Part 2 of 8
The essence of heart is emotion. Heart Freedom enables you to experience a bountiful variety and complexity of feelings. The supreme emotion is love, which by its very nature implies a relationship, the lover and the beloved. In modern Western culture, couple relationships are often symbolized by the Valentine heart. If you both want to make your relationship work, pay attention to its heart, to the emotional, energetic, and spiritual connection between you. For relationship happiness, you must welcome, nourish, and cherish such deep connection.
The responsibility of Heart Freedom is to allow yourself to feel everything, both positive and negative and to act despite your emotional discomfort. A few yogisi claim they can voluntarily stop the heart from beating, and who among us has not tried to deliberately stop our hearts from feeling? When the yogi stops his heart from beating, it is a demonstration of physical and spiritual mastery, but when you or I try to stop our hearts from hurting it is only a pathetic kind of emotional suicide. If we try to turn our hearts off in order to be protected from feeling the pain of loss, abandonment, deceit, or betrayal, eventually we feel nothing at all and life becomes flat, dull, and boring. There is little pleasure, joy, or happiness because we can’t be fully human and only feel the good things. With the heart, it seems to be “all or nothing at all.”
Heart freedom means feeling everything.
Hearts start out innocent and pure, loving spontaneously and unconditionally, but become wounded through hurts and betrayals. We erect barricades to protect them against more pain. Your heart, however, longs to break out of its confinement and to return to the openness and freedom of its natural state. There’s no freedom in a barricaded heart. Imposing isolation supports powerlessness, reinforces fear, and leads to physical and mental illness.
Al Link and Pala Copeland own and operate 4 Freedoms Relationship Tantra. They regularly host lover’s romantic weekends near Ottawa Canada, and weeklong retreats in exotic locations. For more information call toll free from Canada or USA: 1-800-684-5308 International long distance: 1-819-689-5308. Visit their website www.tantra-sex.com and their blog www.askaboutloveandsex.com or send email: 4freedoms@tantraloving.com They have four books published including Soul Sex: Tantra for Two, New Page, 2003; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Supercharged Kama Sutra, Penguin, 2007; Sensual Love Secrets for Couples: The Four Freedoms Body, Heart, Mind and Soul, Llewellyn 2007; Tantra Step by Step: 28 Days to Ecstasy, Llewellyn 2007.