most people are quite familiar with the terminology “stress response” yet most people don’t really get what it means for how they experience their life on a day to day basis.  

When we are in protection (i.e. avoidance) mode our nervous system wires and fires pathways that create various messages throughout the body.  These messages gear us up for fighting until we eventually burnout and the effect of this is what we call adrenal fatigue.  These messages also put us on alert, or in a hyper-vigilant state.  They get us to focus on what’s wrong or what might be out to harm us.  They create tension in the body so that we don’t feel the impact of harm or pain.  They effect our sleep cycles making it hard to feel rested or get good sleep.   They make it harder to digest our food, and they move energy out of self-healing and into self-protection.  This state of being is called neurological defense.  At any point in our life we can have experiences that don’t feel good to us and we activate these patterns of defense rather than feel the impact of pain or harm or potential pain/harm.  There is intelligence in these defensive patterns, however they greatly limit our experience of life.  We cannot move into healing and neurological openness unless we are willing to move towards that which we avoid feeling.   

NEUROLOGICAL OPENNESS   

Moving towards life

While there is intelligence to our defensive reactions and patterns in the body they also create great limitation in our experience of life.  They allow us to experience only a limited range of feelings, sensations, and thoughts.  They limit our behaviors, perceptions, and our relationships with self and others.  They cap the amount of energy we have access to receiving, giving and sharing.  They keep our bodies running in suboptimal energy conditions effecting our health and overall well-being.  They keep us from fully experiencing the range of our hearts and the hearts of others.  There is great cost to our avoidance of feeling pain.  

When we stop avoiding pain and allow ourselves to feel and be with it, some pretty amazing things happen.  First is that you can no longer be angry.  Feeling the pain we’ve experienced softens us.  Some people don’t even know just how angry they are because they’ve adopted other strategies of self-protection such as always being positive, people pleasing, or the more quiet version of anger which is self-hatred.  This can manifest very subtly as negative self-talk or simply not feeling yourself to be great.  If you don’t unequivocally know that you are fucking amazing then you probably have some work to do here.  Second is that your neurological, and thus physiological state, shifts.  All those messages that your nervous system sends out change in nature when you move towards life experiences.  Rather than messages gearing you up to fight, flight or freeze, it sends messages of relaxation and ease.  Food can then be digested, sleep happens naturally, and the self-healing mechanism occurs unimpeded.  Muscles relax, the posture becomes more upright and open, and your focus shifts onto what is here, what’s working, and on how life is supporting you.  Nothing is out to get you anymore.  You look for invitations and openings.  More opportunities seem to be available to you.  You feel more confident in yourself.  This is what I call neurological openness.

In neurological openness we participate more fully with life.  We perceive things that we didn’t perceive before, and we sense, feel and think differently because we are more open to life rather than in protection from it.  We become more awake or aware of our impact on life, others and ourselves.  We recognize more and more that we have choice.  This recognition of choice is the beginning place of novelty.  We start trying on new feelings, thoughts, behaviors and perceptions, which create and lay down new patterns in our neurology.  We become different and therefore experience life differently.  

The more we lay down the patterns of openness in our nervous system the more we move into the field of our heart.  The yummy bliss of yes.  Beyond participation with life we move into oneness with it.  We see that nothing in not us therefore there has never been anything to protect from.  This is the awakened stage of the healing journey.  From separation and self-protection into unification and love.  It is all available to you as you are ready for it.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

WANTING WHAT IS

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WANTING WHAT IS 

Getting into alignment

Wanting is an inclusive energy.  Wanting invites, welcomes and moves towards.  Wants guide our actions, our choices and they are the fuel behind our motivations.  Wanting is an attractive force.  When we don’t want we tend to feel aimless, lethargic and like we are just trying to get the day (or our life) over with.  When we do want it brings more energy into our system to move in a particular direction.  Sometimes we will try to convince ourselves that we want something other than what is in our present moment, yet when we realize that what is, is what we want, the inner battle ends and we become available to life again.

