Inner Stillness

This Journal contains a good message and a good practice for those who want to enhance calm in an inner being which may be agitated by unwanted thoughts and unhappy emotions.

This message is from the HeartMath group which promotes tools for achieving heart coherence, global peace, and planetary healing. Here is a link to the Science page of the HeartMath website. I have referenced the HeartMath Institute often in the writings of this website.

Here is the HeartMath message on culturing inner stillness.

“Many spiritual cultures agree inner stillness creates an energetic environment for supporting our advancing consciousness that can unleash the transformational power of our love.

HeartMath tools and coherence technologies have been designed to monitor and facilitate easier access to stillness and its connection to the natural inner wisdom and guidance of our heart.

A coherent alignment between our spiritual heart, mind and emotions can lead to a new way of perceiving, thinking and relating. When practicing heart coherence, we experience a distinct quieting of the inner noise generated by the normal stream of unregulated mental and emotional activity. When you’re in a still coherent state, your nervous system is more aligned, your hormonal and immune systems are getting rebalanced, and your mind and emotions are connecting with more of your spirit’s practical guidance.”

How to Acheive Inner Stillness

“Achieving inner stillness requires a little practice because our (brain) mind will try to occupy any available space. Think of inner stillness as something practical and street-worthy. How many times have we told children or others to get still inside and listen up because we have something important to tell them? This is because we instinctively know that stillness plays a part in the quality and depth of most people’s hearing ability. So, why not use stillness in the way it can count the most—to quiet our mental and emotional static so that we can sense the counsel and wisdom from our heart.

When our mind finally relaxes in meditation, inner stillness is where we land. From there, we can reset and upgrade our life experience. As we learn the value of inner stillness, this reduces life’s more challenging ways of nudging us towards listening to our heart’s suggestions.

It’s a highly effective energy-saving choice to schedule times for practicing inner stillness and allow our heart, mind, and emotions to experience a relaxed time-out from competing with each other over which decides the choices and decisions we make. Stillness softens our determined mental and emotional energetics so that our heart-speak can be heard.”

Exercise: Stillness

“Step 1…As you breathe quietly, imagine your breath calmly slowing down the vibration of your mental and emotional energy. Stay with it, and don’t care if your mind disrupts you. This will improve with patience and practice.

Step 2…As you feel your energy calming, softly radiate love and peace into your inner environment. This connects you with your heart energy.

Step 3…While maintaining your state of calmness, ask your heart for guidance, solutions, or deeper understanding regarding life issues you are experiencing.

Step 4…Imagine stillness as a peaceful place in which you are sitting. If thoughts do come up, don’t push against them. Casually refocus on breathing love and peace into the stillness. Our higher choices become more obvious as we increase our capacity to listen in stillness to our heart’s intelligent directions through day-to-day challenges or creative initiatives.”

Practical Applications of Stillness

• “Start your day by doing the Stillness Exercise, along with the commitment to breathe an attitude of inner stillness, when convenient, throughout the day. It’s a soft place inside that is sensitive to your intuitive nudges.
• As you proceed through the day, stillness helps to prevent the mind’s impatience and distractions from overriding your choices for the best outcomes.
• Practicing inner stillness helps you to create the straightest line toward the manifestation of your intentions.
• Practicing inner stillness to connect with our heart’s care and guidance can become a most positive step forward for humanity, not as a trend or religious motivation but as a practical street sense, heart-based way of life.
• To get benefits out of these stillness practices, you don’t have to totally stop the mind – even reducing thoughts and calming yourself improves your capacity to sense your heart feelings and suggestions. In a short amount of time, the power to quieten your mind will increase. You’ll also find your stress will reduce at a surprising pace with a little practice.”

Crestone and Beyond

The practice of inner stillness, as described above, is a meditation practice. Some also refer to such practice as contemplation.

Meditation is a practice of staying beneath thoughts, neither fighting them to stop them, nor thinking more of them. By focusing on the breath, we can learn to hold at a deeper level than brain mind activity. This helps calm shadow emotional states which are felt in the body. In the quietness that ensues, we are able to know and follow more of the heart’s wisdom and guidance.

The term “heart’s wisdom and guidance” is not a figure of speech. It is a literal truth which is learned about in one’s inner laboratory.

The heart is the seat of the mind, and may also be thought of as the hub of everything in our existence. The anatomical and electrophysiological basis for the primacy of the heart in all experience is explained in The Spiral of Life…Heart Electromagnetics, Part II.

