This morning, still lying in bed, I directed my attention deep into the heart. It’s a tangible sensation in the heart center, an essence we can feel and ‘drink.’ I noticed the following:
At first there was a period of deepening my attention into the heart. When that focus had become stable and I could clearly feel the heart essence, the mind descended on me like a swarm of hungry locusts, with images and stressful thoughts – and they didn’t matter at all! I recognized the mind’s usual movements, it’s attachment to pain, to judgments, its fabrication of stressful stories, and all of it was revealed as completely untrue. It just didn’t matter when compared to the ability to stay in the heart, to drink this essence.
There was no need to do anything else. What is seen as not real is not real. The truth is the heart and all of the mental noise is just that – noise. In the place of the heart there is a silence so powerful that none of the noise can penetrate. We can only lose this vantage point of reality and get lost in the mind, in the noise. We do it by habit. The noise cannot by itself disturb this inner peace.
So I would like to recommend to you to find the place of the heart essence. We have practiced that in Open Attention, when we focus on a place of discomfort in the body brought on by stressful emotions and then find the heart essence and direct it into the place of discomfort.
Now here is a new practice, in addition to the old one: Simply seek our the sensation of heart essence and drink it deeply. Stay with it. Be quiet. Watch, observe the heart and the mind. Do it repeatedly, until the heart becomes so strong that the mind no longer pulls your attention away from the heart. I found this deeply enjoyable.
I’d love to know how this works for you.