I think it is frequently the case that people have the experience that whatever it is they are experiencing is not what they want.  We tend to call this having a bad day, feeling low energy, or being out of alignment.  When we look at life through the perspective of seeing it as something we don’t want then we are out of alignment.  We are out of alignment with the way life is expressing itself in that moment, or said another way, we are in disagreement with the universe.  It never feels good to be in disagreement with what is.  It’s heavy, we feel irritation or annoyance, and generally experience less vitality or zest for life.  This is why feeling bad is an indication of being out alignment.  Sometimes we can’t always pinpoint the “thing” that created the sense of out alignment for us, all we know is that we feel bad.  Whenever you notice that you feel bad it is an opportunity to stop, pause, and notice that you are in disagreement with what is.  You are not wanting what is to be what is, and yet it is what is.  This is also an opportunity to shift your perspective to wanting what is, which brings you back into alignment.

As casually as I write that it does not always seem so easy to get ourselves into agreement with what is.  When we perceive that what is, is not what we want, we will often fight tooth and nail to convince ourselves and the world that what is should be different.  Perhaps it’s that we should feel different about how we feel or what we are doing with our day or our  life.  Maybe we think we should have different sensations in our body than we currently do.  Perhaps we feel cheated by our experience or lack of experience and we want to insist that we were wronged.  Maybe we are trying to convince ourselves that we want something we don’t really actually want, but that we think we should want.  It can feel hard to let go of our story about what is and simply let what is be.  Yet this is exactly what must occur if we are to get into alignment with ourselves and feel the freedom of being present. 

OPENING THE HEART

Choosing what is

A beautiful thing happens when we change our mind, and rather than disagreeing with what is showing up we decide to want it instead; our heart re-opens.  It might be that 5, 10, 20 or 100 times a day your heart oscillates from being open to being closed.  The only difference in it being open or closed is whether or not you are in agreement with what is showing up inside of your experience.  Being in disagreement tends to shut us down.  We get opinionated, judgmental, righteous, disgruntled, peeved, angry, sad, scared and on and on, when we are in disagreement.  Reactions, agendas, fears and self-survival dominate and motivate our actions.  When we are in that state of being the heart is not open and not in free flowing acceptance and love of what is.  

It takes a hell of a commitment/devotion to being in an open hearted state in order to get ourselves to make the decision to shift our perspective, or to shift where we are coming from.  To turn towards wanting what is.  You are the one that must choose what you value.  In fact you are the only one that can choose.  If your value is open-heartedness and living from the perspective of love, than making the shift is a must.  It’s really not even a choice, it is simply the only possible way to go.  What will then be required of you is that you must turn towards and lean into what is.  You must want what is.  Even if what is, is the most undesirable thing that you can possibly imagine or feel.  If you feel heavy or tired, want that.  If you just got turned down by a potential partner, want that.  If your body weighs 10 more pounds now than it did last year, want that.  If the house is dirty or disorganized, want that.  If a big project you’ve been working on tanks, want that.  If you are scared or depressed, want that.  If your body hurts or expresses some other sensation or experience, want that.  See if you want it, you stay open.  You feel what you are trying to not feel and that lets you relax and let go.  Can you feel that?  If you don’t want it, you close down and keep fighting or resisting, and you don’t really get anywhere new.  

We must first accept what is before any change will show up inside of how we experience life, and acceptance of what we think we don’t want is one of the hardest things for us to do as humans.  Yet when you master this, you master life.  You master life because no longer does what is showing up inside of your experience dictate how you experience it.  You become the source, seer and chooser of the experience when you come into agreement with what is.  This is where true power lies, where miracles are the ordinary way things work, and love/bliss is how you feel and see even when sensations in your body or other various emotions are present.  You realize none of it matters, because you’re in charge and the experience/appearance is not.  

Wanting what is opens the heart.  When your heart is open you give everything the opportunity to be as it is, you include all, you recognize wholeness and perfection, and you give everyone around you the opportunity to open their heart as well.  This is what it is to be of service, to be living your purpose, to be in alignment.  Being of service, in purpose and in alignment are not about what you do, but instead who and how you choose to be and see.  Here is the invitation to be brave enough, devoted enough and committed enough to love, to choose what is and want what is.  Any fear you have around doing this will be resolved in the act of you doing it. This is true sovereignty, autonomy and power.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

UNWINDING NEUROLOGICAL DEFENSE

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UNWINDING NEUROLOGICAL DEFENSE 

Dismantling our protection from pain

We’ve all experienced tension.  That tight, constricted, unrelaxed feeling.  Sometimes it feels hard to breathe.  It can come with feeling overwhelmed and like there isn’t enough time or resources available to us.  It can be challenging to discover and feel what we are feeling.  Often it comes with uncomfortable sensations in the body.  Tension is means of protection.  We create tension, and our body feels that tension, in order to protect us from pain, when we perceive that pain might be present or imminent.  The pain, which tension is protecting us from, isn’t always clearly evident to us.  Yet if we investigate we can always find the thing we are attempting to avoid feeling or experiencing.  

