You may feel disconnected from your heart, especially when it comes to feelings or situations that you struggle to accept. You understand that opening your heart would help you to feel more deeply connected to those you care about most, but you are not sure where to begin.

This is a short practice John taught live at the October 2019 Embodied Men's Leadership Training retreat in the Panamint Valley Desert for creating space in your heart for a challenging situation in your life that you are rejecting.

If you want to cultivate a greater opening in your heart for yourself and those you love, begin with this 6-minute practice.

Begin seated in the strongest position you can. Connect to your heart and make it as wide as your chest. Breathe into it, eventually making it as wide as the sky. With strength, breathe into your heart a situation that you are having a hard time accepting. Breathe in every aspect of the experience into your big, wide blue sky heart (i.e. your partner's rejection of you, your own self-loathing, the resentments you are carrying, all of the emotions around it etc.) Allow your heart to fully accept every aspect of it. Then, on the exhales, allow yourself to open wide as that experience. 

After a few minutes of this, begin to feel out into everyone in the world having the same challenging experience and breathe in their pain and rejection of it. Make your heart wide enough to hold all of their pain. Then, after several breaths from this place, slowly come back to your own experience and notice if you've created more space in your own heart for your experience - what you're holding, rejecting, and not accepting. 

Disclaimer: Although anyone may find this practice to be useful, it is made available with the understanding that we are not engaged in presenting specific medical, psychological, emotional, sexual or spiritual advice. Nor is anything in this practice intended to be a diagnosis, prescription, recommendation or cure for any specific kind of medical, psychological, emotional, sexual or spiritual problem. Each individual has unique needs and this practice cannot take these individual differences into account. Each person should engage in a program of treatment, prevention, cure, or general health only in consultation with a licensed, qualified physician, therapist or other competent professional. Any person suffering from a sexually transmitted disease or any local illness of his or her sexual organs should consult a medical doctor and a qualified instructor of sexual yoga before practicing the sexual methods described in this practice.