Interest in meditation has introduced many in the West to an extremely valuable spiritual practice – mindfulness. However, there is a closely related, but less well known, practice that I think is at least as important. I call it heartfulness. 

Most of us are comfortable with the notion of being mindful. All the connotations and associations are right. So, anything that makes us more mindful seems like it must be good. But that is not the case with the heart. The most common association to the heart in the West is emotions – particularly love. But whereas logic and thoughtfulness are highly valued, emotions are mistrusted and associated with being weak and soft-headed. 

So, what is this heart that is worthy of being strengthened and trusted? 

The Heart: What it is Not and What it Is

First, let’s be clear about what the heart is not. Heartfulness is not gushing sentimentality or irrationality. Nor is it irrational. It is transrational – more than rational. 

Within the wisdom tradition the heart is the fullness of the mind. To be heartful means, therefore, to move beyond a reliance on reason and learn to embrace subtle, generally underdeveloped, heart faculties such as intuition, imagination, and listening to our bodies. Together they move us into a realm of wisdom. 

It is the heart, not the brain or the mind, that connects us to that which exists beyond us. The heart can see further than the mind because it draws its data from all levels of reality – including but never limited to the mind. It is the heart that senses wholes, “gets” poetry and art, and gives us our expansiveness – stretching out beyond our individuality to connect us to the very heart of the universe. This is why our heart is our spiritual center.

But while the heart is the doorway to the self-transcendent, it is a doorway through which we cannot pass without the mind. The heart can only be the fullness of the mind when it includes all the dimensions of the mind – even those that are normally ignored and subsequently underdeveloped. It is the inclusion of these powerful means of knowing that allows the heart to serve as an organ of spiritual perception and trustworthy wisdom.

Cultivating Heartfulness

The practice of meditation is central to the awakening of the heart. While there are many ways to meditate, all invite an awakening of the heart by helping us release our compulsive attachment to thoughts.

By meditation, I mean the practice of wordless, thoughtless, imageless openness and presence. Pondering a passage of Scripture is not, in this sense, meditation. It is a valuable form of prayer, but it is quite different from contemplative prayer – which is the Christian name for the wordless, thoughtless and imageless presence that opens heart space. This moves us to a place much deeper than thoughts. It shifts us into the region of the heart.

The human heart has infinite spaciousness. However, clinging reduces the heart’s spaciousness. The more we cling, the more the heart is constricted, and the more things we cling to, the more chronic and life-strangling the constrictions become. Meditation addresses this by teaching us how to gently release the things to which we cling. This starts with thoughts, but over time we begin to notice other attachments that are strangling our heart. Regardless of the objects of our clinging, we can learn to hold them lightly. Doing so unblocks the clogged arteries of our spiritual heart and lets life start to flow freely again through us. 

Detachment is learning to hold things lightly. Detachment is not indifference or drifting through life without engagement. It is freedom from the grasping and clinging that shut down the heart. Detachment opens it up, and nonattachment keeps it open. The detached heart is the one that is free to most fully feel, most passionately love, and most dependably guide us as we seek to translate concern into constructive action.   

Meditation offers unique resources of wisdom and compassion. It teaches us to see reality as it is. It helps us let things be as they are rather than forcing them to be what we think we need. And slowly but surely, it leads us from grasping and clinging to awareness of the harmony of the larger wholes within which we exist. In the depths of our being, we begin to know the divine coherence of life and the way in which we and everything else belong within this wholeness. 

Heartful Living

No one should settle for clarity of the mind as the goal of meditation. Ultimately, what we need is purity of heart. As Kierkegaard reminds us, purity of heart is singleness of heart — to will and to love one thing above all else. It is to have our heart aligned with the pulsing heart of the universe so that love can flow freely through it. 

I have a Buddhist friend who ends every conversation we share by saying, “May your heart flow freely.” This is heartfulness. Heartfulness is allowing love and compassion to flow freely through us. 

To one degree or another, most of us suffer from hardening of the arteries of our spiritual heart. Nothing could be more important for our well being than having healthy hearts. 

Heartfulness is living out of this inner place that connects us to the heart of the cosmos and to the heart of God. Compassion and kindness are intrinsically part of this place and translate naturally into actions when we live out of our deep center. 

Mindfulness prepares us for heartfulness. It helps us know what matters most in any situation. But it is the heart that guides our response to that knowing. And without that response – without love flowing through us and into the world – heartfulness is empty. 

Heartfulness doesn’t have to be generated. Trying to be heartful simply reinforces the egoic false self. Just release that egoic mind and, with a deep exhalation, sink into your center – a place where the boundaries of your heart and the heart of God are almost impossible to identify, a place where you-in-God and God-in-you cannot be easily teased apart. 

Don’t waste time trying to figure out how to get to this place. Just sink into the spaciousness of your heart. And as you do, notice the difference – not just in the present moment but in how you live your life as you are led by your heart. Don’t forget to keep returning to your center, because if the egoic mind is anything, it is perniciously resistant to letting go of its usurped position as your center. But this is a battle you slowly win with successive acts of surrender. Just let go and return to your center – and be prepared to keep doing this, over and over again. That is all it takes.

2020 © Dr. David G. Benner

For more on the heart and what it means to live heartfully, see Dr. Benner’s book, Human Being and Becoming (2016).