FINALE - what the heart might say

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Shall We Gather At the River

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/DigitalPainting/A-Simple-Life/i-rbshcM7/A

I have spent several posts discussing why we should and how to listen to our hearts and before I have to take a few weeks offline, I thought I should finish up this series with the last steps. Already, we've looked at the groundwork in quieting the mind and beginning a discipline and a practice of meditation. But it's important to look at what we can build on that foundation and how that brings us to a more wholehearted life.

According to Steve Mueller, author of Personal Development Blog Gone Wild, there are an additional eight steps to the practice of listening to one's heart. I'll try to simplify those as much as possible. After learning to meditate and focusing on one's breath, the next step says Mueller is to "go with the flow." By that he means don't try to force your heart to speak or demand that your intuition suddenly become a perfectly clear message. Expecting to "hear voices" dooms us to disappointment - just begin to tune in for the way the messages might come - as a calm certainty, or a profound insight. And when you do recognize an intuitive heart message - make a note of it. Keep a journal or diary of hunches, observations, certainties. Mueller says it's important to keep a record of every time you followed your intuition and found your life improved or felt lighter in spirit. The journal serves another purpose and that is to identify the pattern - the particular way your heart speaks to you, whether that's through hunches or a physical reaction or a sudden clarity. We begin to trust the messages, the voice of our hearts, when we keep a record of what a wonderful guide it is. As Helen Keller once said, "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor touched but are felt in the heart."

Learning to trust our heart messages involves using the mind well - once we've learned how to quiet the mind temporarily in order to meditate and listen to the heart, then we can allow the mind to speak as well. Now it is influenced by the heart rather than being at odds with it. Now our intellect becomes an additional tool for clarifying the heart messages. We need to let our bodies speak as well because the body can translate the language of the heart into language that we may understand more readily. Your throat might tighten, your heart race, your stomach tie in knots when your heart is saying no, wrong choice. You might feel suddenly more energetic, more creative, more peaceful when you're hearing a "yes" intuitively. 

It takes a lot of practice - and it takes time to learn how to listen to the heart without ignoring the intellect and the messages the body sends as well. Don't be impatient and don't give up. For some of us, it's a lifetime of practice. But as Steve Mueller says, "When listening to the wisdom emanating from deep within, you will begin to experience unexpected but supportive synchronicities, things will show up when needed and lessons will be taught once you are ready to perceive their contents, always accompanied by the knowing that your heart will always take care of you.

*** I will be off for several weeks and unable to post or respond to comments. I thank you in advance for coming by, taking the time to read or comment and I'll get back to you as soon as my recovery permits. Thanks for all your lovely support these past months. Lianne xox 

QUIET the mind...open the HEART

"Meditation speaks. It speaks in silence. It reveals. It reveals to the aspirant that matter and spirit are one, quantity and quality are one, the immanent and the transcendent are one."

Sri Chinmoy

Sanctuary

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In the last post, I spoke about the first steps towards listening to your heart and I mentioned that in this post, I'd talk a little bit about meditation and introduce you to a guided meditation to open your heart. Steve Mueller, author of the "Personal Development Blog Gone Wild" on his Planet of Success blogsite lists a number of steps for beginning the practice of meditation that I'm going to share with you here:

1. Sit down in a comfortable upright position
2. Make sure that your spine is straight
3. Focus your attention on your respiratory organs
4. Feel the natural flow of air entering and leaving your body
5. Allow your mind to calm down, while you focus on breathing
6. [Optional] Begin to vocalize the mantra of your choice
7. Watch as your mind begins to ease, enjoy the inner peace
8. Enjoy the tranquility and go with what feels natural to you
9. If a thought begins to arise, think and contemplate about it
10. If a certain scenario/day-dream begins to unfold, follow it
11. Remain in the meditative state as long as it feels right

All of those steps are important and they sound easy enough, but I suspect that for most of us it's a bit more difficult than this. I'm reminded of a scene from Eat, Pray, Love, where Julia Roberts is attempting to discipline herself to meditate. She's living in an ashram and the discipline involves getting up at 4 a.m. and spending several hours in the meditation room in the lotus position. But the harder she tries, the more impossible it is. Her mind races, fills with inconsequential thoughts and distractions and she begins to question herself. "Why can't I do this right?" "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Now she's angry and frustrated and a long way from the inner peace meditation is supposed to bring! I can sympathize. My first attempts at even a guided meditation were dismal "failures" for the same reasons and I would say to my instructor again and again, "I can't do this right."

