Mandi Cloete
Mandi Cloete · Jan 2017 · 5 min read
Our heart is something quite extraordinary. Beyond the physical organ what we all have is something magical. What if I told you that within each and every one of us lies the passage to our own healing and awakening, and that of the planet, and that this passage has a doorway, a portal – the Heart.
Since being a child the image ‘Most Sacred Heart of Jesus’ has always resonated with me. I find the image itself quite kitsch, probably due to the fact that I only ever saw it hanging in the homes of aging devout Catholics. In Roman Catholic terms this image represents taking Jesus Christ's physical heart as the representation of His divine love for humanity. But for me it means something more.. For me this image depicts the Spiritual Heart which is the essence of our true nature, oneness, Supreme Consciousness. A point of contact with God.
It’s my understanding that we have three hearts – the physical heart, the energetic heart (Chakra) and the Spiritual Heart (Sacred Heart). It is through communing with our Spiritual Heart that we experience divine Love, our true nature and return home. What’s not to love!
Scientists at the HeartMath Institute have been researching heart science with amazing results. Predominately focused on heart and brain communication and how this influences our consciousness and perceptions of our world, this group of scientists have been able to gather data and measure the large electromagnetic field generated from the heart. When we feel positive emotions like gratitude, love and appreciation, the heart beats out a certain message aligned with the frequencies of these emotings. Knowing this, you can understand more deeply the power of the words we use and why affirmations can be so effective.
According to Rolin McCratey, Ph.D, and Director of Research at the Institute and author of the paper ‘The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication Within and Between People’: View Paper here
"The electrical field of the heart as measured in an ECD is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an ECG. The magnetic component of the heart’s field is around 100 times stronger than that produced by the brain, and is not impeded by tissues and can be measured several feet away from the body. Emotional information is actually coded and modulated into these fields. By learning to shift our emotions, we are changing the information coded into the magnetic fields that are radiated by the heart, which is ‘felt’ in every cell in the body, and can impact those around us. We are fundamentally and deeply connected with each other and the planet itself."
When science validates what ancient wisdom and mystics have been teaching for thousands of years it’s incredibly exciting, because this valuable information is being made mainstream and palatable for many who are turned off by anything remotely spiritual.
Surrendering into the Spiritual Heart through meditation, which after many years of truth seeking has been the most profound gift, and changed my life.
Through this practice, I’ve experienced depths of presence that once felt, changes you.
Our perception of life shifts to one of beauty, joy and love and through practice this becomes a more frequent experience. Through experiencing, perceiving and evidencing this beauty, joy and love we in turn emanate the vibration of this emoting through our hearts electromagnetic field and this is the ultimate change we want to be if we want to see, hear, feel change in our world.
The invitation to us all
Coming back to the beautiful image of the ‘Most Sacred Heart of Jesus’, I like to imagine that Jesus Christ is revealing his Spiritual Heart as an invitation for each of us to become aware of its existence and to enter, deeply, devoutly and passionately into our own Spiritual Heart.
According to Ramana Maharshi the great Indian sage and jivanmukta “the godly atom of the Self is to be found in the right chamber of the heart, about one-finger-width’s distance from the body’s midline. Here lies the Heart, the dynamic Spiritual Heart. It is called the hridaya, is located on the right side of the chest, and is clearly visible to the inner eye of an adept on the Spiritual Path.
Through meditation you can learn to find the Self in the cave of this Heart”.
“What is essential in any spiritual practice is to try to bring back the running mind and fix it on one thing only. Why then should it not be brought back and fixed in Self-attention (to this feeling of ‘I’)? That alone is Self-enquiry. That is all that is to be done!”
– Ramana Maharshi
Knowing this, the wonderfully creative head brain seems rather limited in its practice. If we practice meditation purely from the aspect of witnessing our thoughts this can be a game with no end. Yet when we witness conscious awareness in the Spiritual Heart we then experience our true nature, our One Self, the Supreme Infinite. And in turn, through continued devotional practice, we experience the presence of the Ultimate Witness.
“The ignorant one thinks that the Self can be known by the intellect, but the enlightened one knows that he is beyond the duality of the knower and the known.”
– Kena Upanishad
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