So my name is Victoria Angel Hart,
And I'm a sacred musician and a mindfulness guide,
And I have a business called Head Into Heart Space where I work one-on-one with people to do mindful life resets,
And I do group coaching programs as well.
I'm really excited to be here on the Insight Timer.
So the practice that we will be doing for the next 50 or so minutes is called Calm Your Mind,
Open Your Heart.
And I created it about four years ago.
I've been professionally teaching meditation for that long,
And it was one of the first practices that came,
Just truly came through me,
And I recognized,
Wow,
Okay,
My purpose here is just to be the conduit of love,
The instrument of grace,
And to let things flow through me as they will.
And what came through in this practice of calming your mind and opening your heart is about the practice of allowance.
I used to be a really high-strung,
Stressed-out,
Busy professional,
And I had insomnia,
And I had chronic pain,
I had binge-eating disorder,
And I was really struggling.
I was overweight,
I wasn't sleeping,
I was miserable.
And when I found mindfulness,
It changed my entire life,
And it enabled me to free my voice,
To find my authentic truth,
And it helped me for the first time in my life to calm down my racing thoughts and to stop trying all the time to be good enough,
To prove myself as worthy.
Can anyone relate to any of what I've been sharing?
Because I know that I work with clients a lot who have had similar stories of really struggling,
And now that the pandemic has been happening and many people are isolated,
There's even more of that just incessant mind chatter.
And I wanna offer this as a respite.
For the next almost hour,
You have the opportunity to let go of being a human doing things,
And instead,
You can come back into yourself,
Into your true nature as a human being.
There's nothing for you to do and nowhere for you to go during this practice,
Unless you have something to do and somewhere to go,
And you're just tuning in for a few minutes,
In which case,
Cool,
Let that be.
But until you get to that point where you have something to do and somewhere to go,
My invitation is for you to give yourself permission to pause,
Permission to slow down,
And to let go of having to figure it all out.
We're not going to solve any problems in the next hour.
We're not going to fix anything,
And at the same time,
We are going to create a shift in our reality.
So my invitation for you is to perhaps put your phone down.
There is nothing for you to look at while we practice together.
You don't have to see my face.
You don't have to leave any comments if you don't want to.
Let me grab my water,
Excuse me.
You can put your phone down,
And you can really just drop in,
Ah,
And rest.
If you have kids,
Maybe you've just put them to bed if you're over on the East Coast.
Maybe you're finally getting a moment of free time to yourself.
Maybe you've just stopped working for the day,
Or maybe it's morning and you're just getting going wherever you are.
Regardless of what has been happening until this point,
My offering to you is to let it all be.
Let it all be in the past,
And see if perhaps just for this moment,
You can invite in a little more ease into your life.
Giving yourself permission to calm your mind.
Sometimes when there's a lot of stress going on around us,
In particular in the US around the election and yesterday's Supreme Court confirmation and many of the other distressing events that are happening in our country and then around the world,
It can be especially challenging to calm your mind because you can't make sense of what's going on.
It might feel frustrating.
There might be some hopelessness or despair.
There might be some visualizing of what you wish was happening.
There are all of these ways that our minds are active as a way of protecting us.
We think that if we just keep thinking about it,
Something will change.
Yet I'm here to remind you that you can only control what is inside of your locus of control.
And oftentimes,
One of the only things we can truly control are our thoughts.
I shared this in a class I taught last night and I'll say it again now.
Thoughts are not facts.
Our thoughts are our perceptions and we have a lot of thoughts that come through our brain every day.
And as we start to calm our minds,
Something ironic happens.
We actually get busier minds.
We think,
Okay,
I'm gonna settle down now.
I'm gonna stop thinking.
I'm meditating.
I'm gonna calm down.
I want my thoughts to go away,
Like make them stop.
I'm trying to be quiet.
And then we just go down that rabbit hole.
Has that ever happened to you?
