Cultivate Heartfulness: Live And Meditate With Heart

This lesson describes the layout of this course on cultivating heartfulness in your inner practices and outer life and describes the five key areas of focus (or states of being) we will be exploring. It includes a mini-meditation presence to come into the presence of your heart and bring a felt-sense of fullness there.

Simply put, meditation is a way of tuning in deeply to something which is important to us, for a short while that, after we engage with it, shifts us in positive, and sometimes surprising, ways. In this lesson, you are reminded of your own spontaneous experiences of meditation and how they are guided from your heart and what it loves and from which it finds nourishment and healing. You will learn how to harness this intuitive power as you move through life and in your own personal inner practice. I offer a simple understanding of, and technique for, heart-centred, embodied meditation.

In this session, we learn about neuroplasticity, our negative brain bias and how practicing heartfulness corrects this natural imbalance.we're going to touch very simply and briefly on the key ways in which meditating this way helps us collaborate with our nervous systems natural desire to heal and repair and recharge, and in particular, how we can harness the power of meditation to change our emotional states and our behaviour, and as a way of meeting the challenge that all humans have - of managing our stresses and dealing with our fears, such that life isn't ruled by them, and we can still sink into the vivid presence of things like ease, and joy, magic and love.

We are ready to explore our first foundation practice area. Cultivating a safe home base is an instinct that all animals and humans have in order to fill a fundamental primal need. In this lesson, you are invited to tune into experiences of feeling safe, at home and at ease in your own body. We learn the powerful benefits of having repeated experiences of internalising a sense of security, for our psychological safety and healing capacity, and to feel safe to live in an open heart.

In this lesson we practice a guided meditation, set to music, that uses some tools and techniques implied in heartfulness and embodiment. As we feel ourselves come off adrenaline and land in an internal space of home and safety, We use affirmations and the mantra "Hello Friend, Welcome Home"

This lesson allows you to reflect on the practice you just did and how it felt in your body. It summarises the tools that were used and encourages you to use these in your own practices and to adopt this practice as necessary. It suggests ways we can use our heart's guidance to bring a more felt sense of "home" in our lives, and a home base to return to, whatever is coming up for us.

Every human deserves and benefits from feeling welcomed and accepted just as they are, rather than being seen as someone with faults and being offered kindness and respect and being forgiven for the mistakes they make. I this lesson, we explore how important the heart qualities of compassion and welcome are, as we prepare to practice these in the next guided meditation.

In this meditation we use conscious, heartful qualities of awareness to embody a welcoming, accepting and cherishing self-approach. We especially practice tending to our inner life and all our parts with gentle curiosity and spaciousness. We use embodiment techniques to stay close to ourselves and have a felt sense of relaxing into our beings without having to change a thing about ourselves in the moment.

In this short lesson, we reflect on the practice we just did and how it felt in our body. We remember the way we accessed our heart's qualities to create a felt sense of the experience we wanted to have - that of meeting ourselves and our humanity with a flow of grace.

In this lesson, we learn how our hearts guide us into the presence of goodness and can open up to receive and benefit from the good things in our lives. We remember the things that literally magnetise our hearts and how we can use this awareness and our simple technique of lingering and absorbing, to correct our tendency to over-focus on worries or threats.

In this lesson we practice meditating with all the sources of goodness that are flowing in our lives and being in the presence of that goodness with the fullness of our hearts and the entirety of our beings. We continue to practice with our simple definition for meditation and use techniques to install the goodness we are calling in.

This lesson offers you ways to reflect on your experience of meditating with the heartful focus of soaking up goodness. It reminds you of some of the specific techniques you brought in and reminds you to keep following your heart and its access to so much that is kind, uplifting and inspiring.

One of the most beautiful heart-qualities we have is that of peace, so part of cultivating heartfulness must involve creating more peaceful spaces in our lives. While our hearts may be guiding us to taking restorative breaks, our minds can guilt or punish us into accumulating more stress.In this lesson, we learn about why our nervous system needs us to pay attention to our heart's desire for peace, resting and healing. We learn how anxiety and worries create a chemical load on our body that resting in a peaceful heart, for even a short amount of time, can dissolve away.

This lesson is a guided practice to help you "be" rather than do - something that our heart is craving in order to recharge. It uses the "Do Nothing technique" where you allow yourself to have some time completely with yourself and your inner world and whatever is arising, letting your inner energies do do their natural drifting daydreaming, remembering, planning or just drifting off. This can feel delicious and relaxing and is a practice which can strengthen us when it comes to putting in boundaries to protect our sacred energy.

In this lesson we reflect on the practice and whether we encountered any resistance. We learn about where that resistance may come from and how to challenge it by giving our bodies repeated beneficial experiences of allowing our wise hearts to govern our schedule, not our pushy minds. We learn about the health benefits of doing so and particularly the value of daydreaming and how some meditation instructions are not helpful when it comes to allowing ourselves to "do nothing".

This lesson explores the beautiful and life-changing qualities of love and kindness. We remember how capable our hearts ae of generating the qualities of compassion and self-compassion and how these resource us with a potent suite of inner strengths. We learn how acts of loving kindness that touch us become stored in our blood and in our marrow, to be accessed at times when we need the strength and comfort they deliver and we begin to explore how to initiate that flow, and install it, in practice.

In this meditation, adapted from the work of Chris Germer of the Centre for Mindful Self-Compassion, we use the three universal expressions of compassion: soft gaze, soothing touch and gentle vocalisations, and we behave towards ourselves the way we usually behave towards others when we offer them love and compassion.

In this lesson we reflect on how we felt before, during and after that loving presence practice. We consider how consciously installing loving kindness might benefit our hearts and lives. We consider ways you might adapt the practice and the many ways that we can bring these memories of love that are stored inside of us into more vivid presence

Our final audio allows you to reflect on your journey overall, now that you have completed the course. It offers some key reminders of what you have learned and how to integrate them into your life, as well as encouraging you to share your discoveries with others, using the comments boxes. I give you details of where to find my resources here on Insight Timer and let you know that I would love those of us taking this journey in heartfulness to enrich the experience by getting into conversation in the comments, at live events, and/or in my group Alison Potts- Light walkers Collective. Thank you - from my heart to yours.