Heartfulness

Heartfulness

There’s a marvelous story about a mindfulness researcher going to visit a monastery of Tibetan monks. The scientist comes with advanced western scientific equipment to show the monks that it is possible to measure mindfulness. As he begins to outfit a monk with the equipment, a tittering begins to pass through the assembly. Confused, he stops fastening the straps on the EEG helmet to the volunteer, turns to the translator, and asks, Why are they laughing? The translator replies, They’re saying that if you want to measure mindfulness, you’ve got the equipment connected to the wrong part of the body. He then places his hand on the center of his chest. Here’s where you should be measuring, he says.

At a certain point in European intellectual history, identity became equated with thinking, and the mind with the brain. When we say the word mindfulness, it has overtones of something mental, something cognitive, and yet this isn’t what we are talking about at all. Heartfulness would be a more faithful translation. What does it mean to begin centering our awareness—our intelligence—in our hearts, rather than our heads? This is neither an academic, or a merely theoretical question. The practice of heartfulness is this understanding. It is the practice of locating our center in the heart, rather than the head. Many cultures have understood that this is the proper center of intelligence. In Aramaic, for example, the word for heart is leba, which means the center of courage, intelligence, and feeling. The word courage itself come from the French word for heart: coeur. To lead with the heart. Our own culture now, at the leading edges of neurophysiology, by way of the Polyvagal Theory, and the science of neurocardiology, is beginning to substantiate what many ancestral cultures have always known. The heart is not merely a mechanical pump, but a center of intelligence, feeling, awareness. In fact, most of the cells in the heart are neural cells, not muscle cells. To practice heartfulness is to practice feeling, relationship, to practice connection.