A Day in the Life — With an Open Heart
Students often wonder where they should direct their attention during meditation and throughout the day — the heart? The suṣumṇa? The crown? The answer is “all of the above.”
Be sure to begin each day by opening your heart. Take a conscious breath as soon as you awake, opening deeply inside as you bring your attention into the heart cakra. After that, your morning meditation will further establish you in that openness so you can begin the day from there.
There is a tendency to rush into activity: we grab our phones to check email and feel the pressure of the things we must do that day. When that happens, we can easily forget to meditate!
After we meditate in the morning, the double-breath exercise helps us sustain this openness throughout the day. This is important, because from openness we are able to stay in contact with the flow of vital force within. We want to establish ourselves in flow so that we can engage the dynamics of life from a place of fullness rather than from one of contraction
Staying in the Flow
If something grabs our attention during the day — whether it’s something external that we perceive is happening to us, or something internal causing our minds to run amok — we want to re-center ourselves.
Discursive thoughts often pull us out of the heart, and we then project our energy outward, trying to control life. Our experience becomes one of being embroiled in difficulty. Instead of getting tense, use the energy from those interactions to open your heart even more. This is exactly when to do the double-breath to internalize the energy that is arising and put it into the flow. Your energy can then remain inside, in that flow, deepening yourself.
When we are established in openness, we can engage the day from expanded consciousness and awareness. I describe this as establishing a horizontal flow so that all the situations you engage with or connect to — more specifically, all the people you engage with — become part of the flow, creating an energetic exchange that is simple in its essence.
This means that throughout the day we can use the flow to open even more and feed the spiritual force within. As the day continues, we take care of our responsibilities. Throughout engaging in our household duties, or dealing with our job and family, we keep our awareness inside, in touch with the flow. When we sit down to meditate again — perhaps in the late evening — instead of having to pry our heart open, we simply expand from where it has been, to reach an even deeper awareness.
Accessing the Central Channel
By working in this way, we are strengthening our ability to access the suṣumṇa, the central channel of the psychic body. It is in the suṣumṇa that we become established in the perpetual flow of energy, the śakti that is our essence. And we want to not only connect to the śakti, but to surrender to the changes it is creating in us.
As śakti moves in us, it may dislodge a few boulders and tweak a few things. We may experience some emotional situations in which we become aware of a blind spot in ourselves. When we surrender to the śakti, it can free us of our limited understanding and help cultivate the capacity to live in a permanent state of surrender.
We can also focus on stillness, which we access in the space between the in-breath and the out-breath. That moment of stillness is where the pulsation of Consciousness arises and subsides. That’s the breath of God, the source of our individuated breath. From that stillness we find the deeper channels of the suṣumṇa, and ultimately connect to dvādaśānta, the space above the head where śakti reunites with its source, Consciousness.
Easy as 1,2, 3, 4
The progression of our practice throughout the day can be summed up as:
- Breath
- Cakra
- Flow
- Presence
Start with a breath and open your heart cakra. Feel the flow. Surrender to the śakti. This is what brings you in contact with God’s presence.
A spiritual life is not something we practice every once in a while. It must be a moment-by-moment commitment to growth. From the first breath we take upon waking, we open our heart and our spiritual day begins. In our morning meditation, we establish ourselves in the central channel, and when we open our eyes, we consciously stay connected with the flow of energy and awareness inside, extending it out into our activities. In this way, everything we do becomes fuel for the unfoldment of higher consciousness.
You can have this experience every day of your life if you establish yourself in this practice. And you can use this simple progression from the moment of your first waking breath of the day to your last. This how we establish ourselves in the freedom that is available to us all.