If you're still looking at your phone,
You can send a like or a comment if that resonates with you.
If you try to calm your mind and in trying to calm your mind,
You actually make it more active.
I know that's been true for many of my students around the world for many years.
And I remember when I started living at a Buddhist monastery,
I would be so distressed and go to my teacher and ask her like,
Why can't I just be quiet?
Why is my mind so active?
And she just laughed and she said,
That's just what minds do.
And in that moment,
There was such freedom of recognizing that our minds are always doing what they were meant to do,
Which is to think,
Which is to keep us safe,
Which is to propagate the human species,
All of those things that the mind does.
Wow,
It's actually really profound when you think about it.
And we now have the opportunity to shift consciously because the mind has been doing what the mind does because the mind thinks that's all it can do.
You've been conditioned to have certain thoughts,
Certain patterns,
Certain behaviors throughout your whole life.
And we use mindfulness as a tool to interrupt those thoughts,
To interrupt these habitual conditioned ways of thinking that aren't always serving us,
That are actually oftentimes keeping us stuck and holding us back and keeping us from really living in joy,
In presence and in love.
And if you're here on the Insight Timer,
You're probably familiar with what I'm saying and you recognize that,
Yeah,
My thoughts cause me to suffer.
And when we calm our minds and open our hearts,
We're bringing in a state of presence that allows us to let go of suffering.
We're not creating anymore by reacting unconsciously.
We are responding from a place of inner wisdom,
From a place of our higher or wiser self.
And we can access that in many ways.
And one way in particular is the breath.
So I'm going to sing a song from my Buddhist teacher,
Thich Nhat Hanh.
And the song is called In Out Deep Slow.
And we'll practice a little bit with this song.
In out deep slow,
Calm ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
And you can actually give your thoughts something to think about as you focus on the quality of the breath in your body.
So you're really feeling as you breathe in,
Feeling yourself breathing in.
And as you breathe out,
Feeling yourself breathing out.
And then as you breathe in,
Letting your breath deepen.
As you breathe out,
Letting your breath slow.
And continuing on.
And I'm actually going to turn off my light that I have here,
Cause it's giving me a bit of a headache.
So I apologize if that makes it harder for you to see me,
But I have to take good care of my own body as I take care of all of our hearts and minds here for this practice.
So as I sing,
I allow you,
I allow you.
That's not what I meant at all.
My head is kind of hurting.
Let me take a second and breathe.
I invite you to allow yourself to find more rest and more ease.
And that might mean closing your eyes.
That might mean laying down.
That might mean uncrossing your legs.
Sometimes we have these notions of what it means to be a good meditator.
One of them being,
You must sit up very tall with your legs crossed in full lotus,
With your eyes closed and not thinking.
Only then are you really meditating.
And I just want to name that.
That does not have to be your reality.
That is one conditioned belief around meditating.
And I invite you to let go of that belief and get comfortable because it's when you are in a position of ease and comfort that you give your body and your mind the opportunity to relax and you invite in open-hearted presence in your heart.
So I'm gonna take a drink and then I'm gonna start singing and if you know this song,
I invite you to sing along and if you don't,
Just let it come in and just really remember the words of the song are about the breath.
So as you hear the words,
Follow along with what they're saying and notice the breath as it's flowing in your body.
Let me know about the volume if at any point you need me to change it.
In,
Out,
Deep,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
In,
Out,
Deep,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
So we can calm our minds by giving them something to focus on that's not ruminating on thoughts.
Rather than being worried about what's gonna happen in the future,
Rather than being caught up in wishing we could change the past or rather than staying stuck in judgment of what's happening right now,
We can offer presence through open awareness of what's actually happening,
Letting go of having to figure anything out and just being with our experience in our body and in our breath.
So as I sing this song again,
I invite you to deepen your attention even more as you hear the words to really feel and experience the breath in your body as a way of calming your mind.
