My journey to a softer heart has been a long and arduous one. A couple of hours spent in the presence of me and my kids and you would see that I have not gone too soft.
I descend from a place of rage. My father had it, and my siblings have it in spades. My mother claimed not to have it but she is Hungarian and if you know any Hungarians you can decide how to describe their “passion”. My rage can bubble up within me at a moment’s notice and it is all I can do to keep it down.
What does this have to do with my sub-occipital muscles and my heart chakra? Maybe nothing but then again…
Long before I started doing yoga I knew I had stuff to deal with, like any human being. But when I got to the yoga world and started dabbling in the world of esoterica I learned some interesting lessons.
As it goes I am very willing to give my money to people who say they can help me.
There was the healer who punched me in the stomach and snapped his fingers at me for an hour.
And the dude who dug his elbow so hard into my thighs that I was ready to scream but I was too distracted by his running commentary, “Your Mother is in that leg and we have to get her out.”
Did I mention the woman who tried to get me to give her $2000 so that I could be buried in the desert sand up to my neck and left alone overnight?
Should I continue?
In the middle of the more nutty stories there were reasonable people who did card or astrological readings, or in the context of this post—Chakra readings.
I have been to a number of those. And they all say the same thing.
If you get a particular kind of session the practitioner holds a string, with a small object tied to the bottom, above your chakras to see if they are open or not.
Now I have done these on both coasts with people that didn’t know each other and the same thing happened each time.
The wheel, which spun like crazy at the first second and third chakra stopped dead at the 4th—the heart chakra.
Oh the pain of me!
And what does this have to do with the sub occipital muscles? Well, here we go.
Before I got Rolfed for the first time which is almost ten years ago, I suffered from neck issues and muscle tension headaches. Also I was quite jacked up in the front of the rib cage, unable to relax at the base of my sternum.
I remember one of my yoga teachers telling me that I was one of the warmest people she knew emotionally but I was hard as a rock in my heart (area).
Getting Rolfed was a revelatory experience for me and the main physical benefit was that releasing some of the tension from the sub occipitals seemed to release something at the base of my chest and that gripping or stuckness in the chest dissipated.
One of my essential intructions when I teach is “Go blah”, trying to get people to relax or sigh in an attempt to soften the heart center.
I haven’t been back for a chakra reading since getting Rolfed but I wonder if maybe the little thingy would spin now?
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