“Gratitude is the memory of the heart.” -French Proverb
When we store a memory in our heart and not in our mind we create a pathway for gratitude. One of my favorite new meditation techniques is called the Midline Meditation. In this meditation, practitioners focus on the physical sensation of the midline of the body, the root of our nervous system and the connection to a source of energy that is referred to as dynamic stillness. The meditation technique was derived from the study and practice of dynamic cranial sacral work, and is based on working with the primal streak, which is the most primary embryological structure in all life forms.
Much of the midline work originates from the heart field, which extends and has been measured at least ten feet away. Sixty percent of heart cells are neurons, which like brain cells, are the intelligence of the organ. What your heart senses and feels is often shrugged off as somehow less accurate or reliable than brain thought, which is ironic considering that the heart has an energy field 60 times as powerful as our brains.
Learning to use the power that we all hold at the center of our being is a function of one’s capacity to interpret the world and our individual circumstances with gratitude. For most of us, a re-training is required. Not only do we change our focus outwards, but more importantly we learn to identify the experience inward. Feeling our heart, even one filled with grief or fear, gives us access to the felt sense of our lives that we can cultivate and can act as a guide through life.
In turn, this spaciousness inside, helps us to turn our gaze outward to appreciating life as it is. This shift in outer vision is a small revolution that creates a life of gratitude and a nervous system that is comfortable at ease. An ancient Roman scholar, Marcus Cicero taught that, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
A grateful heart is also a generous one and it can make sense of the past by making peace with the present... It opens the way to a future that is worth dreaming about. I spent several hours focused on my heart today. I am grateful in my whole body for it. System reset, how lucky I am to have this life.
