The feeling of love fills with joy, gives strength for accomplishments, helps to overcome difficulties. However, what to do if you were once severely injured? How to regain the ability to love? Work with the body and mind, the specialist in oriental medicine is sure.
It is impossible to enjoy life without feeling love – for people, for yourself, for art and nature. We all know this, but sometimes there are situations in which we forbid ourselves from such feelings.
Over the years of human development, the concept of love has acquired many burdens: rules have appeared about who can be loved and who cannot, what love should be like, how it should begin, develop and end.
In addition, each of us has accumulated experience, which sets certain personal preferences. We know exactly who you can fall in love with, and who you should never fall in love with!
On the one hand, this is useful: we need to protect our inner world and build personal boundaries. On the other hand, there is always the danger of “excesses”: the more rules, the more likely it is that love will simply disappear or be transformed into one big problem.
Psychologists help to remove internal prohibitions on the opportunity to be happy, loved and loving. In the Taoist tradition, there are also special techniques that allow this to be done.
The exercises proposed below do not have magical powers and are unlikely, as if by magic, to return a feeling of love to your life. However, with regular practice, they “tune” the body and mind in such a way that a person’s natural perception of reality is restored, so that he feels the joy and fulfillment of every second.
Love in the chest
It is not for nothing that hearts are drawn on postcards for Valentine’s Day: in Taoist culture, it is believed that love lives in the heart. And for the cultivation of this feeling, it is necessary to make the chest such that energy circulates easily and freely in it.
Please note: a person who is sad, suffering, tense and lost tends to slouch. Even if his posture itself is perfect, in difficult emotional moments, the shoulders still “go” forward, and the chest, as it were, is screwed inward.
Not only does the actual volume of the chest shrink in such a situation, causing the heart and lungs to suffer, but from an energetic point of view, the flow of this area is also disturbed. This means that the emotions of joy, love fade, become inaccessible. To correct the situation, according to experts in oriental medicine, it is necessary to relax the chest.
Return feelings
To understand how true the idea described above is, conduct an experiment. Sit in a chair, slouch as much as possible, tighten your chest and shoulders – and think about what is especially bothering you right now. It doesn’t take long! Because the effect will be obvious: if the injury is fresh, it is very likely that even tears will well up in a second.
And now it’s the other way around. Lean back in your chair, tilt your head back and spread your relaxed arms to the sides. Feel how there is physically more air and space inside the chest. And think about the same difficult situation.
I suspect that now this thought will not be so easy to keep! When the shape of the body changes, the pattern of habitual emotions also changes.
In the qigong practice of Sing Shen Juang, there is an exercise that is very uplifting and fills us with joy – it is called “Crane Wings”. By doing it regularly, you will learn (and train your body) to breathe deeply and contain more joy and love. My experience shows that a month of regular qigong practice allows people suffering from depression to radically improve their emotional background.
Meditation: Cultivate Love
So the next step involves meditation. To do this, qigong practitioners learn to enter a state of silence (turn off the internal monologue) and find their inner light. Sounds mysterious, right? The easiest way to understand this idea is to put it into practice: let’s try it!
Focus your attention in the middle of your chest, breathe softly and smoothly, as if plunging into an endless source of light, peace and security. Imagine how this light fills the chest. Concentrate it and send it as a beam to someone or something important in your life. Transfer this flow to another object and, if something interferes, mentally illuminate this barrier too.
In the Taoist tradition, they believe that this practice allows a person to be filled with love and again give it to others.