Dear Yogis,
I have a mini orchard in my backyard and I’ve learned that my tree’s fruits are very much affected by what I feed their roots.
At the start of spring, gardeners start fertilizing, and if you ever bite into an organic vs. non-organic fruit, you’ll notice a huge difference in the flavor of that fruit.
The organic one is often sweeter and juicier, partly because organic gardeners have to work harder to make sure the plant is getting fed right with good and natural stuff.
The Buddha alluded to this as he said, “A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree.” He was stating this in reference to if you want to change the culture, you need to change the heart.
If you want to be healthy, you have to eat healthy right? You can’t eat garbage and expect the result to be glowing health. If you want a peaceful life, do not fill it with hate and anger.
If you want a healthy open heart, what can you do? It is said that often times, our suffering comes from resisting what is, rather than the experience itself. The resistance to a feeling, emotion, situation is often times what causes anxiety, fear, or depression.
It’s this inability to trust that this is happening for you, not to you. The universe has got your back. And this, no matter how UN-perfect it feels, is somehow exactly what you need (to be feeling, hearing, seeing etc.) in order to grow and expand the capacity of your own heart’s ability to love.
An open heart doesn’t mean just loving and accepting when it feels good. An open heart is loving and accepting even when it feels like the last thing you want to do. An open heart offers the teaching of unconditional positive regard for whatever is happening in life.
So to get that open heart, we have to give it nourishment in the form of healing, back-bending, writing, art, creation and meditation. Nourishment can come in the form of trust- accepting that what you are experiencing is here for important lessons and growth.
Sometimes heart nourishment comes in the form of community- allowing ourselves to give and receive love from people in our community, our family, and our lives.
Do not poison your heart with resisting- try instead to lean in - lean into the emotions and experience. We learn this first by leaning into the sensation of a posture rather than shying away. We use the breath to carry us through each pose and eventually each experience.
In yogic and Buddhist philosophy, addiction and aversion are equally toxic to an open heart, so how can we lean into what we’ve been resisting in our practice and see if that makes a difference?
Can we spend more time expanding into those poses, thoughts, experiences that we usually rush through? Can we create more space for a full heart in our experience?
Peace and Love,
Amanda and the good folks at Revolution Yoga
Originally shared in our March 2024 newsletter.