meditation – Eos In Love

A meditation to keep your heart open to those who have hurt you

One of the biggest challenges we face in a relationship with those we love is the occasional misunderstanding or conflict that results in an emotional wound. We are wired to seek connection with others, and it feels so good when we find it. When we feel the rift of disconnection separate us from those we love, even if it is just for a moment, we can find ourselves wanting to close our hearts and retreat into ourselves. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable means that we allow ourselves to get hurt. It seems like a paradox. On one hand, we work hard to treat ourselves well and expect the same from others; and yet, we know that by consciously allowing ourselves to be hurt by others, we often experience our greatest growth.

There is not a single person alive today who does not know what it is like to have their feelings hurt by someone who he or she loves. We all have various coping mechanisms when this happens, and some of us are better at moving forward than others. How we deal with it depends on the person who hurt us, the degree of hurt we feel, and the nature of the hurt. Often, our suffering comes mostly from our own minds and attachments to what we think another person’s intentions are. Our egos can use moments like this, when we feel vulnerable, to rise up and reinforce certain illusions like “I am not worthy”, “Why does everyone end up doing this to me”, or “I should have known better”. We then project intense feelings of bitterness or disappointment onto the person who has hurt us, often out of proportion to their true intention. It is so important to catch ourselves in these emotional states, because we can lash out or withdraw from the person we love to such an extent that we in turn hurt them.

So the question becomes, how do we keep our hearts open to someone we love, who has hurt our feelings?

For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, the answer will come as no surprise. It is to simply breathe. It’s a hard thing to remember when we are caught up in our emotions, but becoming aware of your breath when encountering hurtful situations will help you get through them. Taking even, deep breaths during these times might even feel like you are actually breathing in the hurt, and this is ok. In fact, allowing yourself to breathe in the hurt, to feel it fully in your whole being, is the first step in letting it go. Breathe your way through the conflict, and then when you can take some time to yourself, consider the following meditative practice.

The Buddhist meditation called ‘tonglen‘ focuses on breathing in your suffering, and breathing out your happiness and blessings to others. This might feel counterintuitive at first, but it is a way of connecting yourself to anyone and everyone who might be feeling just as you are in the moment. And I can assure you, there is no hurt that you have ever felt where you have been alone. Someone, somewhere out in the world, has felt the exact same thing. In the depths of any suffering you might be experiencing, you are not alone. Ultimately, the situations that hurt us the most with others are the ones that make us feel suddenly severed from them, cut off from the warmth of their understanding and love. Whether this occurs in a new friendship, or with a spouse of fifty years, the nature of the hurt is the same. It is rooted in disconnection. While their words or actions might legitimately have caused us pain, it’s the feeling of disconnect that comes from it that creates the emotional wound. Practicing tonglen during these times is difficult, but reminds us we are not alone. We are never truly disconnected from anyone; we only perceive that we are.
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Below are the steps you can use to keep your heart open during times of conflict with a loved one:

1. When you feel the familiar sting of emotional pain, acknowledge its presence.
2. Identity where you feel the pain in your body, and then take a deep breath in.
3. Breathe in the pain, deeply, visualizing it entering your heart.
4. Breathe out from your heart your blessings to everyone feeling as you are right now.
5. Allow any emotions to arise, and any physical reaction you might have to them, such as crying.
6. After several breaths, give thanks for yourself and the courage you showed in allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

As you work towards staying vulnerable and open, especially when you want to close yourself off and retreat from the world, be kind to yourself. It’s important not to judge yourself and your reactions, but to merely observe them. By practicing vulnerability in the face of emotional wounds, you are actually opening yourself up to feeling deeper levels of joy and love. This is ultimately the gift in our pain – it is the key that unlocks the hidden rooms deep in our hearts that have been empty and gathering dust, simply because we didn’t know they were there. Keeping yourself open to those who have hurt you will allow you to consciously inhabit your own heart.

Inner Balance: Meditate like a video game

If you are new to meditation, you might be finding that it’s not as easy as it looks. It seems great on the outside, sitting in lotus with your eyes closed, but on the inside there’s a wild monkey rattling the cages of your brain, wanting your attention. For some reason, the quieter you get, the louder he gets, until you give up in frustration.

Or, you might find that meditation is an excellent practice….for falling asleep. The minute your body relaxes, you zonk out, snoring and/or drooling slightly until you fall over and the floor wakes you up.

These experiences are normal, and part of the process for many meditators. There is no goal in meditation. You aren’t any more successful on a day when you find perfect stillness compared to a day when your whole practice has been spent worrying. With that said, I do understand the feelings of disappointment and struggle that arise, because I have often felt them myself. I encourage you to keep up your practice, but I also want to share with you a tool I have used to supplement my meditation practice, developed by the Institute of HeartMath.

