Elements and Qualities of the Heart Meditation

The heart has always been a bit of a mystery for me, and accessing it readily not easy. I am and always have been a head person, so dropping into the heart for meditative contemplation has long been foreign to my nature. I recently had a Eureka moment when I realized that part of the difficulty was that I was attempting to observe the heart, as one might do with other forms of meditation – such as observing the breath, or observing thoughts, or observing sensations in the body. The turn of the key in the lock was recognizing that one needed to feel the experience of the heart, not observe it from a detached point of view. This is likely an elementary understanding to most people, folks who routinely live in their feeling-nature, but it can be like learning a foreign language for those of us who may be more temperamentally inclined to a jnana yoga approach.

This meditation is designed to exercise the feeling capacities and qualities of the heart. It is spontaneously generated from my own experience and shared freely for whomever might benefit from it.

The key in these exercises is not to imagine (as in imaginally projecting a cognitive supposition in the mind’s eye) the experience, but to actually interiorly generate and feel a sensate experience in the heart. The exercises may take time to learn to do if the heart is a foreign territory; that’s OK, it’s more important to slow the experience down and actually feel the exercises, even if it means you can’t get through them all in one sitting. Partial completion as intended to work is far more valuable that cursorily rushing through all of them with no clearly-felt sensation for any of them. Take your time, and be gentle and thorough.

The beginning of the exercise applies as the point of return at the completion of each exercise as well. Close the eyes and allow yourself to be drawn inward to the silent, magnetic core axis of your body. Drop your attention into the center of the chest. Perceive from here. Note the distinction here: it is not a turning one’s attention on the heart, for that means you are still in your head while the heart only remains an object of contemplation. No, this is putting the center of your awareness in the heart, even if you don’t understand exactly where this is. It is not necessary to understand objectively where your center of attention is. Most people intuitively understand what it means to drop one’s attention into a body location. It is much like Eckhart Tolle’s exercise on feeling the interior space of your hands or feet; the difference being you are feeling the interior space of your heart. This is the origin point of all following exercises.

Heart as Earth Element

Feel (don’t imagine) your heart as a heart of sand grains. Sift it back and forth through the ventricles of the heart as you would sift your toes through sand on the beach. Give your heart a “sand-washing.”

Feel the rhythm of your heartbeat as a drum rhythm, endlessly cycling. Fall into and become entranced with the rhythm. Amplify the rhythm internally so that it fills your ears, and simultaneously envision that the sand grains of your heart are being vibrated into standing geometrical patterns, a sand painting of the heart, like iron filings orienting around a magnet with tapping.

Heart as Water Element

Feel your heart as a bubbling spring pool or well infused with subtle light, in an interior cave. Simultaneously, feel the surface of this spring being the receptacle of a thin stream of light-water coming directly down from the crown chakra. Feel the place in the heart where this upwelling meets the downstreaming. Feel the pleasant intermixing of subtle water from below and subtle water from above in the vessel of the heart, slightly aerated with bubbles from the light turbulence of the confluence. Feel the bubbles dissolving and carrying away old hurts.

Feel the sensation as if the heart was a soiled, stiff, and dried-up washcloth needing a wash. Feel immersion of the heart into a container of warm, slightly saline and alkaline water. Feel the washcloth of the heart lifted out of the container and gently, repeatedly scrubbed and worked back and forth, rinsed under a stream of warm water, with frequent re-immersions in the saline water bath. Feel the soapiness of the alkalinity lifting free adhesions and constrictions of the heart. Feel a final rinse in a clean vat of warm water, the heart now refreshed and rejuvenated.

Listen to the interior sound of a large waterfall, with you and your heart at the base. Hear the constancy of the roar of water hitting water. Allow this interior sound to suffuse your heart, reminding you of the power of water.

Heart as Fire Element

Feel your heart as embers of a campfire. Feel the embers glow and dim, heat currents shifting from place to place within the heart. Feel the heart radiating warmth and comfort in rising and falling waves to you and those in circle around the campfire.

Hear the interior sound of a roaring fire, as if from a furnace, coming from within your heart.

Next, feel your heart as a silent and constant flame, as if from a candle wick in a calm room. Feel the gradations of heat corresponding with the zones of color in the flame – the blue base, the yellow/white body of the flame, the violet and ultraviolet region at the tip of the flame.

Heart as Air Element

Next, feel your heart as if being breathed upon by a holy one. Feel the air infused with healing power passing over and through your heart. Feel the warmth and gentle caress of this healing breath.

Transition to feeling this healing breath now becoming your own breath. Feel your heart suffused with your own breath as you inhale and exhale. Feel the close and symbiotic relationship between your heart and your breath, their complementary and essential union. Allow your heart to draw peace and healing energy from your own breath in real-time.

Lastly, feel your heart container as semi-permeable membranes that allow for the passage of air, like light-weight or sheer clothing on a clothesline. Feel a warm wind originating outside your heart sweeping down into and over it, permeating and suffusing it with spaciousness and motion. Release any holding in your heart and allow the nature of spirit (Greek: pneuma, meaning breath) to blow through and beyond it, carrying aware any worries or concerns into the openness of the sky.

Hear the interior sound of wind rustling through your heart.

Heart as Ether (Space) Element

Feel your heart as limitless and absolutely calm space. Feel the utter transparency and emptiness/spaciousness of the heart, extending radially without bounds in all directions, encompassing all, showing no favoritism or exclusion. Feel the peace and the calm, abiding ease this invokes in your being.

Hear the sub-audible note of creation thrumming throughout the space constantly – AUM. Contemplate how the note permeates all, just as limitless space permeates all. They are co-extensive. Become absorbed in the stillness of the space and the note of creation.

Heart as Light

Closely related to the space meditation, shift the focus of the feeling to the feeling of the heart as light. Feel your heart’s emanations as rays of light traveling through the limitless space. Feel the natural good-will of the heart, your essential nature, radiating out through the medium of interior space. Feel the glow of your heart’s light rays landing on the objects of your attention, illuminating them physically and spiritually, and imparting benevolence, good-will, and compassion universally. Feel your heart as a source of light in all environments, all contexts, at all times.

Feel your heart as a rising red orb over a horizon, gradually and progressively casting a greater and greater rose glow through the matrix of atmosphere/space and illuminating everything under the heart’s gaze in the peaceful ether with warmth and a reassuring light. Maintain the feeling of the constancy and evenness of this universal light emanating from your heart.

Heart as Love

This is the graduation step of the meditation. After the previous exercises stretching and limbering the feeling-capacities of the heart in different ways, this practice exercises the heart’s native function. Bring to mind a person you feel love for in your life. Feel their immediate presence in your heart, and radiate love to them. Feel, too, their reciprocation of your love, that you are receiving their love in return. Feel the give-and-take of this exchange, the constant supportive cycling of energy between the principals of the exercise. This capstone exercise can segue seamlessly into the Giving and Receiving meditation outlined here.

The exercise can be repeated using your feeling of the Presence of the Divine in your heart as the recipient and giver of love, as well. Or if there are difficulties with self-love, practice feeling love for yourself, and love being reflected back to you from yourself. For both varieties, engage in this reciprocal exchange for as long as it is productive and your interior attention holds.