“Enlightenment means opening the chest, and thereby opening the heart. That’s a worthy goal.” ~ Keith, my yoga teacher
Keith is my anatomy teacher for my yoga teacher training program. Despite his modesty, he has an insane amount of knowledge about the body, about moving someone else’s body, and about the body’s positioning to the world around it. He’s also a little sarcastic and contrarian so that makes me like him even more.
In our class today, he emphasized the need to focus on opening. “Forget about what a manual tells you to do or what a teacher tells you to do or what some guru tells you do. Just minimize pain,” he told us. “If your knee hurts when you have a certain alignment, then change the alignment or end up with bad knees.” Straight-forward. No nonsense. Exactly my kind of teacher.
Keith really made us get under the hood of our practice and consider what it is we’re all really trying to do. Put aside all those textbook answers of improve our health, increase flexibility, etc. “Enlightenment means opening the chest, and thereby opening the heart. That’s a worthy goal,” he told us.
So now imagine if every asana we ever took, every meditation practice we ever did, every breath we ever took had that same goal. Open the heart. What if that becomes the only thing we ever tell ourselves we have to do? What doors begin to open and what doors do we choose to close? What opportunities do w seek out and take and what opportunities do we just let pass on by? With that kind of clear direction, open the heart, we now have a lens to look through for our every action and every day. Open the heart, and that’s enough.
Christa Avampato 