Pain can come in many forms.  It can be purely at the body/sensation level.  You might experience this in a car accident or a fall where you finding yourself bracing (i.e. creating tension) in order to protect the body from damage and lessen the impact.  You may also have a chronically painful part of your body.   Often we create tension around that area in order to attempt to not feel the pain as much.  It’s not the tension that is painful even if that is what we think is the source of the pain.  The true source of the pain is often below the tension.  The tension is the means to dull what is underneath it.  Pain can also be felt at the emotional level.  The root of most emotional pain is the fear/experience of being unloved or unlovable.  At the next level up pain felt at the mental levels is often rooted in not being enough, sharing enough or having anything worthy to give/be.  Lastly pain is also experienced at the spiritual level, which is rooted in believing we are separate from spirit/God.  

Due to the fact that most people don’t want to experience pain we learn to create protection or defense from it.  We gear up and create armoring.  This armoring is like a neurological suit that we wear that we don’t even know that we are wearing.  Everything we experience or interact with gets to come into contact with this suit.  The suit is a filter.  It’s not who we are, but it is often who we think we are and also who others perceive us to be.  Loosely you could call this our personality, and it also comes with a particular way we posture our body, talk, walk, think, perceive, dress, eat, behave and the sensations we have or don’t have.  It colors our entire world.  The suit comes with wiring.  That wiring is called neurological defense.  There are patterns and architecture to neurological defense.  These patterns are specifically what Network Chiropractic addresses.  Network assesses for the patterns that are present and helps wake up awareness and liberate energy inside these patterns of protection, so that your true self may be known to you.   

OPENING INTO THE HEART 

Rewriting the nervous system

The true self is the heart.  It is that space or experience of relaxation and easefulness that is joyfully and blissfully present.  It is light and spacious.  It is all inclusive and allows everything inside of it to be as it is.  It is energized and alive.  It is awake.  It sees nothing as wrong.  There is no resistance and we feel just as our self.  Nothing to hide, protect, avoid, or run away from experiencing.  It is that which we are all hungry for and finding our way into in our own ways.  The heart is not just for some people or for some times.  It is for all times and all people.  

The heart seems absent, foreign or mysterious to us when we are in a state of neurological defense.  When we are in protection mode we view ourselves as a subject/object that is independent from other subject/objects.  This is how most beings in the world view themselves and also why there is such a disconnection from the heart amongst our collective at large.  When separation is the predominant perspective than there is always something/someone to protect ourselves from.  Yet when that predominant perceptive changes to non-separation or unity, than protection becomes nonsensical and arbitrary.  

The heart isn’t something hard to find.  Its all pervasive, ever present and never comes or goes.  What does come or go is our focus or attention on it.  When our focus and attention is wrapped up in all the ways we need to protect ourselves to physically survive, get all of our emotional needs met and to satisfy the demands of the stories we’ve learned to tell ourselves about what our life is supposed to be and who we are supposed to be, then the heart is not in our view.  Shifting priorities, changing stories and reconditioning the neurological patterns present in your energetic and physical configuration is required in order to experience life as heart.  

Opening into the heart is closer than you think.  It’s not too hard to find/feel glimpses of it.  These glimpses are important as they start to light up pathways that don’t get lit up that frequently inside most people’s nervous systems.  This is what Network entrainments provide the container for as well.  During entrainments an energetic field is created that is organized in such a way to amplify the experience of heart for you.  While the gentle contacts along the spine help dismantle neurological defense, this field or container of the heart is readily present and available.  With continued tastes, touches and glimpses of this field of the heart, a person can receive and exchange more and more energy and awareness with this field.  The energy, awareness and perspective of heart then becomes the dominant program in your system.  The heart starts speaking louder than the pathways that are fighting for survival and viewing life from a scarce and separate perspective.  This is the progression, the objective and the intention.  It’s simple.  It’s available.  It’s time is ripe.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

