Heart-centered Meditation

Perhaps the most significant difficulty with our first spiritual exercise is the lack of a clear target.  If there was a clear ‘X-marks-the-spot’ target for your meditation, you could focus your attention there, and you probably would have felt more successful.  At the very least, you could tell when you stayed on the target and when it eluded you.  But what kind of target does the Presence of God present to you?  Is it some image of the Divine?  Is it a particular kind of inner feeling?  Or something else entirely?

There was actually a good reason behind this lack of specificity.  If you had some kind of clear target, instead of pursuing the actual real Presence, you would likely imagine something.  Something that you thought fulfilled the parameters of your search.  The only thing that could be said of such an imagining is that it is a fantasy – something that does not exist in reality.  What a terrible way to start your journey toward that which Is, the ultimate Reality behind all our apparent observable reality.  

The truth is, we humans have this marvelous ability to perceive patterns – to fill in the blanks, so to speak, with what we believe completes the pattern.  Let me give you a simple numerical example:  1,  2,  3,  __.  Now, fill in the blank.  

Most probably inserted a ‘4’, but how did you come to that number?   You guessed, right?  You assumed it was an ascending numerical sequence, and the single space indicated a single digit, so you assumed ‘4’.  But maybe I was giving the last four digits of my phone number, or my social security number, or something else.  There was no way of knowing without more information, so you hallucinated a number to fit.

While this ability to make and perceive patterns is helpful in many situations, it becomes a liability in our search for the Divine.   It is, I believe, the primary reason why there are so many radically different ideas about God.  Sadly, almost all of these ideas tend to lead us astray.  If nothing else, none of our thoughts begin to encompass the vastness and majesty of God.

That being said, we humans have trouble with vagueness.  I remember working with a woman who had wrestled with an unidentified chronic illness for years.  She was terribly depressed because her doctors could not find a diagnosis.  One day she 

came into my office all smiles, just glowing with happiness.  “They finally figured it out,” she said with a grin.  “I have stage four pancreatic cancer!”  

This was a virtual death sentence, yet it made her very happy.  Finally, she had something concrete and real.  Never mind that it meant her death; the certainty made her happy.

So how can we use our need for certainty in our quest?  How can we create a target that is easier to work with, but one that doesn’t compromise our search right at the get-go?

To answer this, we need to look at our spiritual forebears.   All of the great religions talk about a spiritual center in our bodies in the region of our heart.  They say that the place where the Divine is most accessible to us is in this spiritual heart center.  Several Christian mystics have stated that the veils which separate us from God are most transparent in the spiritual center of our heart.  

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), an Eastern Orthodox saint, taught that we can experience the Divine directly, in the region of the heart.  He was working from a very ancient practice, the Jesus Prayer, which originated with the Desert Fathers in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries.  (More on the Jesus Prayer in later editions of this newsletter.) In Western Christendom, the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing also describes the heart as the primary focal point of contemplative prayer.  

Of specific interest to us, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing invites his reader to put “a cloud of forgetting” beneath him – letting go of everything that might distract him from the love of God.  Then, he invites us to put a “cloud of unknowing” between ourselves and God.  He rightly says that we can never ‘know’ God like we can know the objects around us.  Better to not speculate, then, and to place one’s self in the presence of God and rest there, without fabricating ideas or emotions about the experience.  And that, of course, was the point of our first spiritual exercise.

Moving forward, we can make our spiritual journey easier, quicker, and more productive by centering our attention in our hearts.  So, let me introduce you to the practice of heart-centered meditation.

Heart-Centered Meditation

If you have difficulty moving your attention out of your head, first feel the sphere of energy around your head.  Then imagine that sphere descending about an inch or so with every breath you take.  When that sphere reaches the center of your chest, imagine reaching out from your heart to someone you love.  Then reach out to another and another.  This tends to anchor your attention in your spiritual heart center.

I have had people say they can’t move their attention out of their head because that is where it is supposed to be.  That’s a common misperception.  If you have ever stubbed your toe, barked your shin on something, or hit your fingers while hammering a nail, you know this is just not true.  When you stub your toe, ALL of your attention is suddenly focused on the hurt toe.  There isn’t even a particle of attention left to think about anything else.  It’s just that we don’t pay much attention to what is actually going on inside of us.  When you start noticing what is happening inside of yourself, you start to see some amazing things.

With practice, you will come to know your inner world.  As you get more and more familiar with your heart center, your ability to focus without interruption will gradually increase.  As you let go of your thoughts and emotions, you will experience a certain stillness in your inner world, a stillness that is free from your ego driving this thought and that one.  This is not something you can force.  You can’t say to yourself, ‘Stop chasing that thought,’ and expect to be successful.  Why not?  Well, stop and observe what part of you is doing the talking.  It’s your ego that is attempting to exert power and direct your mental traffic here.  And guess what – your ego is not likely to participate in its own demise.

This is the paradox of spiritual work.  You have to find a way to go deeper inside to find the Divine dwelling within, but the tool you have always used to get things done – your ego – is not effective here.  Remember what happens with seeds that are planted?  The seed has to die in order for the new growth to occur.  The same happens in the spiritual realm as well.

That’s all for this week, folks.  Next week, we will start looking more deeply into the nature of the mind because the more you know about your inner world, the easier it is to negotiate your way home.  Keep up with your daily practice.  If you are new to this, try meditating multiple times a day for just five minutes or so.  See you next week…

With deep affection,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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