“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
I invite you to scan through your body and notice where your centrepoint of awareness is. What did you notice?
Was it your: head, heart, belly, somewhere else or you're not sure?
For most of us, our centre of awareness predominantly resides in the head. In Western society, the mind is associated with the brain so it makes logical sense for your centrepoint of awareness to be emanating from this part of your body. But this is in contrast to most eastern cultures where the word for heart is synonymous with the word for mind, bringing more emphasis and value to the practice of heart-centred awareness.
Modern science is only just catching up with what many eastern traditions including Tantra have intuited for thousands of years, that in fact we have three main centres of awareness (‘bindus’ in Sanskrit), or ‘brains’ including the head, heart and gut, with each of these areas offering a different perspective in decision-making: logical (head), emotional (heart) and intuitive (gut).
Today, I want to focus on the heart.
In most cultures around the world, the heart is the seat of powerful emotions such as joy, sadness, love, anxiety, fear, courage and pride. From a Tantric perspective, the Heart-bindu is more than just the seat of our emotions, it is the centre from which our total mental, emotional, psychic and spiritual experience emanates from.
We are told to ‘follow our hearts’. But what does this really mean?
Latest research in neurocardiology and embodied cognition has shown that the heart does more than just pump blood around the body. It has the ability to learn independently and it has its own memories. The heart also emits the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, 5000 times stronger than that of the brain. This field can reach almost 1 metre outside of the physical body in all directions and can be felt energetically by a person sitting next to you. What this means is that our hearts are constantly feeling and sensing information not only within our own bodies, but also our environment and the people around us.
Much of the modern world places an imbalanced emphasis on ‘head-centred’ perspectives – logic and rationality over the more affective and instinctual ‘heart-centred’ viewpoint. But as we lose touch with our more embodied sense of awareness, we begin to confuse thoughts with awareness. We become entangled with our thoughts making it difficult to make more self-informed decisions.
Practising attunement to the heart and intentionally shifting our centrepoint of awareness to the area of the Heart-bindu has many benefits for our wellbeing, relationships and experience of pleasure including:
Self-care
Reposing our centre of awareness to the heart creates more space between us and our thoughts, allowing us to observe and acknowledge our thoughts without necessarily personally identifying with them. This can allow us to feel more centred and at peace, helping to reduce stress and anxiety.
Relationships
With the heart being the seat of emotional intelligence, practising heart-centred awareness can improve emotional awareness, an important aspect of empathy. It also cultivates feelings of love, compassion and kindness not only for others but also for ourselves leading to a greater sense of connectedness with self and others.
Pleasure
Our experience of sexual pleasure can be so intense in our genitals or head that we often forget to notice and include the heart. This can alter our experience of pleasure in two ways: it can become blocked and stuck, limiting our ability to feel pleasure, or it can become compressed and explosive where we lose control of our sexual energy. Practising heart-centred awareness can help to bring more flow to our sexual experience, allowing the energy to move around the whole body, opening us to whole body orgasmic bliss.
Practice Heart-Centred Awareness
Heart-Meditation
Here is a short heart-centred meditation that can help to shift your centrepoint of awareness to the heart space and allow you to become more attuned to your heart's intelligence.
Take a comfortable, supported seat
Feel your pelvis connecting with the surface you’re sitting on and feel a gentle upward lift through the spine.
Take a few rounds of conscious breath to bring yourself into the present moment.
Relax the jaw.
Notice your centrepoint of awareness.
Invite this to drop to the base of your heart.
Feel your whole body from this centre.
Take in your environment from this centre.
Practice in this way for a few minutes.
Remember that thoughts, feelings and awareness are not the same thing. Borrowing words from Christopher Wallis “feeling this point is not a specific kind of experience. It’s a point from which experience is had.”
Sensing from our heart-centre takes practice, and you may not feel anything at first. Our connection to this centre strengthens with time and practice.
Experiment with practising heart-centred awareness while you’re taking a walk, while you’re self-pleasuring or making love with someone else. Notice how this changes your experience.
Tantric Massage
Another way to connect with our heart-centre is through physical touch. There is a strong emphasis placed on heart-centre activation during a Tantric massage, whereby sexual energy is directed to the heart centre to increase vitality and flow. Not only that, it is a practice given from the heart and received by the heart fostering deep heart-centre connection and awareness.
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