Yoga Opens the Heart to True Love

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj — to yoke, to unite, to join.  It’s a practice of dissolving the illusions that keep us separated from love in its deepest form.

Yoga teaches us to inhabit the body honestly.  One who has learned to be at home in their own body brings something essential to love: Presence. 

The practices of pranayama brings greater attention to the breath. To breathe fully is to feel fully. Many of us have unconsciously learned to breathe shallowly as a way of keeping sensation at a manageable level, of not feeling too much.

True love requires the opposite. It asks us to feel fully. It asks us to be seen in our fear and our longing and our hope, without retreating into performance or control. The breath, practiced with intention over time, slowly unwinds the habit of contraction. We learn that we can feel deeply and not be destroyed by it. We learn that vulnerability is not weakness — it is the very doorway through which love travels.

Love, at its most mature and most alive is about surrender.  It’s the willingness to be changed, to let love do what love does rather than insisting it conform to our plans and expectations. The great mystic poets — Hafiz, Rumi, Mirabai — speak of love as a fire, a flood, an undoing. They are not exaggerating. Real love is a transformation.

The yoga that opens us to love is practiced off the mat or cushion - in the quietest moments: pausing before a difficult conversation to take three full breaths. Noticing when we have armored and choosing to soften.  Yoga is, at its heart, a love practice.  It allows us to let go of the masks and reveals a  place of wholeness where we find True Love, our True Self, was here, all along, waiting for us to arrive.

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." — Rumi