From the Heart

She guides us through a heart meditation. Cradle your heart with your hands. Feel your heart beat. Allow your palms to receive the sensation. The beat. The pulsation. Listen. Feel.

I follow her lead, placing my hands on myself as she has placed her hands on herself. “She must know what she’s doing. She must be feeling her own heart beat,” I think to myself. “So why can’t I feel mine?”

All I feel is heat and a solid stillness. All I hear is a voice in my head, questioning my experience, or what I consider a lack thereof. I think of the times that I do hear or feel my heartbeat, and how it elicits momentary panic. Why is this? I don’t know. Probably has something to do with the trauma of my car accident, but that’s a whole other story.

During the meditation, I think of the definition of Te in The Tao of Inner Peace; I think about the "going straight from the heart." I think about my tendency to question what is heart vs. what is ego, to question what is fear-based vs. what is love-based. How can I live from my heart if I cannot physically feel it beat, and if the sound of my heart-beat freaks me out?

And how is it that I, someone who practices and teaches a form of qigong that focuses on opening the heart, is so uncomfortable with this deep, embodied, heart meditation?

Clearly I am giving myself a hard time over this.

And as soon as I realize that, I soften into self-acceptance. Seeing clearly. Self-acceptance. Finding my way back to at least those two aspects of te. I settle into the meditation, I settle into the feelings. I settle into the lack of feelings. I know my heart is there. I know it is beating. I even feel it from time to time throughout the remainder of the meditation. And so I open up to new sensations. Get out of my head and more into my body again.

It helps to stop focusing on the heart in my chest and instead to expand my awareness into my entire body. Today I learned to think of the heart as actually being throughout the entire body, thanks to the thousands of miles of heart capillaries from head to toe. As I feel my heart in the centers of the soles of my feet, the centers of the palms of my hands, and so on, I see the bigger picture. I feel at peace.

And yet-- SURPRISE!-- I leave the meditation full of anger.

I pulsate. Like a heartbeat. Open. Close. Open. Close. Peace. Frustration. Peace. Frustration. Acceptance. Judgment. Acceptance. Judgment.

Is this just part of riding the waves?

I share my experience with my peers and workshop leaders. I’m asked what I need. I don’t know. Nothing. Just to acknowledge both sides of the coin. Just the time and space to breathe through it, to move with it, to write it out, to feel it, and release it. And then return to the middle. Which is where I am now. Constantly returning. Returning to the Tao.