Heartfulness: A Meditation on Giving and Receiving Influence

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

When I work with students in a mindfulness capacity, something I often have them do early on in the process is shift their attention to the emotional tone in their own body as well as the emotional tone around them. I'll have them get into small groups of three or four and notice what they can be aware of in terms of the subtle information that's flowing through the air, so to speak. 

What I find when I ask students to do this is that they often have a moment of self-doubt, especially if they've never done the practice. They wonder if what they're sensing is just a part of their imagination — if there's anything they can actually sense at all — when they tune their awareness to this more subtle bandwidth of experience. 

We're used to seeing with our eyes and feeling sensation through the body, but when we tune into the more subtle elements of human experience, it takes a little more time to adjust and start to sensitize ourselves to this new kind of information. But as we practice tuning into our own emotional state, our own subtle rhythms through the body and heart, we spontaneously become more sensitive to the environment around us. Ultimately, this practice of shifting our attention slightly to pick up on a different wave-length of experience is something we can get more and more proficient at. And as we get better at it, we start to trust ourselves more and realize just how much information is available to us when we pay attention in a slightly different way.

Not only are we giving influence throughout the day just by walking around with this human body and this human heart, but we're receiving influence deeply as well. I've mentioned in the past how permeable we are, how vulnerable we are, and in a different light, how connected we are — how much influence we have over one another. Heartfulness is just a slightly different way of talking about that. 

You can experience this right now if you put your hand over your heart. Take a breath. And just notice that your awareness has already become more subtle. Tuning in to this different wavelength, you can sense into the environment around you. Just notice how it feels. 

*Start Practice

I want you to start by focusing on the breath. And for a moment here, we're going to have an intention to breathe rhythmically. You can just choose your own adventure here. If you feel like it, you can do four counts on the in-breath, four on the out-breath. Or maybe you want to do six counts on the in-breath, eight counts on the out-breath. I personally like to do a little bit longer of an out-breath, so I'm going to do the six counts in and eight counts out.  

So go ahead and start with this breath, breathing rhythmically. And if you need to adjust your counts, maybe extend the out-breath a little more or the in-breath, just make the adjustment you need to. And as you do this I also want you to focus on the quality of evenness in the breath, so that you're breathing in a steady stream of oxygen and expelling a steady volume of oxygen. Evenly breathing in and evenly breathing out, according to your own rhythm. Just trust yourself with this. Find what's comfortable to you. The important thing with this exercise is to hold the same ratio, meaning maybe six counts in and six counts out. Eight counts in and ten counts out, just see what feels best for you. Try this for a while.

Good. Stay with that just another couple of breaths. Feel the body softening, coming into coherence. Less of a ragged feel, like you're burning energy, and more of just a smooth flow. All of the organs — all of the systems in the body — coordinating with the energy field of the heart. Like the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing together in unison.

The last step I'll ask you to take, here, is to focus on the heart. Just bring your awareness to the physical heart and notice how it feels in this moment. You can continue to breathe. Don't worry about the count, the ratio, so much at this point. Just trust the intelligence and wisdom of your body to find its own rhythm. Just notice how the heart feels in this moment. Notice the emotional tone of the body. And feel the influence, the energy of your own heart extending out several feet away from your physical body in every direction. If there are people nearby you in the moment or other forms of life — a house pet, a plant — whatever it is, you can just extend your influence to all of life around you. And notice the environment around you. It's quality, it's subtle energetic. Notice what you can sense when you shift your awareness one degree and tune in to this more subtle wavelength. 

You can stay with this practice as long as you want. You can come back to it as often as you want. Breathing rhythmically, evenly, bringing awareness to the heart, inviting the body into coherence. Sending out a loving influence all around you. Blessing other’s lives — human beings, other forms of life. I encourage you to stay with this practice. Stay embodied through the heart, and as you walk around the world you can know yourself to be a human love machine, sending out your influence, receiving influence from others, all in a seamless exchange.

