Getting to the Heart of Matters with Meditation

In this modern age, it can be difficult to make sense of what really matters. With countless tasks, technologies, and causes all calling for our attention, many feel that it is becoming increasingly challenging to find any kind of peace and clarity amidst the chaos. To navigate this dilemma, meditation is a tool we can use to help us get to the heart of whatever matter we are facing — both figuratively and literally.

What Really Matters?

As we make our way through challenges at work, in our relationships, and all other facets of being human, we might start to wonder:

What really matters?

What is really most important to tend to while I am here?

What is the best way to navigate the world as I encounter it?

When we make space and time for meditation practice, we start to uncover the answers to these questions — not all at once typically, but slowly overtime. Mental chatter in the mind starts to ease and we begin to tap into more fundamental truths about what it means to be alive and human.

We might experience our perceptions and beliefs starting to soften and new possibilities beginning to open up. We might also begin to understand our interconnectedness with others and with the earth in a new way. As these moments of insight arise, we develop new perspectives about this life that we are an integral part of. These new perspectives guides us to act and express in ways that feel true to the heart of our being.

In this way, meditation helps to peel away the layers of who we think we are and what we think we know. For those who have yet to dive into meditation practice, it might sound like meditation would then add to the confusion we might have about life. What is this life all about it if it is not what I have believed it to be?

However, it is through bringing mindfulness awareness to our own biases, assumptions, and patterns of conditioning that we start to realize our confusion arises largely from the unexamined mind. As our mental tendencies come into clarity and begin to soften, we start to sink into the heart of our being. And, as we begin to operate in this world from the heart space, we start to intuitively understand what really matters at the core of any situation we find ourselves in and what most matters about life as a whole.

Tuning into the Heart Chakra (Energy Center)

Now, in addition to the capacity of meditation to bring us into the figurative heart of things, we might also explore chakra-based practices that help us to tune into the energetic heart center that lives within the chest.

The heart chakra is the center of the thirteen major chakras. As such, it symbolizes balance between the cosmic and earthly energies of life — the tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible. In this way, heart chakra meditations can help us tap into the sense that we are made of both the earthly and the spiritual.

This chakra also coincides with energies that many people, through meditation, come to realize are the things that really matter in life. The heart chakra is associated with energies such as:

– Compassion for oneself and others
– Forgiveness for oneself and others
– Empathy and kindness
– Acceptance and understanding
– Gratitude and appreciation
– Compassionate discernment

Through the heart, we are reminded of our shared humanity. As we cultivate energy within this space, we start to connect with others and with the world at large from a place of care, compassion, and gratitude. We find it within ourselves to love both ourselves and others and to seek to understand in ways we haven’t before.

So again, we might ask ourselves:

What really matters?

Perhaps the truth of what really matters in any given situation or in regard to life as a whole is something we cannot make sense of through the mind. Perhaps we need to tune into the heart to gain true clarity and insight — to feel and to listen to the heart-based knowings that the mind has overlooked for far too long.