In,
Out,
Deep,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
In,
Out,
Deep,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
And beginning to notice if there's been any subtle changes in your body,
Noticing if you feel any more calm,
Any more ease,
And seeing if perhaps you are in your body even a little bit more than before this practice started.
We are having a human experience,
And part of that is being human,
Embodied,
Not just these brains up here thinking.
So feeling in to your body,
And feeling into your breath,
Our breath tells us so much.
It's really clear about our state of being based on our breath,
Which is really miraculous.
If you actually pay attention,
When you're feeling different emotions,
Your breath shows up in different ways,
And we can actually consciously regulate the breath.
And one way I love to do that through building heart coherence is by placing one hand on the belly.
And as you breathe in,
Being aware of your hand as it rises,
And as you breathe out,
Being aware of your hand as it falls.
Breathing in,
Your hand rises.
Breathing out,
Your hand falls.
So we'll continue calming our minds by giving them something to focus on,
Letting them focus on the feeling of the breath,
On the rise and the fall.
And I'm going to count to six,
And you don't have to count along,
But just follow.
Breathe in for six and out for six as you focus on the breath as it rises and falls.
Taking a clearing breath by breathing in and then sighing out and making a sound,
Letting go.
Ah.
Breathing in,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
In,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Taking a second and doing that on your own.
Just noticing the breath as it rises in your belly,
Feeling your hand,
And noticing the experience of the breath as it leaves.
And in this practice of calm your mind,
Open your heart,
We shift now up from the belly where we focused on using the breath,
Using the body to calm the mind,
Up into the heart center.
So I invite you to bring one hand up to your heart and just let it rest there.
And just breathe and notice the subtle rise and fall of your chest as you breathe And with your hand that's on your heart,
Just tuning into your heart and recognizing that below all of these emotions that are always shifting,
The fear,
Anxiety,
Stress,
Anger,
Sadness,
All of those emotions,
There lies within you a basic goodness.
That is your true nature.
Really,
Below all those things that you wish you could change about yourself and all the ways you're your worst self-critic,
All the conditioned ways you've been told that you're not enough or not worthy,
Still beneath all of that,
Here in your heart center lies the truth,
The essence,
Your basic goodness,
Your natural open-hearted presence.
And you can access this place.
And often it's easy to access when you call in a feeling of gratitude,
A feeling of appreciation,
A feeling of compassion.
It could be for yourself or for another person or for life,
Or it could just be feeling the elevated emotion,
It could be more relaxing,
Just feeling into the ease and the peace and the goodness.
So however you'd like to access it,
See if that feels possible,
Even the tiniest bit for you right now.
And now as you let your attention rest here to open your heart,
I invite you to feel the goodness that you are.
Fill up your heart as you breathe in.
And as you breathe out,
Let it wash through each cell of your body.
It's a simple practice,
But it's really profound when you feel into the experience.
You feel it as gratitude,
As joy,
Love,
Bliss,
Compassion,
Appreciation,
However it shows up for you,
Just letting it be there.
Feeling it fill you up as you breathe in and then letting it flow through you as you breathe out.
And I'll count to six again and you just focus on your open-hearted presence,
Filling up with goodness and letting it flow as you open your heart.
So breathing in,
Releasing,
Letting go with a clearing breath.
And breathing in with the attention on the heart.
In,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
In,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Out,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Six.
Continuing on at your own pace,
Feeling the goodness flow through you,
Feeling the goodness fill you up.
Just resting for a few moments in this place of having a calm mind and an open heart.
And to end our practice together today,
I'm going to offer that song one more time,
Perhaps letting it sink in a little bit deeper as you rest.
The words are in,
Out,
Deep,
Slow,
Calm,
Ease,
Smile,
Release,
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.
So you can continue staying in this place of rest,
Feeling your calm mind and your open heart.
Or if you need to,
You can begin to invite movement back into your body,
Perhaps even singing along.