***

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Reclaiming the Body: A Meditation to Integrate Body and Mind

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

In a famous (and hilarious) TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson talks about how our education system hampers creativity. He says that for many university professors the body is reduced to a vehicle that shuttles their heads around from meeting to meeting. It's his funny way of saying that university professors are so in their head, so involved in the intellectual side of life, that they forget that they have bodies. 

What Sir Ken Robinson points to isn’t just a phenomenon with university professors. He may as well have been describing adulthood itself. There's a shift in the locus of our identity when we become adults. Just think about childhood and the roly-poly, rough-and-tumble, playing-out-in-the-sun kind of kids we were — coming home with grass stains on our clothes and a big ring of grape jelly and peanut butter around our mouths after lunch. 

The world is so physical when we're young. We're physically embodied for a long time in life, and it's around adolescence where we start to get what is sometimes referred to as a mind-body split. And this is not all bad news.

When the mind and body split, our cognitive function is starting to develop. It's starting to come more into the foreground of our experience as adults. And we do amazing things with cognition. For instance, you can imagine what your life could be like if you really dedicated yourself to your values and your principles. To imagine who it is we want to be, what we want to do with this precious life, and to actually apply ourselves to realizing that vision — that all requires cognition. 

The trouble we get into with the thinking mind is that there's a tendency to leave the body behind. And when we have less awareness in our physical bodies, the body becomes less sensitive. It becomes less vibrant. It can even get sick and start to break down when we're not, for example, eating healthy and exercising or just paying attention to our physical state. 

So, the opportunity of adulthood is to develop our minds and bodies. And this is where a mindfulness practice comes in.

Mindfulness is a practice that can help us grow and develop in a more healthy way into adulthood. And reclaiming the body is a perfect example of this. What we see in our research in adult development is that this mind-body split is a real thing and it becomes a challenge for many adults in their lifetime. You could say it's a developmental threshold of sorts. We reach adulthood, and we start to lose touch with the body,  and a lot of problems can come up from there. So how do we cross this threshold? How do we reach back down into the physical body — into embodiment — and integrate the body with the mind? To me, that's the question. How do we really take this challenge as an opportunity? This challenge of disembodiment — of the body being a vehicle that just shuttles the head around from meeting to meeting. How do we actually invite the physical body to become more sensitive again, to play more of a central role in the sensuous delights of human life? How do we bring the body back online and start to integrate it more fully with the adult mind?

Rather than talk about the answer to that, which would just be more cognition, we're going to practice this. We're going to practice bringing more awareness into the physical body and feel the way it can start to integrate, cooperate with, and flow with the activity of the mind. 

I'll invite you to settle in wherever you are and we'll begin.

[bell to commence practice]

You can start by just taking a couple of deep breaths and if you're comfortable doing so, just allow yourself an audible sigh. Just letting it all go. 

You can just start to settle in. whatever you're doing, whether you're in stillness or motion, you can just start to gather awareness in the physical body - all of the physical body. And as you breathe you can imagine that you're breathing in through every pour of your skin. Lighting up and nourishing the entire body. And moment to moment you can notice the flux of sensation through the body. Even if you're sitting perfectly still with eyes closed, just the expansion and contraction of the breath is a cascade of physical sensation.

As you notice thoughts pulling for your attention, or sounds in the world, sights, just notice that and practice letting go and just allowing your awareness to flow as the sensations of the physical body. Notice that this flow is like a mighty river. Sometimes white-watered. Sometimes silently flowing. But it's unbroken. Moment to moment there is just a stream of sensation through the body.

And as you let awareness really deeply flow and merge with the stream of physical sensations, you can see if that changes the quality of sensation. Noticing if it becomes more clear, more vivid. Often times just bringing attention to the body lights up the experience. Makes it more deeply felt.

