Engaging the Heart in Meditation
Engaging the heart in meditation can be a challenging concept for many students to grasp. If you are intuitive, empathic, or a highly-sensitive person, this concept may come more easily to you, because you have a strong connection to your intuition and can make deep connections with others and Source. If you are more logical or science-oriented, you will have to work harder to connect with your heart and intuition, because there is a tendency to refute or doubt what the intellect doesn’t understand.
To paraphrase my guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, a self-realized Master and avatar of wisdom, “It is fortunate that the workings of the cosmos are not subject to the understanding of the human mind.” Yukteswar had a profound understanding and practice of the balance of reason and intuition.
Therefore, please do not perceive intuition as a weakness. When coupled with reason, as is the goal in meditation, the result is a deep, unshakeable knowing that drives your practice into new places of growth and understanding of your true nature. The result is strength, resilience and calm versus doubt and fluctuating resolve.
Why do we need to engage the heart in meditation?
It is easy to look at meditation as a mental exercise. However, engaging the heart (feeling) along with the head (intellect) in almost any endeavor can lead to greater success. When you engage the heart in meditation, you bypass some of the obstacles to meditation like resistance and doubt. Engaging the heart means to bring in great amounts of energy through intuitive “feeling” into your meditation practice. You know when you have succeeded because you feel calm enthusiasm, total focus, determination, and energy versus tension, resistance or doubt. Think of an Olympic athlete who has overcome the fluctuating mind. They perform their sport, not as an intellectual practice - like “hey, I am so fit from all of this exercise”, but from a deep rooted love for their sport and knowing they excel at it. That loving knowing creates the sweet spot that allows them to continue in the ups and downs.
How to awaken and engage the heart within meditation
Begin with a calm, inward feeling which is your intuition: the ability to know calm certainty without any doubt. Try to intuitively sense the direction the meditation technique you are using is trying to take you. It should feel inward, upward and/or expansive towards a higher aspect of yourSelf (I.e. peace, joy, love). Cooperate with this feeling by matching it with willpower. Relax into that quality, like going with the flow of a river. Then transition into expanding and deepening the feeling of this relaxed, calm inward, upward, expansive flow, even to the point of becoming the quality your heart is attuning to. The transition should feel simple and natural.
To develop your intuitive abilities within meditation
Practice an affirmation or visualization before meditation to warm up your intuitive abilities. Spend more time and meditate with intuitive people, whose magnetism will help you develop your abilities. Spend more time practicing becoming a quality of higher consciousness. Ask your Higher Self for help in developing this faculty.
In case you are inclined towards a more scientific explanation
Science shows our heart is the intuitive center of our being. The heart is crucial for our meditation practice. Here are a few facts that have been discovered by the HeartMath Institute:
The heart has a system of neurons that have both short- and long-term memory, and the signals they send to the brain can affect our emotional experiences.
The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
Coherent heart rhythms help the brain in creativity and innovative problem-solving(1).
So, as we stimulate our frontal cortex (point between the eyebrows) while concentrating during meditation, our heart also can be stimulated and strengthened during meditation. Since our heart is responsible for sending information to the brain, it makes sense for us to cultivate feelings of joy, love, peace, and compassion in our heart. One way that we can experience this cultivation of feeling is through a visualization of or sankalpa (resolve to experience) a particular desired quality (peace, joy, calm, wisdom, power, love, sound or light) before we begin our meditation techniques, which stimulates feeling emotion in the heart.
Ways to improve intuition or overcome obstacles to engaging the heart:
Practice placing your left hand over your heart center and breathing with an awareness of connecting to your heart and intuition.
Spend more time in nature really trying to appreciate and to connect with what you see and feel or intuit from nature (walks or walking meditation)
Practice service devoted to others (seva) with a focus on helping others and a non-attachment to personal outcomes, and
Practice guided introspection to develop devotion (I.e. reflect on a past event that is creating a disconnect with your intuition and accept that event as a teaching tool; feel gratitude for any blessing received from the experience; and lift that gratitude from your heart to the space between the eyebrows).
In Summary
Engaging the heart in meditation takes practice. But remember, you do this every day. When you really want something, you somehow find the willpower and energy to go it, even if you are tired, right? You are engaging the heart’s energy and feeling when you:
Find your second-wind after a long work week to see that much-anticipated movie that was finally released, or
Follow-through on reading your child their favorite bed-time story when they are sick and awake at 3am.
The only difference is that in meditation, you are applying that energy, that love or devotion, to getting to know and experience your true Self.