The Institute of HeartMath (IHM) is an internationally recognized research and education organization focused on understanding the role of the heart’s electrical activity in our overall emotional and physical health. The heart generates its own spontaneous, measurable, electrical field that has been shown to be affected by our internal emotional states. The term “coherence” describes the state in which our positive emotions affect this electrical activity, which in turn is associated with a beneficial physiologic state in the body. This is a relaxation state, associated with stress resilience, improved hormonal balance, and a variety of other health benefits. You can learn the quick coherence technique here, which I highly recommend for everyone, whether you meditate or not. You can use the technique to develop stress resilience, as preparation for meditation, or as a meditation itself.

If you want to go a step further, you might be interested in the devices IHM makes that provide biofeedback information about your level of coherence. (The sign of a true nerd is if the word “biofeedback” gets your heart racing with excitement, like mine does). Inner Balance is my favorite tool to use to practice coherence. I find the visual display to be stunning. It’s about $100, which is pricey but not as expensive as the other devices IHM makes. Right now it is only compatible with Apple products like the iPhone, iPod and iPad, but when I talked to IHM’s founder, Doc Childre, last year, he said the eventual plan would be to adapt it for Android products. The device itself is a heart rate sensor that plugs into your Apple device, with an app that you can download from iTunes. It’s extremely simple to use, and portable (which for me is a huge plus.)

You begin each session by calling to mind a positive thought, feeling the accompanying emotions, and then focusing on this state for as long as you can. As you can see below, the colors are vivid and the graphics are very pleasing to the eye, which definitely helps when trying to stay in a positive state. You can see your real time heart rate variability, and each session’s data is recorded so you can measure progress over time. As you focus on the positive thought, the device monitors your level of coherence with the colors red (low), blue (medium) and green (high).

There are additional views of the same information, if you prefer a different look:
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Your heart rate variability is recorded, along with your pulse and your level of coherence, which is translated into a numeric score and charted on a graph. Throughout the session, you receive this biofeedback information so that you can learn how to subtly shift yourself from low to high coherence. The visual display you choose to look at is up to you; I tend to prefer the very first image. While I love the graphs, I find that when I switch to the data view, my coherence drops a level. The waterfall provides a soothing image for those who would rather not see the shifting graphs and colors of the other views.

I will say that while the biofeedback is great, any tendency to criticize your “performance” is not. The biofeedback is merely to provide you with information; the information itself is neutral. If you find yourself feeling competitive or disappointed if you don’t reach the coherence scores you want to, then using this as meditation would be counter productive. But if you can remain detached from the outcome, and remain focused on a state of positive coherence, then this can be a very effective (and fun!) way to practice meditation. Five to ten minutes daily can be enough practice to help you reach a state of inner balance. Used as meditation or not, the device trains you to tune into your inner emotional states so that you can shift yourself into a positive, relaxed state more easily.

So if you are struggling to meditate, check out this device and see if it might work for you. It can help you improve your stillness and focus, which will aid in any formal meditation practice you commit to later.

(Disclaimer: I do not receive any monetary compensation from Institute of HeartMath for recommending their products.)

Meditation in Motion

I can’t stress enough how important a meditation practice is to develop. In a world filled with deadlines, obligations and distractions, we can so easily lose sight of ourselves. We can get caught living “out there”, and become a stranger to our own thoughts and feelings. Or worse yet, we become acquainted with the thoughts of feelings from everyone around us, as if they are our own. Meditation is the one practice that I would recommend hands down, above any others, for improvement in our health.

With that said, one of the most difficult obstacles to meditating regularly is figuring out what meditation even is. I’m sure most of you imagine it involves sitting in the lotus position on your floor, maybe with a lit candle and burning incense off to the side, while closing your eyes and chanting “Om”. While that actually is a very effective practice, it might not be right of you in this moment. Part of the benefits of a meditative practice is getting to know yourself. Dusting off your intuition and putting it to use. You might find that while the idea of sitting in stillness with your eyes closed appeals to you, you just aren’t ready for that yet.

Meditation can take many forms. The key element is that in whatever form you choose, it must allow stillness of the mind so that you can bring your awareness into the present moment. You want a practice that allows you to physically relax while you mentally focus, that allows you to let go of burdens as you sharpen your mind. Any practice that facilitates this process will be the right meditation for you.

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Other physical activities can also be meditation in motion. In fact, anything you do has the potential to be meditative, as long as you are able to commit to mindful movement. This means that your total attention is placed on what you are doing. Whether you are taking a walk, or washing the dishes, with your full awareness you can reap all the benefits of a sitting meditation practice.

If you want to meditate and don’t know how, or have tried to sit still and just couldn’t focus, why not start with an activity you already do frequently? Pick something you do daily, and start to bring your full awareness to the activity while incorporating your breath. Observe yourself consciously carrying out the motion. These little changes can go a long way in creating the foundation for a meditative practice. When you are ready, your sitting meditation practice will be waiting for you.