From here, you can open up the scope of your focus a little bit wider to include not just physical sensation, but also the thinking mind. So not trying to get rid of thoughts, but not indulging in thoughts or elaborating on them, either. Just allowing thought to flow through awareness the same way that physical sensation flows through awareness. And you can just let it be one in the same flow. It's not that physical sensations are good and thoughts bad, it's all just one unbroken flow. And you can relax your awareness, relax right into this flow.

Let your awareness remain soft and open. Physical sensations flowing, thoughts flowing through the mind, all flowing through awareness. Just take another moment to give yourself back to this flow of nature. And as you practice this more and more, you come to directly experience that you're not a thinking mind separated from a physical body so much as a body-mind. One unbroken flow always flowing through the open expanse of awareness itself.

[bell to conclude practice]

No need to stop, here. You can just stay with this, continuing as one unbroken flow of body, mind, and spirit. Return to this practice again and again as you see fit.

***

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"The Longer We Practice, the Deeper We Practice": An Extended Meditation on Presence

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Listen to this episode here.

***

“The longer we practice, the deeper we practice." 

It’s something that one of my meditation teachers always used to say. In this spirit, I'm going to offer a longer guided meditation about being in the present moment. This is the practice of presence, of really learning to open up to the fullness that is here right now. 

Begin

Take a moment to let the body settle into the posture, gathering awareness in the physical body, letting the dust from your day or your night of sleeping and dreaming just start to settle. And remember that you don't have to try and get settled, try and rest. You can just give yourself over to the natural rhythms of your own body, of nature — as rhythmically as the tide ebbs and flows, the body expands and contracts through the breath. You can just return to this rhythm.

[extended silence]

Good. Bring your awareness to the nostrils, the sensation of breathing in and breathing out through the nose. And just practice for a moment, tightly focusing your awareness on these sensations — breathing in through the nose, breathing out through the nose, and just noticing the changing sensations as you do this, letting everything else in the entire world fade into the background.

If you get pulled away from your focus on the sensations around the nostrils or inside of the nostrils, just notice that and come back. Refocus. Redouble your efforts, really bearing down on this small area of sensation.

And for a moment, as you do this, staying with the tight focus on the sensations of breathing through the nose, I want you to notice that within your narrowed focus there's a quality of total openness, that awareness is open to whatever sensation is flowing. No matter how tightly you focus, there's a quality of awareness that remains totally open. Within your scope of focus around the nostrils, you can just be open to whatever sensation is flowing in this moment. Tingling sensation, air cooling the nostrils as you breathe in, warming the nostrils as you breathe out. 

Then go ahead and let that go. Relax your focus, opening up awareness to cover the entire physical body, all of sensation in this moment. Focusing on the physical body, being open within the scope of this focus. Allowing whatever sensation wants to arise, to arise. Whatever wants to pass, to pass.

And go ahead and relax that. Let go of that narrowing of focus on the body. And at this point you can totally ease up. Letting go of any particular focus in awareness and just allowing awareness to be completely open — not focusing on any one thing whatsoever.

As you stay open in awareness, you'll notice that however open you are, awareness will naturally and spontaneously focus. It will grip on an object such as a physical sensation, a thought in the mind, without your doing it. and you can just notice as this happens. Going from total expanse, total openness, to a spontaneous focus. And as you notice this spontaneous focusing, this spontaneous gripping, you can practice letting go. Letting go of whatever awareness notices in the moment, coming back to open awareness.

And start to notice that in a given moment, whether awareness is focused or open, in any event, you are simply aware. You are present. Whether you're present in a focused and narrowed way, or present in a relaxed and open way, awareness is simply aware. Just take a moment to enjoy this. From this perspective there are no distractions. There's only awareness. There's contractive awareness: tightly focused. There's expansive awareness: totally open. You're always aware. You're always present. You are aware presence itself.

Enjoy the freedom, the natural rhythm of awareness expanding and contracting, as naturally as the tides ebb and flow. As naturally as stars, suns, rise and set over countless planets. Awareness expands, contracts, and you are present. Aware, awake for it all.

