Heart-breathing meditation
Inhale the future, exhale the past. ―Author Unknown
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Easy
⏳ Total time: 11-30 minutes
🥣 Ingredients: A quiet place with no distractions, “Pioneering the Possible” book by Scilla Elworthy (if you’re curious to find out more about it!)
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Awareness, Positive Emotion, Radical Care
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Breathing, Caring, Centring, Compassion, Kindness, Mindfulness, Peacefulness, Relating to Others
Heart-breathing meditation
📝 Description
A breathing technique to fill your heart with compassion.
The following activity has been taken from Scilla Elworthy’s book Pioneering the Possible: Awakened Leadership for a World that Works. The book explores how humans can make the necessary leap in consciousness to address the global crises modern society faces and create a better world for all life.
This exercise will help you fill your heart with compassion and peacefulness. Elder Scilla Elworthy suggests that “the heart needs to be the new focus of consciousness, rather than the mind, because it is the first and most important organ in the body.”
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Set up (3’)
Sit in a comfortable position, keeping your back straight yet relaxed. Relax your shoulders, increasing the space between your shoulders and your neck. Keep a gentle smile on your face and close your eyes. Become aware of the space around you: What sounds can you hear? What smells reach your nostrils? What other bodily sensations can you feel?
Step 2 – Heart-breathing (5’)
Gently shift your awareness to the centre of your chest, in the heart area. Breathe deeply in and out through the heart. If it helps, you can place your hand on the heart to emphasise this.
Step 3 – Activate a positive feeling (5’)
Now activate a positive feeling of some kind: gratitude for what you have, love for people you hold close to you, compassion, peace… Radiate this feeling from the heart – first throughout your own body field and then out into the wider field of the world.
Step 4 – Come back (2’)
Stay with the previous step as long as you wish. When you feel grounded and peaceful, bring your awareness back to the here and the now. Whenever you are ready, open your eyes.