Wait for it…The sexiest organ in your body is not your genitals, or even your mind…

It’s your heart!

Your heart is a mechanical pump that pumps oxygenated blood & nutrients through the body in order to keep us alive. How can it be a tool for relationship, and as the sexiest organ in your body, be a tool for the best sex of your life? We show you how in 3 profound Heart practices below, but first a bit of background.

‘The heart is an organ if fire’ from The English Patient

Energetically, intuitively, psychologically and emotionally your heart is a whole lot more than a physical organ. It’s a whole lot more than the fluffy pink images we associate with  Valentine’s Day cards as well. Your heart is the centre of love, courage, wisdom, gratitude and forgiveness with its own unique brand of intelligence and communication that makes it powerful beyond measure. Your heart is the union place of the inner masculine and feminine- where we cease to be just male and female and become simply human. It’s also the place of creative possibilities.

This more typically eastern way of viewing the heart is today being backed up by western science studies done by the HeartMath Institute, amongst others, who say that ‘Heart intelligence underlies cellular organization and guides and evolves organisms toward increased order, awareness and coherence of their bodies’ systems’ www.heartmath.org/FAQS.

At Oztantra we see the heart as an important part of creating inspired, magical relationship and lovemaking, whether you believe in it in this way or not…We see it over and over again, couples getting in touch with their hearts and opening to each other (and themselves) in ways that defy description. If we had to put words to it, we’d call it being touched by Big Love. Not love as in romance or the giving of ourselves to another (though these flavours can lie within it) but something much more-maybe we could call it opening to the mystery of love.

For those of you looking to get laid this might sound quite airy fairy and lacking a physical approach yet if you think back to the early days of your relationship wasn’t this some of the best sex of your lives, where the magic of it lived? This is not only due to the lust of young (or at least younger!) love but also the openness of our hearts, when you each thought the other perfect and there was no real hurt between you.

Your heart’s many qualities can offer moments of exquisite tenderness, boundless love, challenging lust, profound sadness, huge anger, blissful freedom, generous playfulness, fierce motivation and much more. Your heart has no agenda, it is not attached to things looking a certain way (like your ego), it just is. Your heart can help you see beneath your partner’s behaviour into their hurt that is driving their hurtful actions allowing you to choose an empathic response. And as surprising as it may seem your heart is a powerful tool for accessing greater sexual pleasure, as an open heart literally creates more room for sexual energy to flow freely through your whole body, leaving you feeling expanded, desiring and creative! Which sounds like a great place to make love from, or even just live life from.

The thing is, your heart might work mysteriously but there are things you can do to support this mystery to show up, starting with choosing to be in greater relationship with your heart.

So what is your current relationship to your own heart? Do you see it as mere mechanics, or are you open to the possibility of it being something more? Can you think of time when you felt heart open and really close to your partner, or you ‘just knew’ something in your heart that helped you, that you needed to listen to? Or a moment when even though you might have felt like strangling your significant other you suddenly notice how cute they look sitting there or you’re reminded of how much you love their smile you fall in love with them all over again in a single moment?

Yet we have a tendency to ignore our heart

We do this for one of four reasons:

1. We haven’t connected with it in this ‘intangible feeling’ way, we judge it as ‘woo woo speak and don’t believe in listening to it.
   2. It takes a moment or two of ‘dropping our story’ to hear what it has to say.
   3. We often don’t like what it has to say, for the heart cuts through the bullshit of the ego mind, the part of us conditioned to stay safe and look for approval, and gets to the ‘heart’ of matters.
   4. Our heart is where we can carry our deepest emotional hurt and we’d rather avoid this than take the time to feel and heal it.
   Are you willing to listen to what your heart has to say?

In the beginning it can be tricky to know what is truly your heart and what is your ego’s needs masquerading as your heart. How do you tell the difference?

Your head (or Ego brain) speaks from 2 Value Logic:

Amongst much analysing, thinking and questioning your Ego Brain uses both positive and negative judgements, along with self-justification and an underlying need to be on top of, or in control of any given situation or person. Head talk is driven by our internal programming, our belief systems, our memories and our self-identity with its fears about the future or blaming from the past. Your head focusses on two value logic- this is black and white, right and wrong thinking, saying ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’, or ‘It is this’ or ‘It is that’ with no other possibilities. Often these choices leave us in a conundrum in our relationships, struggling with win/lose, good/bad choices, where one person has to lose and of course we never want to be that person.

Your heart (and Soul) speaks from 4 Value Logic:

Heart talk is simple yet limitless, infinite and unrestricted, possibilities and is ok with not knowing. Your heart won’t tell you to ignore your fear, instead it will take you beyond it given a chance, to a place of deeper logic. This is four value logic, rather than just the two value logic of right/wrong, good/bad, all/nothing. Four value logic is ‘I am this, I am that, I am both, I am neither’, ‘this is right, this is wrong, this is everything, this is nothing’ all at the same time. It allows us greater understanding of a situation and of ourselves. For example, from our hearts we can say, it is ok for my partner to love another person even though they already love me because the heart is capable of much greater love than our minds can comprehend, instead of only listening to our fear based ego that says because this person is in a relationship with me they cannot love, look at or even think about anyone else’.

The heart uses simple language

It may speak about letting things be, letting them go, finding compassion, acceptance and understanding. Sometimes it might say it’s time for you to get off your butt and having a go or doing the one thing that is the scariest for you, such as maintaining a boundary or giving out some tough love. Heart outcomes are ultimately the most satisfying, better for you and those around you (even if they can’t see it straight away), helping you break out of old ways of being and motivating you to maintain the new ones you choose. Our hearts never seek power over another but power within ourselves. Our hearts also have a very good in-built bullshit detector and will call us on the places we (or others) might be avoiding our/their higher truths.

