7: Heart-centered Meditation

Perhaps the most significant difficulty with our first spiritual exercise is the lack of a clear target.  If there were a clear ‘X-marks-the-spot’ target for your meditation, you could focus your attention there, and you probably would have felt more successful.  At the very least, you could tell when you stayed on the target and when it eluded you.  But what kind of target does the Presence of God present to you?  Is it some image of the Divine?  Is it a particular kind of inner feeling?  Or something else entirely?

There was actually a good reason behind this lack of specificity.  If you had some kind of clear target, instead of pursuing the actual real Presence, you would likely imagine something.  Something that you thought fulfilled the parameters of your search.  The only thing that could be said of such an imagining is that it is a fantasy – something that does not exist in reality.  What a terrible way to start your journey toward that which Is, the ultimate Reality behind everything we observe and take as reality.

The truth is, we humans have this marvelous ability to perceive patterns – to fill in the blanks, so to speak, with what we believe completes the pattern.  Let me give you a simple numerical example:  1,  2,  3,  __.  Now, fill in the blank…

Most probably inserted a ‘4’, but how did you come to that number?   You guessed, right?  You assumed it was an ascending numerical sequence, and the single space indicated a single digit, so you assumed ‘4’.  But maybe I was giving the last four digits of my phone number, or my social security number, or something else.  There was no way of knowing without more information, so you hallucinated a number to fit.

While this ability to make and perceive patterns is helpful in many situations, it becomes a liability in our search for the Divine.  It is, I believe, the primary reason why there are so many radically different ideas about God.  Sadly, almost all of these ideas lead us astray.  If nothing else, none of our thoughts begin to encompass the vastness and majesty of the Divine.

That said, we humans struggle with vagueness.  I remember working with a woman who had wrestled with an unidentified chronic illness for years.  She was terribly depressed because her doctors could not find a diagnosis.  One day, she

came into my office all smiles, just glowing with happiness.  “They finally figured it out,” she said with a grin.  “I have stage four pancreatic cancer!”

This was a virtual death sentence, yet it made her very happy.  Finally, she had something concrete and real.  Never mind that it meant her death; the certainty made her happy.

So how can we use our need for certainty in our quest?  How can we create a target that is easier to work with, but one that doesn’t compromise our search right at the get-go?

To answer this, we need to look at our spiritual forebears.   All of the great religions talk about a spiritual center in our bodies in the region of our heart.  They say that the place where the Divine is most accessible to us is in this spiritual heart center.  Several Christian mystics have stated that the veils which separate us from God are most transparent in the spiritual center of our heart.

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), an Eastern Orthodox saint, taught that we can experience the Divine directly, in the region of the heart.  He was working from a very ancient practice, the Jesus Prayer, which originated with the Desert Fathers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.  (More on the Jesus Prayer later).  In Western Christendom, the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing also describes the heart as the primary focal point for contemplative prayer.

Of specific interest to us, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing invites his reader to put “a cloud of forgetting” beneath him – letting go of everything that might distract him from the love of God.  Then, he invites us to put a “cloud of unknowing” between ourselves and God.  He rightly says that we can never ‘know’ God like we can know the objects around us.  Better to not speculate, then, and to place oneself in the presence of God and rest there, without fabricating ideas or emotions about the experience.  And that, of course, was the point of our first spiritual exercise.

Moving forward, we can make our spiritual journey easier, quicker, and more productive by centering our attention in our hearts.  So, let me introduce you to the practice of heart-centered meditation.

Heart-Centered Meditation

1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed.  Turn off your cell phone and deal with other potential distractions.

2. Be seated in a chair, with your spine upright and your feet flat on the floor, cradling your right hand in your left.  Don’t cross your legs or ankles, and don’t interlace your fingers because they are likely to fall asleep, which will distract you from your practice.

3. Close your eyes and focus your attention within your body.  Simply observe, and refrain from judging what you experience there.

4. Notice the flow of your thoughts and emotions.  No need to chase after them or elaborate.  Just observe.

5. Notice the flow of sensations through your body.  No need to get caught up in them.  Again, just observe what is.

6. Now, gently bring your attention to the region of your heart.  Most start with feeling their attention in their head, where we think the self or ego lives.  Gently feel your attention move slowly down through your neck, your shoulders, letting it come to rest in the center of your chest, in the region of your heart.

7. When you feel it come to rest here, open your heart to the Presence of the Divine.   

8. Rest here without moving for the period of your meditation.

9. When you are distracted, bring your attention back to your heart and rest here with God.

10. When you are ready, let the feeling come back into your feet, your hands, and your face.  Take a deep breath and open your eyes.

If you have difficulty moving your attention out of your head, first feel the sphere of energy around your head.  Then imagine that sphere descending about an inch or so with every breath you take.  When that sphere reaches the center of your chest, imagine reaching out from your heart to someone you love.  Then reach out to another and another, and still another.  This tends to anchor your attention in your spiritual heart center.

I have had people say they can’t move their attention out of their head because that is where it is supposed to be.  That’s a common misperception.  If you have ever stubbed your toe, barked your shin on something, or hit your fingers while hammering a nail, you know this is just not true.  When you stub your toe, ALL of your attention is suddenly focused on the hurt toe.  There isn’t even a particle of attention left to think about anything else.  It’s just that we don’t pay much attention to what is actually going on inside of us.  When you start noticing what is happening within yourself, you will start to see some amazing things.

With practice, you will come to know your inner world.  As you become more familiar with your heart center, your ability to focus without interruption will gradually increase.  As you let go of your thoughts and emotions, you will experience a certain stillness in your inner world, a stillness that is free from your ego driving this thought and that one.  It will happen momentarily at first, and then will gradually lengthen and become more frequent.

This is not something you can force.  You can’t say to yourself, ‘Stop chasing that thought,’ and expect to be successful.  Why not?  Well, stop and observe what part of you is doing the talking.  It’s your ego that is attempting to exert power and direct your mental traffic here.  And guess what – your ego is not likely to participate in its own demise.

This is the paradox of spiritual work.  You have to find a way to go deeper inside to find the Divine dwelling within, but the tool you have always used to get things done – your ego – is not effective here.  Remember what happens with seeds that are planted?  The seed has to die in order for the new growth to occur.  The same happens in the spiritual realm as well.

I want to encourage you to start a daily meditation practice.  If you are new to this, try meditating for just five minutes several times a day.  If you are faithful with this, you will find your meditations spontaneously lengthening.  As this occurs, you may want to reduce the number of times you meditate each day.  You will really start to notice internal changes as you are able to meditate for twenty minutes or more at a time.  It seems to take most of us about twenty minutes or so for the ego to stop its attempts to distract us.

And remember, our Lord is with us, at all times and in all places.  All we need to do is let go to experience this deepest of all realities…