GIVE, GIVE, GIVE

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GIVE, GIVE, GIVE 

Stop withholding love

The most sustainably reliable way of being that produces fulfillment and happiness is giving.  Giving to others, giving to life, giving, giving, giving without any agenda or expectation of return.  Yet most of our energy and attention goes to what we will get from life.  We have been brainwashed into believing that getting is what brings us fulfillment, joy and happiness and that giving depletes our already scarce resources of time and energy.  Getting the relationship, the job, the family, the business, the vacation, the house, the attention, the perfect body, the healthy body, and on and on provides only the delusion of happiness in attainment   We even often only give in order to get, meaning we give ourselves to people or things in order get a result or something in return.

What does pure, without agenda or expectation giving, even look like?  To make it really simple it means that you would have to not want or need anything from anything or anyone.  This includes things like wanting love, attention, desire, recognition, acknowledgment, and praise, as well as survival needs such as financial or living support.  I get that that can seem like a really tall order and many people aren’t ready for that level selflessness. However until you arrive at that level of purity you will suffer and attempt to get things from life and others that seem to have the promise of joy and happiness inside of them, but which instead postpone true fulfillment.

Any time you suffer it’s because you don’t get, see or experience what you want or because what you give isn’t received by others in the way that you want it to be, which again is not experiencing what you want and hence your agenda in giving.  When we don’t freely give we withhold and distort love and it feels really, really bad.  What this typically manifests as is us feeling bad, being in a bad mood, feeling frustration or stuck-ness, not having clarity, being confused, and feeling powerless or not seeing choice in the matter at hand.  These feelings and experiences are life telling you that you are withholding love, which is also withholding yourself because love is what you are. When you try to hold onto something, get something, or keep something you think you want you will distort the love that you are.  The result is impure motives, drives and lack of any true lasting fulfillment. 

LOVING IS GIVING 

Opening the heart

Loving is giving and giving is loving. They are the same.  It is not hard to give.  In fact giving is more natural than anything because it is your nature.  You don’t have to have some special skill set or come up with some fancy thing to give to others or life.  Your being is giving, and when you have purity and agenda-less-ness, giving is the natural result.  For a moment think about the times when you thought about saying something nice to someone or doing a kind act that you felt naturally inclined to do, but then you didn’t do it.  Maybe you weren’t sure how they would take it, or you didn’t want to seem like too much, or you doubted yourself and made your giving silly or stupid.  In this example what happened is that you become more concerned with yourself than you did about giving.  You made it about you, as you cared more how it was received and how you would be seen.  This withholding seems innocent enough and yet its laden with self-centeredness.  

Keep in mind is that giving is organic. Sometimes people will over-give in order to feel right, worthy, or validated.  This too is a distortion of love as they seek for ok-ness, approval, value and worth.  There will be energy expenditure and energy transfer that may create feelings of tiredness to your physical, emotional or mental bodies, but there should not be depletion of your being.  If you are feeling depleted it is an indication that you are out of balance and need to reassess what really serves.  Are you doing too much because you are focused or attached to an outcome and are therefore over-extending yourself?  Are you doing too little, withholding, not giving to others and therefore not bringing energy into your system through giving and thus feeling depleted?  You having a fuel tank of gas and taking care of your self-care is absolutely essential if you are going to be of service in giving to others.  The intention remains though that taking care of you is to give to others, not an end in of itself.  

In order to naturally give, to be giving in and of yourself, your heart must be open and available.  Giving is a lot of work, draining and effortful if your heart is not online.  Opening your heart is both the first and last step.  When tension or resistance is suspended or resolved you radiate, emanate and overflow.  The easiest and quickest path to resolution is forgiveness.  For-give-ness.  For in forgiveness you give again, you choose to open your heart, you choose to let go of what you think you want or need, how you were done wrong or did wrong, and all agenda for getting or being received in any particular way.  Energy can now freely exchange in and out of your system.  You hold onto nothing and hold back nothing.  There is nothing to lose and only the gift of being and sharing remains.  

The gift is the giving of your being just as you are.  When your heart is open it includes all inside of it, all beings, all others.  Care is inherent.  As you increase your dial on what you can give to others all of your needs, wants and desires will be taken care of.  That which is in alignment with you will be your experience.  There is no lack when we give, but rather natural overflowing abundance of giving and being.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado