Join me as I guide you through the Eight Directions Breath, a gentle yet powerful practice designed to open your heart to the boundless love that already exists within you.

In this episode, we explore how to consciously expand your heart, creating space for love to flow freely through your body to nourish you and those who come into your world.

Through this guided meditation, you'll learn to counteract the physical collapse of the chest that often accompanies emotional shutting down, allowing you to experience the empowerment that comes from fully embodying and expressing love.

The practice combines intentional breathwork, gentle awareness, and energy expansion to help you recognize that you are not only loved, but are love itself—infinite, whole, and complete.

By the end, you'll have experienced firsthand how focusing your attention on love can amplify its presence in your life, creating a natural pathway for more love to flow into your relationships and your entire being.

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Andrea Balboni

Andrea is a certified Sex, Love and Relationships Coach at Lush Coaching.

Her mission is to help people experience as much pleasure and fulfillment in their personal intimate lives as they desire.

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Practice: Heart Breath – A Guided Meditation for Opening to Love

Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Lush Love, the podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Balboni. Through conversations with special guests, we'll navigate the intensity of intimacy, the highs and lows of relationships, and the beauty and complexity of the erotic, desire and pleasure.

I'll guide you through embodiment practices and meditations in special episodes that will bring to life and make real what you learn from conversations with thought leaders, teachers, and guide of all kinds. My goal is to support you, to experience intimate relationships in the way that you desire, so that you feel nourished by deep, meaningful connection, by passion and pleasure.

I'm so [00:01:00] glad you're here with me on this journey. And if you are to rate and review this episode, if you feel the same.

Welcome to the Eight Directions Breath for Heart Expansion. This practice gently supports opening your heart to the love that is alive there. It's a simple practice that I'll guide you through now. Keep in mind that as you inhale, you are expanding your chest, your physical body and the energy and essence of love that is housed in it in eight directions, forward, backward, side to side, and diagonally out to the front and the back of you.

On a physical level, you'll release tension from the ribcage and your chest. You are really going to go for a full expansion of the chest so [00:02:00] that you counteract any collapse of the chest inward.

And a corresponding sense of closing off or shutting down to love. As you inhale, you are going to feel an expansion through your chest and body, and connect with a feeling of empowerment that comes from the embodiment and expression of love. And as you exhale, you're going to send and radiate that love like tangible liquid gold throughout your whole body to every cell and bone of your being.

If you struggle to feel the love move through your body during this practice, start off by imagining it moving through you. Eventually, over time, you may develop a feeling or a felt sense of this happening physically in your body. I'll guide you through the entire practice. Let's begin now.

To begin this [00:03:00] practice, find a comfortable seated position, either seated or lying down.

You can gently lower your gaze towards the ground, and if it feels right for you, you can close your eyes. Folding your focus and attention inwards,

you can take a moment to resource yourself. So resourcing can be something like simply scanning your body, starting from the top of your head, moving your way down, down, down through your body. Noticing where within you feels like home, like safety, like steadiness, like an anchor. This place or space [00:04:00] within you is your resource.

And if you struggle to find a place within your body, then you can consider a time or a place when you did feel safe and steady. Remember that feeling. Remember that place. Remember, perhaps, the people that you were with. Or if it was a pet, or another non human being, remembering how you felt when you were with them, and inviting that essence, that experience of feeling that way into the present moment now, maybe even into your body. [00:05:00]

And next, becoming aware of your breath. Inhaling through your mouth, exhaling through your mouth, just noticing the breath without having to change it or modify it. Feeling your body gently expand on the inhale and relax on the exhale.

And on the next inhale, breathing in through your mouth. Sending that breath all the way down right into the center of your chest. At your heart center, feeling your chest, your ribs cage gently expand. On the next inhale, breathing in through your mouth, all the way down through your body, [00:06:00] right into your chest.

Right at the center of your chest, feeling your chest expand with the exhale and on the exhale, simply relaxing back. The exhale can be slow, relaxed, and soft.

And on the next inhale, once again, breathing right into the center of your chest. Feeling your ribcage expand, your chest expand. And on the exhale, relaxing back, softening, slowing.

And one more inhale right into the center of your chest, [00:07:00] feeling your heart expand into the love that is within you at this place in your body. Right at the center of your chest.

And on the exhale, feeling that love softly expand even further outward as you exhale out, continuing to inhale right into the center of your chest. Noticing with each breath in how the love grows more bright and larger with every inhale. And on every exhale, expanding right into that love even more. [00:08:00]

With every inhale into love, feeling it full of compassion, gentleness, empathy, understanding and kindness, allowing these qualities to permeate your body, to permeate your being. And, on the exhale, letting these qualities settle within you as you relax back into the exhale.

And, on the next inhale, imagining your chest opening and expanding. And the love that's there extending to the front of you, way beyond your chest, way beyond your body, and that inhale. Exhaling, and feeling that love softly effusing outward to the front of you, [00:09:00] beyond your body, into the space just in front of you relaxing.

And on the next inhale, this time imagining the love house at the center of your heart, expanding towards the back of you, way beyond your physical back, right into the space behind you. Exhaling, relaxing, and feeling that love expand even further behind you.

And on the inhale, again, inhaling right into the center of love, the center of your chest, the center of your body. Expanding the love [00:10:00] out to both sides of you, way beyond your body. Exhaling, relaxing, and feeling that love gently expand just a little bit further out to the sides of you.

And on the next inhale, inhaling again, feeling the breath and the love expanding in your chest. Diagonally this time, forwards and backwards, side to side and in all directions, filling your aura, filling your being with a purity and lightness of love and your unique expression of it as it comes to you through your body here and now. [00:11:00]

And letting that love effuse throughout your entire body and your entire being. Recognizing that you are infinite, as is the love within you, that you are whole, that you are complete, that you are loved, and that you are love itself.

And noticing how you are feeling now. how it's possible to experience more love simply by bringing your attention and focus to it. [00:12:00] And this practice is now complete.

You can repeat this practice as many times as you'd like to, to experience more love in your life and notice how love comes to you more easily, more naturally, more fluidly. As you cultivate this feeling of love and the essence of love and all of your body in all of your being. [00:13:00]

Thank you for listening. Share this podcast with anyone you feel would benefit from its message. If you love what you heard, rate and review us wherever you listen. And if you feel that you could use some support, connect with me, Andrea Balboni, through my website, LushCoaching.com. That's L U S H C O A C H I N G dot com. Special thanks to Nicholas Singer for the musical score, and Dion Knight for editing and production. [00:13:46]