Shadow emotional states are a memory problem which is based on unresolved traumas and the resulting burden of the very low level emotional frequencies of guilt and shame. Based on our trauma inventory and memory of unforgiven hurts, we reflex into experiencing what should be protective and utilitarian emotions in their shadow forms.

Guilt and shame create shadow grief. The higher emotional frequencies of shadow fear, desire, anger, and pride follow. Without some kind of forthcoming clarity, these felt emotions usually pile up in an inner tangle. These states are felt in the body first, but we also simultaneously begin to think about them in our brain. The entanglement continues to pile up in our inner being as we attempt to hash through the unpleasantry with our same old habituated brain thinking. These thinking patterns never worked in the first place.

The result is that the heart’s messaging from spiritual source energies is opacified, obscured, and pushed out of recognition. The old habituated brain mind thinking, being a major contributor to our discomfort, must be calmed, quieted, penetrated, and dissolved into a new form if any peace is to be acheived.

Forgiveness is the only way we heal.

Forgiveness has been described as letting go of having a better past.

True forgiveness is not as simple as thinking in the brain about forgiving something. It is a bigger process of evolution that has to be lived out in a life. Just as an oyster slowly makes a pearl of great price from an irritating grain of sand, we have to practice living our way into forgiveness…with patience.

The brain mind and its discriminating intellect should be used to align with the heart’s spiritual essence and purpose. To accomplish this, we have to practice coming into stillness. This is the true definition of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not a mind full of thoughts. It is a mind full of quiet, calmness, and serenity.

The qualities of the heart which arise from a practice of contemplative stillness are forgivness, non judgement, compassion, joy, and peace.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday you will gradually, without even knowing it, live your way into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet.

Thank you for reading.

Signing off from Crestone, and Beyond

Associated Readings

1. Inner Stillness–A Fresh Practical Approach…a short video from HeartMath explaining a simple practice to grow inner stillness and heart connection.
2. Ease-An “Active Calm” State of Being…a 2.5 minute video describing an excellent heart centering and calming technique…”Inner ease is a highly regenerative, energy-saving state that helps us balance our mind and emotions. Ease can help you gain more resilience and flow in your own life, and we share a flagship HeartMath technique to help you shift your awareness to more mental and emotional ease.”
3. The Fascinating Relationship Between the Heart and Brain…posted here on 11-22-21. An important look at new information about the heart’s influence on the brain in this 3.5 minute video from HeartMath.
4. Broadcast Love–What It Means & How to Practice!…another 2.5 minute HeartMath video of a recommended practice which will help you bring love to any situation. “Love is an intelligent, unifying, and transformative attribute of the heart that is the key to uplifting ourselves, and our global community. Let’s talk about how you can activate and strengthen your capacity to love through a simple, effective daily practice that has proven benefits, personally and socially. I hope you will join us in increasing your daily practice of broadcasting love.”
5. Patience: A Heart Quality for Managing Uncertainty and Staying Resilient…a writing from the HeartMath Institute which offers a technique for culturing the pearl of patience.
6. Finding Patience…the Buddhist practice of finding patience has 3 aspects: gentle forbearance, calm endurance of hardship, and acceptance of the truth. This is a beautiful writing on patience.
7. 4 Steps You May Be Overlooking in Your Zazen Practice…the Zen practice of shikantaza zazen, or, “just sitting” is beautifully explained in this brief writing.
8. Minding Your Meditation…a 2014 writing on the website which explores the ancient science of meditation.
9. The Pulse of Life…Heart Electromagnetics, Part I…this Journal writing is a comprehensive introduction to heart electromagnetics and heart coherence.
10. The Spiral of Life…Heart Electromagnetics, Part II…this Journal explains the anatomical features of the heart which allow for its bidirectional connection to and exchange with the field of life which surrounds us and interpenetrates our physical form.
11. Prayer…this writing on prayer is an extension of The Spiral of Life writing.
12. Adverse Childhood Events…the source of our unresolved childhood traumas is explored here. You can take the ACE test to help you explore this inside of yourself.
13. A Fortnight of Time…some words to deepen your contemplations with.
14. How to Choose Joy…this short writing will help you orient your thinking and feeling to the experience of joy. The simple meditation posed at the end of the writing will open the heart to acknowledge and know joy.
15. Hearing Silence…this short composition offers a very good contemplation about the importance of silence, which frames all sound.

 

From Lao Tzu, 500 BC….”Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look out at the stars. This should answer the question.”

