Feel your heartbeat throughout your body and expand your awareness to sense your connection with the world.

English

This meditation facilitates opening of your awareness through the heartbeat as the gateway in. Through the body, we can begin to observe more than just the body. Through the mind, we can ask more of the mind. Cultivating our awareness is an integral part of energywork exploration. This is also a part of a larger meditation series incorporated in this teacher's Reiki Level 1 and 2 Courses. (3)

Opening Your Awareness Through The Heart

Hello! My name is Eden, and I am a therapist, Reiki teacher, and meditation guide. Now whether you've found this meditation through one of my Reiki courses or just through the web of life, welcome! These meditations are intended to deepen your relationship to your intuition and gifts, and facilitate an understanding of your own internal landscape. Each meditation is also a tool that can be offered to yourself or a client, so I invite you to notice what shifts within you before, during, after, beyond the meditation, cataloging the effects with words and feelings and sensations, just letting yourself take note. Allow it to be personal and universal. Let's begin! Wherever you are, finding some rest, finding some peace, finding some spaciousness within your body to allow yourself to settle in. Letting go of the day, letting go of that to-do list, and just allowing yourself to be right here for just a few minutes, gifting yourself these few minutes, knowing the day will be there for you to return to soon. But for now, we take just a few slow, deep breaths into the body, into the belly, to be right here. This meditation is a combination of awareness and imagination, recognizing that the two overlap and interweave when we let them, when we show up with presence and intention and curiosity, and that so much of what is in our minds also lives within our bodies, within our energy systems, within our world beyond us. So just gently turning your awareness, whether your eyes are open or closed, turning that inner eye to your heartbeat in the center of your chest. And for some, it might be difficult initially to feel that heartbeat, to pinpoint that movement in the body, just staying with it. Maybe you can relax any muscles in the chest that are still tense, so you can feel that heartbeat just a little easier. Letting yourself notice, letting yourself soften, being with this heartbeat, this life that is you, yet is also only a fraction of you. Softening any muscles in the face that have tensed up, noticing, being. Good. And now gently moving that same heartbeat awareness now to the temples, this sensitive place within us where our heartbeat can be found too. Can you notice it? Can you feel it? Can you soften the body around the heartbeat at the temples? And just letting yourself notice what that feels like. Good. And same thing now in the neck, finding that big artery and just noticing the heartbeat. Can you feel it in the neck? Can you soften the body to it, around it, for it? Good. And then moving that same awareness now to the palms and the fingertips, finding your heartbeat there. Feeling both the pulse in the fingertips and the palms, maybe letting them start to merge, recognizing them all as one. Letting that feeling of that heartbeat expand into the whole hands all at once. Softening, opening your awareness. And then we gently move the awareness now down into the low belly, finding that heartbeat there too. Right around that low breath. What tiny little muscles in the abdomen, in the hips, can you relax right now so that you can feel that heartbeat just a little bit more? So good. And now we move that awareness finally down to the feet, the toes, the soles of the feet, finding the heartbeat there. Softening to it. And just like the hands, letting the heartbeat of the sole and the toes mesh into one as they are, the same heartbeat moving through you. Let yourself feel that. Let yourself open up to that truth, that physical truth. Good. And now we release that focus on the soles of the feet and the toes, and we come back into the heart space proper, right in the chest. And now here is the experiment. Here is the exercise even deeper. Experimenting to see if you can soften your awareness so that it becomes wider than just your chest. Next, can you usher in awareness, too, around the heartbeat in your temples, that heartbeat in the neck, in the palms and fingertips, the low belly, the soles of the feet and the toes. Next, can you usher in awareness of all of these heartbeats all at once, knowing that they are all actually the same heartbeat radiating through you, softening and opening, feeling the pulse of your being through your whole being now, relaxing any tenseness in the body that you can soak in and notice this feeling even more, feeling your own pulse, your own vibration. And perhaps, maybe, just maybe, you can start to notice how that vibration ripples out into the space around you. Just like your inhale takes up more space in the body, so changes the air around you, so does the vibration of your body, of your heartbeat, of your internal energy. It's always in relation with the external world because there is nothing separate. They're always moving with one another, letting yourself feel that, letting the vibration ripple out, softening the space between the eyebrows, relaxing the jaw, taking one more breath here as best you can into this concept, this idea, this feeling, this knowing, and then gently releasing your awareness, coming back to the body as a whole physical being, not just the heartbeat but everything else that goes on within you. Your mind was just flexing the mental muscle of awareness and of opening up that capacity to be aware of multiple things at once that's necessitated by being trusting, present, open, soft, knowing you can always come back to this or any other awareness meditation to keep flexing that mental muscle. This will allow a deeper relationship with not just your body and your mind but also your surroundings and your and others energies.