To prepare myself for meditation, I like to listen to the sound of trickling water - a personal tabletop waterfall is just the thing. But what helped me the most apart from having settled on a mantra with which I could be comfortable, was to really focus on step 3 above...paying attention to the breath. I mean consciously following your breath in and out with a predetermined intention to breathe IN peace and breathe OUT negative feelings, energy, thoughts. Breathe in through the nose, deeply, and in your mind's eye follow the air into your lungs and more importantly, into your heart. See your breath as if it were light - filling your body - your arms, legs, torso but centering in the heart. When you breathe back out, do so through your mouth but expel the air slowly. Do this by pursing your lips, shaping them as if you were going to whistle or blow up a balloon and feel the resistance through which the air has to pass. At the same time pull in your tummy and contract your diaphragm. Slow deep breaths keep you from hyperventilating, slow your heart rate and oxygenate and refresh the body. At first, you may find it difficult to pair this breathing practice with repeating a mantra but eventually you will find a rhythm that breathes in on the first syllable or part of the syllable and out on the second part. For example, if you are using the traditional Om mantra (pronounced approximately Oh-um but without the clear syllabification) you would breathe in deeply through your nose on "Oh," hold it for a second or two and breathe out slowly, compressing the diaphragm on "um." Likewise if you use the word "Abba" - in on "Ab" and out on "ba."

After about 10 breaths, and with twice daily or even once daily practice for a week, the breathing/mantra combination will feel very natural and in the manner of "self-hypnosis" will get you to a very relaxed and receptive state in which you can begin to open and listen to your heart - steps 7 through 11 in Mueller's list.

Below you'll find a very simple guided meditation to open the heart chakra (a chakra is an energy center in the body that we may talk about in a later post). This is only eight minutes long but it introduces you to three methods of locating and opening your heart chakra. 

From EnergyFundamentals.org

There are many wonderful sites online where you can listen to various kinds of meditation, experience guided meditations geared toward specific purposes and even download some of them for repeated use. I have dozens of these in my files as well as some meditation systems I've paid for which I personally find helpful but think they are an unnecessary expense in most cases. Online, one of my favorite sites for guided meditations is http://www.tarabrach.com/new-to-meditation.html where you will find some very helpful introductory exercises and then some really beautiful longer meditations. That's where I go when I cannot meditate without a guide - and for me, that's most of the time. 

Next post - the remaining steps to listening to the heart. Beginning next Wednesday, I will be offline and unable to post for several weeks although I am going to try to write a post or two in advance and schedule them to post when I am away. 

Begin to listen to your HEART– a how to…

“Your true heart is not subject to chaos or limited by pain, fear and neuroses, but is joyful, creative and loving…It is the core, the essence of your being, a reservoir of joy, powerful love and infinite compassion that lies within you.”

Ed and Deb Shapiro, in Listen Up! Why Being in Your Heart is Better Than In Your Head

Light in the Darkness

I have been talking a lot about listening to your heart these past few posts. But what does that actually mean and how do we do it? The ancients, philosophers and physicians alike, believed the heart to be not only how we “know” something (as the Hebrew people believed) but actually the very origin of thought, emotion, passion and reason. All those years ago, the wisest knew what we have forgotten or repressed. In our busy, logical culture, to suggest listening to one’s heart is tantamount to elevating emotion, sentimentality, impulse and passion above reason and logic. But that’s incorrect – the heart is the center of both reason and emotion,  practicality and passion. Listening to the heart certainly isn’t about being unreasonable or out of control in any way, but rather being at peace, centered, calm and connected to an inner wisdom we all possess if we will but listen.

To do that, as I mentioned the other day, one must silence the mind to some extent. Not ignore it…just get it to rest while we think with our hearts first. The mind is capable of exquisite creativity but it’s also bound to the physical aspects of life…with all its fears and uncertainties – will this work? Will I have enough? Will I succeed? But the heart cares only about our well-being (both physical and emotional), our happiness, and our spiritual growth and enlightenment. So how do we start to listen?

First, we have to consciously confront our bias in favor of the mind. Making decisions, we are almost certainly going to seek the rational and logical answer and ignore any intuition that suggests that might not be the best way to go. Intuition communicates an inner heart wisdom to us in many ways and we must recognize the signs in order to really listen. Have you ever made a logical decision about a career path, a relationship, an opportunity but had your stomach tie up in knots? Suddenly, you’re not so sure – some other center of knowing is giving us a different answer, suggesting that our decision may not ultimately be the right one. More often the heart speaks in hunches, sudden insights, or a profound certainty that is different from our analytical and linear resolution to our problem.

