When we understand the meaning of anything we do in meditation, or anything else in life really, it increases the outcome of the meditation and provides greater benefits. So why should we focus on meditation to open your heart?
When we relax the heart, it opens the brain. Brain waves then can build upon brain waves.
Most of us use only about 4-7% of their brain at any one time. But when we practice opening our heart, we are actually using our brain at about a 26-27% capacity.
We’ve all been bruised. We’ve all experienced hardship and heartache. We’ve all been under stress. But no organism can continuously live in a state of stress or Fight-Flight-Freeze for long periods of time. If we do, we are headed for disease.
What most of us don’t realize is that thoughts alone can turn on the Fight-Flight-Freeze response. Most often, we aren’t even aware that we are living in a state of constant or chronic stress. This state of being has become so commonplace that we actually aren’t even aware there’s another way to live.
The long term effects of living in a state of chronic stress will cause some of our systems to become dysregulated and ultimately downgrade our cells. Chronic stress actually pushes the buttons that turn on disease. It’s not a conscious process. And most of us have become so accustomed to listening to and becoming captive of our thoughts that the thoughts themselves end up becoming an addiction for us. Sometimes it’s as if we crave the drama that gives us a little dopamine hit just to keep the Fight-Flight-Freeze response turned on. When this happens, our autonomic nervous system stays in an activated and continuously heightened state.
It’s not a conscious process.
When our bodies are consistently in a hypervigilant state, our attention stays out in the environment at the ready, waiting for the next fire to put out or the next challenge to solve or drama to relive. (Think about how many times you repeat that same story you’ve told a hundred times before?).
Over time and without consciousness, somehow we start to become addicted to a life we don’t even like.
This is partially what makes the practice of meditation to open your heart so difficult for so many of us. When our body is in a constant state of Fight-Flight-Freeze, the last thing we want to do is close our eyes. Doing so makes us vulnerable and if we’re stuck in survival mode, closing our eyes would make us vulnerable to attack, real or imagined.
When we are stuck in Fight-Flight-Freeze, our brain fires incoherent brain waves which narrows our focus. It would stand to reason then that the obsessive quality of being in the Fight-Flight-Freeze state naturally makes our energy levels decrease.
When we are in survival mode, we become selfish. By that I mean, all things become centered around us and how we feel, what we want, what we aren’t getting, why we’re not happy, etc…We feel envious, afraid, worried, guilty, hopeless. All of these feelings are derived from stress and the body then ultimately becomes altered. In our perception, there’s danger in our outer environment. Trauma is no longer in the brain because it now moves into the body itself.
In short, stress causes our autonomic nervous system to dysregulate.
I recently saw a billboard advertisement that said “Your body follows your mind” and that’s true. If our body stays mired down in a state of stress, our mind will follow and continuously try to “survive.”
It’s impossible to create from a place of survival.
Your heart is your center of wholeness, oneness and the center of where your divinity begins.
When we slow our breath and our heart, it helps to order our heart and causes the heart to become coherent; ordered and integrated. In turn, when our heart becomes coherent, it helps entrain all of the other energy centers in our body.
Relax your heart and awaken your brain.
So the objective in THIS MEDITATION is to restore and balance our hearts. Research shows that once we balance the heart, the energy moves into balancing the brain. Once in a state of balance and coherence, if our body follows our mind, we can come from a state of creation versus a state of stress.
Once we’ve been able to settle our hearts, we will want to bring that energy up to our brain. This will intentionally set in motion the coherence between our heart and our brain.
It’s a simple meditation but research shows that it will produce profound changes in your physiology. In fact, there will be a study published shortly in the medical journals from research currently being done at UCSD about these very benefits of meditation. And yes, I promise to pass that along the moment I become aware of it.
Data shows that when we can sustain an elevated emotion and activate the heart and brain centers, it actually resets the baseline of trauma and emotional experiences from the past.
It also causes your immune system to get stronger and actually signals biological changes in your cells that suggest to your body that you are living in a different environment. That is because the research has proven that factors in the blood of long term meditators actually cause the neurons in their brain to grow and change. AND your nervous system is the greatest pharmacy in the world.
If the mind influences the body and the body follows the mind, then when we increase the state of our heart, we are actually expanding from the narrow to a much wider viewpoint. In essence, we are broadening our focus so that we are no longer caught in a loop of analyzing, worrying, and reacting. Your body then starts to actually believe it’s living in a new environment! Pretty crazy, right?
If your biological body is living in a new environment that is no longer predicated on survival, it can then begin to repair, restore and regenerate itself.
I personally can’t think of any better and more natural way to change my body, mind and spirit than to spend a few minutes each and every day in the stillness of meditation. If you want help in getting started, consider joining us each weekend for a free time of Meditation and Community Connection. Or perhaps give yourself the gift of a one-on-one Meditation Class with Maggie.