End 

Take a moment to give your fingers and toes a wiggle. Let the visual world back into awareness if you've closed your eyes. Stay soft, stay open. Enjoy all of the fullness that is this and every moment. 

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

The Individual and the Collective: A Meditation on Our Porous Nature

I was teaching a retreat a few years ago when a mother shared a really moving story with me. She said that right before the retreat, she was tucking her daughter in for sleep when she had a sense that her daughter was thinking something. So she asked her what she was thinking and her daughter described a really vivid image — the exact same image, it turns out, that had just gone through her mind before she asked her daughter what she was thinking.

It was one of those moments where the common sense of separation totally dissolved. 

We usually think that our thoughts are our thoughts. And in this moment it was really clear to the mother that it wasn't entirely her thought. It was just a thought that was thinking both of them at the same time, so to speak. 

This experience really stuck with me because this particular retreat started off really moody. We had a big group of people at the retreat center, and the weather was dark and the energy of the group felt a little bit sluggish, a little bit weighed down. I felt it just as much as anybody. 

We're all working through this content. We're all feeling so much. And there are moments in life where we recognize that we're actually porous, that we're deeply affected by others, by the environment, and by the entire world. 

Just feel that for a moment. Notice these boundaries that we call the self — maybe the physical borders of our body, or the more subtle borders of our minds. We imagine that we're totally unique and autonomous and even isolated in these boundaries. And yet there are moments in life where it's clear that there's something else going on.

This has some interesting implications. On the one hand, it's amazing that we don't have to be alone — that because we're porous we're not just living our own individual life, but we're living out a life in a collective. We're participating in the life of the world's soul, you might say. But what can be a little scary about that is there's a lot of vulnerability involved. To be porous is to be touchable, reachable, and influenced. 

Notice that for a moment as you breathe. As you feel, you can just notice in this moment what side of the spectrum you seem to be favoring. Do you feel more individual in your experience? Independent? Or do you feel more communal, more merged? 

It's not that feeling independent is undesirable and that feeling communal is desirable. If anything, what's powerful is to just notice this spectrum that's playing out moment to moment. There are times when we feel incredibly self-conscious and closed in on ourselves. And in those moments we can feel very isolated. And there are other moments where we feel totally relaxed and at ease, and our sense of self just expands out, seemingly forever.

The invitation, then, is to bring more attention to your porous nature, so you can notice both of these features. You very much are a unique self with unique gifts to offer those people in your lives, to offer to the entire world. And you're also very porous. You're always a self in relationship to other, in relationship to the whole. And on that level, you're very porous. You're very permeable, you're vulnerable, and yet the vulnerability is what makes possible intimacy and the deepest love. When we return we're going to do a little bit of an awareness practice around these qualities of our experience.

Here’s a meditation you can follow to experience this for yourself.

Start 

Take a moment to allow yourself to just settle in, to arrive more fully in this moment. Notice the shape, the posture of the physical body in this moment, whether in stillness or in motion. Just notice the impact the posture has on this moment, the way the posture of the body colors your experience. 

And you can bring awareness to the emotions. Just notice how you're feeling emotionally in this moment. The quality of emotion in the body. How intense emotion is — maybe very intense, maybe very felt. Maybe very dim. Imperceptible. And you can notice where in the body you're sensing emotion. What volume of space the emotional energy takes up. How it's moving, how it's shifting moment to moment. How do you feel? Just allow yourself to investigate this directly through your awareness.

You can also notice thoughts in the mind. You don't have to get lost in the content of the thoughts, but you can just notice the flow of thought. Whether there are many thoughts, few thoughts, no thoughts. and notice how this colors your experience in this moment as well. Feel the body. Feel the mind. Sense in to the personality the unique person that you are. Just notice what it feels like to be you in this moment.

And then allow awareness to expand, to become more permeable, more porous. Starting with your surroundings. Notice where you are in this moment. And notice the energy, the quality, the essence of the room where you are, or if you're outside somewhere, just allow yourself to soften and be aware of the influence that your immediate environment has on you. Notice the influence you're receiving from your environment.

