Conscious Choice: Yoga of the Heart

February 2006 | Whole Health

Yoga of the Heart

Healing Heart Disease

By Lisa Maria

Nischala Joy Devi is an internationally esteemed yoga teacher and healer. Pioneering the use of yoga in Western medicine, she designed and led the yoga portion of two groundbreaking programs: Dr. Dean Ornish’s revolutionary heart disease study and Michael Lerner’s awardwinning Commonweal Cancer Program. Previously, she developed and was the primary instructor for Integral Yoga’s Basic and Advanced Teacher Training Program. Nischala is the author of The Healing Path of Yoga (Three Rivers Press) and “The Abundant Well-Being” series of cassettes and CDs.

Nischala, what is your view of heart disease?

When I look at heart disease, I wonder what’s going on emotionally and spiritually. One of the main causes of heart disease is the disconnection of people from their spirit. So yes, the cholesterol may be high, but something is going on there that is blocking the flow of spiritual energy. That affects the emotional state, then affects the physical state. If the spiritual and emotional areas are not looked at and corrected, then the heart disease will continue.

Heart disease is a new disease compared to most diseases. Within the last hundred years, it’s become one of the major life-threatening diseases of our society. We are disconnecting from the people who feed us emotionally because of work, because of distance, because of other relationships, and we forget about the connection to the Divine within. It’s interesting to me that most of the life-threatening diseases in our society congregate in the heart chakra (lung disease, heart disease, etc.) …

What did you do with the patients in Dean Ornish’s research program?

We put them through a basic Integral Yoga class. Relaxation in the beginning, some very gentle poses, a long, deep relaxation, some gentle breathing (pranayama) practices, imagery, and a meditation. To remind them of who they are. We did this for an hour a day and we found that they got better. That’s the yoga aspect. There’s also the diet, which was a basic vegetarian diet, and we had a group support where they could talk to each other, and they had a gentle exercise program.

When did you start seeing results and what were they?

Many people had major relief from symptoms within three months, and some even sooner. Some actually had angiographic changes within three months, which is quite dramatic when you consider it probably took them 40 or 50 years to build up their arteries to that extent. The fact that they were able to start to open and clear them within three months is very dramatic.

Can you think of a dramatic success story?

Many! One man, who’s now 90; when he started, he was so sick. He had such severe chest pains he couldn’t cross the street on one green light. He had to stop in the center to rest, to relieve himself of chest pains. When he entered the program, I think he was 76, and now he’s 90 and he travels back and forth to Europe regularly. He’s now writing a children’s book and he’s free of pain. I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of heart patients and it’s quite extraordinary. And the program is still going on.

So talk about the heart chakra and what that seat of energy represents.

The heart chakra is a very interesting chakra because it’s in the very center of the body. There are three chakras below it and three chakras above it. So it’s really where we live in this society. It’s a merging of the Earth and the Heavens. And the main attribute of the heart chakra is love and compassion. It’s a twoway road. So we give out the love and compassion, but we also receive the love and compassion.

It’s interesting because the heart chakra reacts very much like the physical heart in that the heart pumps out to the rest of the body, but it also has to receive the fresh oxygenated blood from the lungs in order to then pump it out. So in our lives, we have to really recirculate love and compassion. And to use that as the first response in a situation to everyone, not just a few.

It’s something that we give and we learn to give ourselves also. That helps us heal on all levels. The heart chakra is very important and it’s something that many of us don’t work with. We go to the chakra right below it, which is the power center. That power center then depletes the heart chakra of its energy. We don’t have the energy then, to love and have compassion for ourselves and others.

What are some of the physical symptoms you’ve seen that are precursors to a heart attack?

The blood pressure will be high, the heart rate is usually high, and there’s a feeling of loneliness, a feeling of disconnect from ourselves and from other people that can actually be visceral. It can be experienced as an emptiness, a hollowness, a coldness in the heart center. These are danger signs. People really need to pay attention to these feelings as much as high cholesterol or high blood pressure.

Is that a common thread among all of the patients with whom you worked?

Absolutely. Because what we do is we move to the power center where we want to be right. Whereas in the heart chakra, there’s no right and wrong. The heart chakra just embraces all different viewpoints, it doesn’t have to be right or wrong.

So if you look at that globally, that’s what’s happening now.

Absolutely! And we want to blame somebody. Whereas, if we live in the heart chakra, there’s no one to blame.

Why do people get stuck in the third chakra?

Because people like power. People like to be right. People see it as strength. It’s a fire energy and it’s very egoic. And that’s where most of us are in our society. And then the materialism fuels the fire. We want more and more and we still think that we can buy happiness. We still think that we can buy health. And we’re finding that we can’t! The richest person in the world can still have heart disease no matter how much money they have.

Last words?

People need to relax more, have more fun in their lives and trust that they are Divine beings!

For more information, visit abundantwellbeing.com.

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