Come Home to the Heart
By: Irene Stepanenko
February invites us into the energy of the heart. With Valentine's Day everywhere we look, love is often framed as something external—something to be found, given, or received from another. But yogic wisdom reminds us that love isn't something we chase. It's something we generate from within.
In Kundalini Yoga, the Heart Center is the bridge between the lower and upper chakras—between our human experience and higher consciousness. When the heart is open and balanced, we move through the world with compassion, resilience, and a natural sense of connection to ourselves and to others.
Rather than focusing on romantic love alone, this season invites us to expand our understanding of love:
Love as presence.
Love as self-acceptance.
Love as the courage to remain open, even when it feels vulnerable.
The yogis teach that when we lead with the heart, life begins to meet us with greater ease. And yet, many of us unconsciously protect the heart—through tension, guardedness, or emotional contraction. Kundalini Yoga offers us practical tools to soften these defenses and return to our natural state of openness.
Through heart-opening kriyas, conscious breathwork, mantra, and meditation, we can gently release stored emotions, strengthen the magnetic field, and cultivate compassion for others and ourselves. These practices help us experience love as a steady inner state, independent of our external circumstances.
Heart-centered and heart-opening Kundalini practices are my absolute favorite. Practicing them can bring up emotions and start the cleansing process in the body, mind, and soul. And if you trust that process, you'll be rewarded with a wonderful feeling of ease, peace, clarity, and trust given to you from your open heart.
When we talk about love, we typically think of something that gets exchanged between two people, as something given and received, earned and lost. But in Kundalini Yoga, love is understood as a state of being. The Heart Center doesn't wait for the right person or the right conditions to activate. It's a generator, not a receiver. When balanced and open, the fourth chakra naturally radiates compassion, acceptance, and connection—toward yourself, toward others, toward life itself.
This is love as capacity: the ability to remain open even when it's difficult, to meet yourself with kindness during failure, to stay present with others during conflict. Heart-opening practices aren't really about manifesting new love in your life. They teach us how to remove the barriers (fear, old hurt, guardedness) that keep us from experiencing the love that's already there.
In Kundalini Yoga, we say: "When you open your heart, you open yourself to grace." I've witnessed this again and again—when the heart softens, something greater begins to move through us, without force.
For me, it's working with sound. The gong responds to the inner state of the person playing it, not just to their technique. But it also works on the Heart Center in a way that's difficult to describe—sound vibration can reach places that breath and movement alone sometimes can't. It bypasses the thinking mind and speaks directly to what's stored in the body. Each session, I take time to connect to myself and what I'd like to share with my students. It's very important for me to always come back to the love and light intention. The gong becomes a kind of invitation: to soften, to release, to remember what it feels like to be open.
February feels like a natural time to deepen this heart-centered exploration.
I'd love to invite you to join me for a Valentine's Day Workshop on Saturday, February 14th, from 1–3 PM, where we'll explore this space more fully through Kundalini Yoga, breath, meditation, and sound. Whether you come with someone else or simply with yourself, this is an invitation to listen inward and open up to greater connection.