Now bring awareness to your closest relationships: family, friends. And notice if any of those people are struggling right now. Notice if those struggles weigh on you. You're concerned for them. You're hoping they'll prevail in these challenges. And notice if any of them are on a roll, so to speak. Things are amazing in their lives and you feel a contact high from their success — a vicarious joy.

Open up your awareness to the mood of your nation. Whatever country you come from, whatever country you currently reside in, just see if you can sense into the mood of the nation as a whole. Feel the way you participate in that mood. You affect it and you are affected by it. You give and you receive influence. 

At the most basic level you can sense into your own aliveness in this moment. Just feel that you're alive: breathing, sensing, awake. And you're not the one doing this. In a sense, life is being done to us. It's this gift we continue to receive with each in-breath, with each out-breath. You can open up your awareness to all of life. the vitality in us and through us all that quickens us, that animates us.

Feel the way, in this moment, that you deeply participate in the life of the whole — all life on the planet and all life beyond. Feel how deeply connected you are, and how profoundly unique you are, all at once.

Mantra Meditation — With Audio and Script

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Get the audio version of this mantra meditation.

***

As we get started, I'll invite you to find a place where you can get comfortable, settle in, not be interrupted, and we will begin.

Beginning Bell

Take a moment to just ground in the physical body. Really allow your awareness to totally fill the entire physical body. Like a sponge that's totally soaked through with water, your awareness soaks through the entire body.

As you do this, you can notice any hot spots, any places with tension in the body where you're tight or holding on. And you can just keep breathing. Letting yourself soften. Letting go.

Feel the support of the ground beneath you. Whether you're standing, lying, sitting, just feel your relationship to the ground and as you do that, you can trust your weight even more to the ground. Letting go, softening.

And for a moment I want you to just bring your awareness to the expansion and contraction of the torso. As you breathe in and out. And as we do this today, we're going to work with a mantra — a syllable or word that we repeat to help us pay attention, to help us concentrate.

I'll recommend you use a word that's simple and meaningful to you. You can use "peace," "love," maybe "patience." Just pick a simple word that has a positive meaning and feeling for you. Don't stress over it, any word will do.

Once you've settled on a word, I want you to say it to yourself in your mind as you breathe in and repeat it each time you breathe out.

Just stay with it. If you get distracted that's okay. Just come back to your syllable, your word, repeat it as you breathe in. Repeat it as you breathe out. You don't have to speak it out loud, you can just think it, softly as you breathe — as the breath breathes you.

For any given period of meditation, it can take a little while to settle in. So as you notice discomfort in the body and thoughts in the mind, just recognize that that's content that the body and mind are in the process of letting go of. They're not problems. You're just releasing.

[silence]

Stay with the breath. On the in-breath saying this word in your mind. And on the out-breath, repeating the same word. Just allowing your attention to be rapt. Allowing yourself to become curious, fascinated by this experience.

As thoughts come up in awareness you can just let them come up in the background of awareness. Not making a problem of them, just staying with your focus. Letting the breath breathe you. Letting the syllable, letting the mantra just flow. 

The longer we practice, the deeper we practice. Just give yourself time to settle in.

[silence]

Good. Stay with it. Go ahead and let that go and just allow yourself to do nothing. If awareness wants to expand you can let it expand. If awareness becomes focused on this or that, you can just allow it to focus. Awareness opens and focuses is natural as the movement of the in-breath and the out-breath. You don't have to exert any control or any effort. Just do nothing for another moment. Whatever happens happens. If you catch yourself trying to do something you can just let it go. 

Ending Bell

Give yourself a moment to start to open your eyes. You can give your fingers and toes a little wiggle, opening up your awareness to the space around you and enjoying this moment of plainness, of ordinariness — immersing yourself in this awareness, the light of mind that is always available.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash