For this weeks meditation exercise, we shift our focus to the spiritual heart - that place in each of us where powerful spiritual energies are most focused. When we are beginning to learn meditation, we start by developing the capacity to concentrate - to harness, focus and simplify our mental and vital energies. Once this is accomplished, even to a small degree, we can then begin to meditate in the spiritual heart where we experience a spontaneous form of meditation.

The best kind of meditation is that which occures naturally and spontaneously. We often see this occure in children who, although they may not be meditating consciously, frequently slip into stillness simply because their heart's are prevalent and their minds are not yet over developed. In the spiritual heart, everything happens at a spontaneous level and is accompanied by sweetness, vastness, love, compassion, oneness and any good quality that can be imagined. The spiritual heart is predominantly a place of expansion and oneness. The mind also has good qualities but is often bound by limitation and negativity due to our conditioning and the fact that we forget how to access our spiritual heart as we get older.

Most people have meditated spontaneously during their lives. Inspiring situations such as when we find ourselves gazing into a fire or contemplating beautiful scenery can bring forward moments of clarity and stillness that we experience when the mind is obsorbed in something vaster than itself. This is spontaneous meditation. However, when we practice meditation in a conscious and regular manner, we garner the capacity to make those moments a permanent part of our life - we learn to dwell all the time in the spiritual heart and have a happy, simple, contented and progressive demeanour. This enhances our individual human nature and adds a spiritual dimension to each and every aspect of our life and, by a happy default, to the lives of those around us.

Through his many years of teaching meditation, Sri Chinmoy constantly encouraged the ideal of living in the spiritual heart as being by far the greatest service that anyone can do for themselves or for humanity. When our own consciousness is improved in any way, the positive force that is released into the world environment as a result of our efforts spreads to other receptive soul's near and far in the form of encouragement, hope and joy - like ripples spreading out in a still pond when a pebble is dropped into it.

The spiritual heart is located in the centre of the chest (the gold ball in the image above) - the place that we often point to when we say me or I. In the following passages Sri Chinmoy offers a simple exercise for developing an awareness of the spiritual heart:

If you can concentrate on the tip of your finger, or on a candle or any other material object, you can also concentrate on your heart. You may close your eyes or look at a wall, but all the time you are thinking of your heart as a dear friend. When this thinking becomes most intense, when it absorbs your entire attention, then you have gone beyond ordinary thinking and entered into concentration. You cannot look physically at your spiritual heart, but you can focus all your attention on it. Then gradually the power of your concentration enters into the heart and takes you completely out of the realm of the mind.

If you do not have purity in abundant measure, if countless earthly desires are in possession of the heart, then before concentrating on the heart you should invoke purity. Purity is the feeling of having a living shrine deep in the inmost recesses of your heart. When you feel the divine presence of an inner shrine, automatically you are purified. At that time your concentration on the heart will be most effective. (Source: Meditation: Man-Perfection In God-Satisfaction)

If you want to keep peace with yourself,
Then care for your heart first.
At the beginning of your spiritual journey,
Care for your heart first!
At the middle of your spiritual journey,
Care for your heart first!
At the end of your spiritual journey,
Care for your heart first!
– Sri Chinmoy