This week Sri Chinmoy offers a meditation exercise for increasing our good and divine qualities by allowing them to enter our spiritual heart – through “your heart's door” as Sri Chinmoy puts it.

And what happens when a negative or undivine quality tries to enter? We simply do not allow that to happen – we use our spiritual heart's discrimination and will and we simply keep our heart's door shut. This may take a little practice, but in time it will become second nature.

Sri Chinmoy's words:

Now please feel that you are standing at your heart's door and you have invited your friends, love, peace, light, delight, power, other friends that you cherish and treasure, to enter. You will stand at your heart's door and wait for them to arrive. When you see that they have come, you will please let them in. But if others arrive whom you have not invited, then please do not allow them to come in! Complexity, insincerity, impurity, insecurity, doubt, jealousy and other negative forces are all uninvited guests. If you see them at your heart's door, please do not let them enter. Please feel that love has taken the form of a human being, peace has taken the form of a human being, light has taken the form of a human being, delight has taken the form of a human being. Similarly, jealousy, insecurity, doubt, impurity, complexity and other negative forces have also taken human forms and human shapes; you can see them with your human eyes.

So please allow your invited friends to come in, but those who are not friends, who are uninvited, will be compelled to stay outside. They will not be allowed to enter your heart's door. If every day you can think of even one friend and invite that friend to stand at your heart's door, it will be the beginning of a divine friendship. Say to yourself, "Today I will allow only my friend love to come in and not anybody else. Tomorrow I will allow my friend joy to come in and the day after tomorrow I will invite my friend peace to come in." Again, if you say, "I have developed considerably. I have the capacity to invite more than one friend in. I shall definitely invite all my friends in – love, joy, peace, light and delight. But I did not have enough means to feed more than one friend at a time, therefore I could only invite one friend. Now I can invite all my divine friends and allow them to enter into my heart-room."

Question: Ever since I began to try to meditate, after a few minutes of meditating I get a strange feeling, almost like tension in my head, and sometimes it is very distracting.

Sri Chinmoy: In that case please feel that you do not have a head or a forehead; only feel that you have a heart. Try to focus all your attention on your heart. You belong to the heart; that is where your consciousness is, not in the head. Deliberately try to concentrate on your heart, not on anything else. You can even keep a mirror in front of you, and look at your own heart that way if you find it difficult to concentrate inwardly on your heart. (Source)

To combat your mind's confusion
Open your heart's door
And gather strength
From its inmate: your soul.
– Sri Chinmoy