Hello and welcome to meditation with Janet Stone.
We'll be focusing a meditation on the hridayam.
This is the heart and it's the spiritual heart really more than the literal heart.
So with the hridayam it is that which is healing to the heart.
And so this meditation in a sense a journey back in toward our heart center,
The spiritual heart of our being.
So give yourself an opportunity to take a seat.
If you'd prefer to rest back into say a supported supta baddha konasana that is fine as well.
Some place where you can feel opening around the heart.
As you come seated I will offer three oms.
Once you're seated or having the space where you can rest back and feel the space around the heart.
If you're in seated or even resting back bring the backs of the hands on the knees or the thighs.
Or if you're all the way resting back on the inner thighs,
Palms facing up.
Here curling your pointer finger in toward the base of your thumb.
And then the thumbs reach over to the middle finger and the ring finger.
This is hridaya mudra,
A seal,
An energetic imprint.
It really marks this hridayam,
The spiritual heart of our being.
If it's easier for you to imagine it as the pumping heart of your being that's fine.
But really in the hridaya it's this center of us that is beyond duality,
Beyond our preferences,
Really beyond definition as well.
As you sit here the breath comes in and moves out with ease.
So no force,
Just ease.
We take a rest,
A pause from the busy of the mind,
All of the ways in which we try to maneuver,
Manage,
Even manipulate the world around us.
Even ourselves,
Trying to fit ourselves in some box,
Some form that we imagine we're supposed to be.
And instead in this moment we drop into what is here in our being,
What is the center of this experience of being in this body at this particular moment in time in our life and in this world.
A softening of all of your cells,
A softening of tension through the face,
The jaw,
The eyes.
Imagining you can take a journey from the thinking mind into the journey of the heart,
Path that you must wind to get there,
To arrive at a place where you can rest at ease between past and future,
Between winning and losing,
Up and down.
On the journey back to the heart,
Returning again and again.
It's easy to get distracted and pulled back into our thoughts,
Into judgment of yes and no,
I'm there,
I'm not there,
I've arrived,
I haven't even begun.
So we keep that movement back to the heart,
The attention to return back to this nature of ourselves that is beyond who we think we are,
How we think it is.
When you arrive at this home of the heart,
Space that is possibly visioned as a golden light or a place of warmth and complete understanding of yourself,
Of your relationship from the spiritual heart,
From the hrudaya,
That emanation back out,
We call in the pranavayus,
The vyanavayu,
This coming from center and expanding back out.
So as we open our eyes and move back into our relationship with the world and those around us,
We carry with us a sense of the center point and get lost in our own reactivities,
Someone else's reactivity,
That maybe we have a clearer path back to the center.
So you can bring yourself seated if you were resting back.
If you're resting back,
Slowly bring the hands to prayer at the heart.
Let the thumbs rest on the sternum so you feel some sense of this inner capacity within you to hold all things,
Making a prayer to your own heart,
Remembering to return to it as often as possible.
And thank you for joining me in this moment of meditation,
This moment where we pause from all the movement,
Drop into the heart center,
Then we get to move out and emanate from there,
Deep om to the hrudayam,
The illumination of our own heart and awareness of om hrudayam hrudayam hrudayam om.
