Greetings Dear Ones and Blessings on the next Revolution!
We've made it together through the darkest days, cultivated our inner light, and are moving quickly towards the viriditas (greening power of regeneration and rebirth) that is the promise of spring.
As we move forward, I am working on visioning and preparing the seeds I will plant for the year ahead. What would you like to cultivate in your own inner garden? Peace, hope, joy, love, prosperity, community?
Please know that I am here to help, through Integrative Holistic Health Counseling, where we can discuss and define together your dreams and goals for the year ahead, through yoga and meditation instruction, to help support your mind and body in clarity and insight, through healing therapeutic bodywork, to allow you to touch a deep space of expansiveness and peace that you can bring back to your everyday life, and through Ayurvedic lifestyle counseling to help with dinacharya (daily rhythms) and ritucharya (seasonal rhythms) in harmony with your inner nature and the natural rhythms of our mother earth.
Keep your eyes peeled soon for save the date notices about workshop offerings this March and other exciting seeds that are sprouting in my ministry in the year ahead.
May your new year be warm and bright, filled with all that your heart desires.
~Anahata Healing Arts and Baba Yaga Botanicals
The Highest Wisdom of the Heart
(Prajna Paramita Hridaya)
My healing ministry is named Anahata Healing Arts. Anahata refers to the heart chakra. In Sanskrit the word Anahata means unstruck, uninjured, unbeaten. It is the space where we are whole, no matter what has happened to us in this life.
The heart is the first organ that forms in the developing fetus, before the brain, before anything else, we are a heart. According to yogic teachings, the space within the heart contains everything, the entire universe is there, all time and space, all creation, past present and future, all reside within the space of the heart.
When my sangha and I meditate with our teacher together, often her first instruction is to 'drop the mind into the space of the heart'. This is a powerful instruction and a wonderful tool to use in your own meditation practice. According to Sanskrit scholar and acharya (teacher) David Frawley; "True meditation is returning to the space within the heart. It consists of withdrawing and immersing the mind in the inner heart space, in which the mind gets lost and loses itself like a drop within the sea."
I have studied many teachers and traditions which understand the heart to be the supreme place of spiritual awakening and wisdom. I love the work of Rudolph Steiner, Drunvalo Melchizedeck, and of course the teachings of yoga and Ayurveda. I also love the work of The Heart Math Institute, whose mission is to achieve heart coherence because; "We believe that when we align and connect our hearts...with others, we awaken the higher mental, emotional and spiritual capacities that frequently lie dormant."
According to yogic teachings, there are twelve vrittis, or qualities of the heart, these are; bliss, peace, harmony, love, understanding, empathy, clarity, purity, unity, compassion, kindness, and forgiveness.
I named my ministryAnahataHealingArtswith the intention of supporting my clients in returning to heart coherence personally and communally so that we might all touch that space of uninjured wholeness which is the essence of who we are. When we touch that space through meditation, deeply altered states induced by bodywork, or earth medicines, we have the opportunity to live from that deep truth of who we are; whole, unstruck, uninjured, timeless, pure love.
I hope to see you throughout the new year and support you in touching and living from that space of the heart that contains the entire universe and is pure love.
With Heartfelt Love and Gratitude,
~Liz
The image above is by the artist Chris Dyer and to me looks like breaking open the head into the shape of the heart, bowing the tool of the mind to the prajna paramita hridaya, the highest wisdom of the heart.