Love is not blind- it sees more not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less. Rabbi Julius Gordon.

Whatever energy we expend in our lives comes back to us either directly or indirectly so it’s worth putting out there what you really mean from your heart because this is what you’re going to get back!

This has been true in Annette & Graeme’s own lives, our hearts started off being a very nebulous woo woo concept to us and have now become a rock solid part of our self-understanding, a pathway to connecting with each other and those around us. Whenever our minds are overly busy with unhelpful thoughts we know our thoughts are probably out of alignment with our hearts inbuilt bullshit detector so we better take a moment to check in and listen…We offer you 3 Hea

Practice 1: Connecting with your Heart 

Take a moment now just to stop and feel your heart. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, feel into your body then focus your attention in the centre of your chest, slightly to the left. Think of something that you appreciate in your life and feel the physical sensation of that for a few moments. Is your heart open, closed, full, warm, heavy, light or blank? Is there sadness, love, gratitude, even anger or shame there? Whatever the feeling is just be with it exactly as it is for a few moments. Do this as often as you can to start building your relationship with your ‘energetic’ heart for the more you connect with it the more it will speak to you. Your heart doesn’t speak in words but in intuitive knowing’s- those things you just know, even though you might not understand how you know- it’s magic.

Practicing when you’re in a place of ease can help you access your heart’s intelligence more easily in times of intimate challenge, to hear it speak from wisdom rather than fear or resentment, creating connection rather than dissonance.

Practicing when you’re about to, or are making love will bring you into a deeper place of openness and connection with yourself. Breathing this openness through your body allows your sexual pleasure to become more full bodied as you’ve made room for it, for pleasure that you can then share with your partner, along with the openness that created it. Again, it’s magic!

Practice 2: Falling On Your Sword 

There is no doubt about it, feelings can really hurt sometimes, especially those in our hearts. They can even occasionally be overwhelming, too much to bear, leaving us instantly overwhelmed, lost, light headed, nauseous, cramped up, bent over, filled with intensity or thoroughly wretched. And it is a very natural impulse to want to resist this hurt. Yet we have found in our own experience, and in working with others, that welcoming these feelings in (remembering that our feelings are just energy in motion) and literally letting them penetrate us, even penetrating our hearts, helps them to shift more almost immediately.

It’s a bit like imagining you’re falling on the sword of your feelings…taking a breath in helps. The only difference being that unlike with a real sword, being penetrated by our feelings won’t kill us. In fact, it will free us from the quite thick walls most of us have built around our hearts. It sounds like a crazy thing to do but if you give it a try you’ll see it really works.

However, this doesn’t stop our logical ego minds from believing the intensity of the feeling is going to kill us. This is merely the ego’s desire to protect itself. The opposite is actually true, not feeling is more likely to hurt us if we block and lock these feelings into our bodies, turning them into stress and eventually disease.

Letting these feelings in can feel like the most illogical thing in the world, yet we’re not trying to be sadistic here. It is like the beautiful Buddhist practice called Tonglen, which is about letting go of resistance to suffering and having it transformed into joy or love.

Rather than trying to avoid the inevitable hurt in intimate relating you can see it as a tool for moving beyond itself.  Over time you minimize your suffering and build on your moments of Big Love by being able to live more inside your heart.

The only way to understand the benefit is to try it for yourself, perhaps beginning with a small moment of hurt. Rather than contracting, take a breath in and imagine the energy of the hurt literally penetrating and moving through you. You will find, if you can totally let go of resistance the hurt transforms immediately.

It works with big hurts as well. Although big hurts such as betrayal by a partner, loss of a job, an unexpected financial loss, death of a spouse can have several (or many) layers of hurt to move through. It may take longer, but the practice is still the same. The gift of this practice is that your vulnerability in it will invite your partner closer to you rather than pushing them away, creating a deep intimacy rather than chaos and withdrawal. The intimacy of being with a partner in this depth of process is indescribably beautiful.

Heart Practice: Re-Opening Your Heart 

Just as your feelings are either flowing or not, your heart cannot be fully open to one person and closed to another, it is either open or closed to all. This means that you cannot fully embrace a new lover (even though it might feel like you have) until you’ve let go of the hurt from lovers of the past. In fact, you might find that opening your heart to a new love releases hurt from the past, this is the gift that love brings. Just because you choose not to live with a past love doesn’t mean you can’t still love them from a distance, your heart is large enough for all, the more the merrier!  

Take a moment just to stop and feel your heart as in Practice 1. Once you can feel your heart imagine your past love in front of you and feel any feelings that arise in you, whether there is grief, anger, resentment, fear, shame etc. Don’t judge them or be in the story of them, just focus on the feelings in your body and let the memories move through your mind. Breathe any associate feelings through you, feeling yourself becoming lighter and your heart more open. Acknowledge any regrets, allowing your 4 Value Logic to find you a new perspective on this love. Notice something about them or your time with them you can feel grateful for, even if it is just something that you learned, because gratitude is a great heart opener. You might need to do this a few times till you feel complete but it is time worth spending for the greater love you will have access to as a result.

We trust you have a newfound (or newly reinforced) appreciation of your heart and its capabilities as the sexiest organ in your body. If you have any concerns or fears about trusting your heart in this way we can support you so contact us on 1800 TANTRA or email here.