The first actual step toward listening and living from the heart, then, is to quiet the rational mind. How? Well, the ancients, especially in eastern thought and philosophy but also in Western religious thought, knew that one had to substitute one repetitive sound or thought for all the racing noisy thoughts that fill our heads all the time. Adopting a mantra (a Sanskrit word that means to “protect from or free from the mind.”) is a very effective way. Traditional mantras include the well known “Om” – a sacred syllable representing the source of life. Pronounced Aum with an extended resonating hum, this sound is one of the most natural to all human beings and combined with a technique of breathing in on the first part of the syllable and breathing out and holding the second part, this mantra can quickly rid the mind of extraneous thought, opening it to “hear” the messages from the heart. But you can accomplish this same purpose by repeating any single or double syllable word that you associate with something greater than the mind. Christians and Jews might use the Aramaic word “Abba” which means “father” or more intimately, “daddy.” It is considered one of the sacred names or titles of God.

Sitting comfortably with eyes closed and repeating some mantra is one of the first tools of meditation…and that’s the second step toward quieting the mind and opening the heart. I’m no expert and I’m not as consistent as I wish with meditation practice but I do have some thoughts and some guided meditations designed specifically to open the heart or “clear” the heart chakra. That’s where we’ll go next time – releasing the energy of the heart. I'll include a soundtrack for a guided meditation and some other suggestions for how to get started or improve your meditation practice. Till Tuesday then...I'll leave you with this profound truth from Franz Kafka - 

Why we should listen to our hearts...

"...the only way to know yourself, is to be yourself. And the only way to be yourself is to listen to your heart."

Mike Dooley

Entrer Dans Mon Coeur

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One of the most important aspects of wholehearted living...living from the heart...is learning to listen to what your heart is actually telling you. Certainly, we've all heard that advice before - follow your heart, your heart always tells you the truth. But how does one actually do that? And is there any reason to believe that the heart really can communicate something different than what we "think" in our heads? Yes, actually there are a number of scientific reasons to believe that "listening" to the heart is important and how to begin to do that. 

Believe it or not, there is a significant amount of research that suggests that the heart controls the mind rather than the other way around. This is tremendously difficult for many of us to accept, living as we do in a mind-dominated society where logic and analytical thinking seem to be the driving force behind our decision-making. But according to Dr. Joel Kahn, in an article entitled, "7 Scientific Reasons to Listen to Your Heart (Not Your Brain), the heart is actually the "little brain" with 40,000 neurons communicating with the brain and the whole field of research into this communication is called neurocardiology. So the heart speaks to the brain and the body in four particular ways - through the nervous system, by hormones produced in the heart itself, biomechanically through blood pressure waves and with "energy" information from the electrical and electromagnetic fields of the body. 

The findings are rather surprising - the heart communicates with the brain far more often than the other way around and the heart emits far more electrical energy than the brain as well. Probably one of the most startling facts to come out of the research is the fact that the electromagnetic field of the heart can be measured by EKG anywhere on the body but also from several feet away! 

Here's the kicker though -  "Activity in one person's heart can be measured in the brain waves of another person." The electromagnetic field of two individuals (human or pet and human), touching or within a few feet of each other, can interact so that energy activity in the heart of one individual is measured in the brain waves of the other. The act of touch for healing therapies can be postulated to be due to this method of communication." The electrical activity of the heart and the brain can be guided into a synchronous electrical rhythm easily measured and displayed by simply focusing on positive and loving emotions emanating from the heart. This state of organ “coherence” is associated with improved higher level functioning, lower blood pressure and cortisol levels, and improved immune system function." (Dr. Joel Kahn). There is apparently a lot to be said for the "laying on of hands" for healing another person and there have been some incredible proofs offered in the past few years including one shared by Dr. Gregg Braden where the healers didn't even touch the sick person - they just "sent" healing energy to the sick person and in that way completely shrunk a malignant tumor. The entire process was captured on time lapse sonograms. 

All well and good but that still sounds as if it's all about science and the mind - there must be an emotional component to the idea of listening to the heart and it's that component that is the foundation for learning to be aware of what the heart is trying to tell us. Clearly, one of the first steps in this wholehearted living process is learning to respect but at the same time quiet the mind.

More on that on Friday - and some of the rest of the steps to following your heart...