“The wise person settles his mind as the universe settles the stars in the sky. By connecting one’s mind with the subtle energy within, it becomes calm. Once calmed, it naturally expands and ultimately becomes as vast and immeasurable as the night sky.”

From Mikao Usui (1865-1926), the founder of Reiki, A Peaceful Mental Demeanor….”Just for today, do not anger. Just for today do not worry. Be humble. Be honest in your work. Be compassionate to yourself, and others.”

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Releasing Separation…a Practice for Unity and Peace…this is a recent Journal writing which I am including here to make a composite with this Inner Stillness writing.

This Journal presents a message and a practice from the HeartMath Institute. I have modified and adapted the message slightly for this reading.

I am also including a link (below) to the Color Us United movement for your consideration.

If you are not familiar with the HeartMath Institute and its 30 years of research and expanding offerings, please watch this recent 4.5 minute video which gives an excellent brief overview of their science and programs…The Road to Coherence, Our Roots, Mission & What We Have To Offer.

Here is the GCI message from the people at HeartMath.

“Current global energies are amplifying our separations, prejudices and polarizing biases. These are coming to the surface to be addressed from the intelligence of the heart. The heart reveals our common humanity and can see new opportunity for creativity in diversity, if we embrace it.”

“The current polarizing political environment is waking up more people to the realization that it’s time for inclusive care, respect, and cooperation to be practiced past the limitations of our personal viewpoints and preferences. This can change the course of many unfavorable events in our personal and collective lives.”

“Our heart’s intelligent guidance can help clear our biases that block our tolerance for each other’s differences. Most of us feel a desire for more harmonious and cooperative interactions, but we have to step into it with our heart’s intention to release habits of separation. It is possible to integrate care, kindness, and compassionate latitude into our daily interactions yet allow for our differences without creating separation. We’ve tried everything else to get along with each other except using our heart’s intuitive guidance and care. More people are realizing this is the missing piece in our interactions and in our quest for solutions.”

“We can each make a conscious practice to release the habit of separation from our own consciousness. It’s beneficial to ask your heart where you’re being too judgmental with people or keeping them at arm’s length with separation or bias. This could be an individual, group, religion, race, etc. Practice radiating heart qualities of acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness to help release separation and judgment. Radiating these heart feelings has a cumulative effect that facilitates families, communities, and nations to open their hearts more and listen respectfully to each other’s views.”

“It’s getting more obvious that the more we shut off our hearts to each other, the worse the situation gets. We’ve seen this in families, personal relationships and between nations. Life is calling (shouting) for a change. The effectiveness of collective heart power is still in its early stages – yet it’s on the rise due to the increase of stress, anxiety and depression, and a desperate need for solutions that the mind without the heart can’t deliver.

As the heart, mind and emotions resonate in coherent alignment, this allows more spirit and heart energy to move through individual and collective intentions. From there, co‑creative solutions have a chance to emerge. Let’s start with our own care and compassion to make things better.”

Care Focus: Releasing Separation

1. Center yourself in the heart and breathe appreciation to warm your heart and increase your focus.
2. Connect with your heart’s intention to create more feelings of acceptance, compassion, and care in your interactions with others and within yourself. Consciously practice these feelings and attitudes for a week or so, and they will increasingly become automatic at times. This can progressively increase your emotional stability and resilience. It can also do much for preventing and decreasing stress accumulation.
3. Visualize our global collective heart energy helping to stabilize chaotic emotional energies that feed separations and biases within individuals and leaders and block effective solutions that are best for the whole.
4. Now envision enough people opening their hearts and setting aside their differences to create a more heart-based world. As hearts open more, there is a natural inner prompting to create ways to get along with each other, cooperate and co‑create solutions for the benefit of all. That’s who we are at the core.
5. Let’s close by radiating our compassionate care to all who are suffering hardships during the present global challenges.

“Thank you for Caring….GCI Steering Committee and Staff”

Crestone and Beyond

Please consider the following as a new springboard for your Care Focus practice of Releasing Separation.

The Color Us United movement is a new movement to support the goodness of We The People of the United States of America.

Diversity requires us to be tolerant of other viewpoints. It is one of the best ingredients for a functional democracy.

“Color Us United is an organization created to speak out against those who want to divide America. Our primary purpose is to give voice to you and millions of others who are upset by government, corporate and media claims that America is a hateful country.”

Here is a statement of Color Us United’s principles: “No society thrives when its leaders incite anger and division. Let’s not argue over which side — or who — is doing that. Color Us United believes in “We the People.” We the people do not want to be divided by race, gender, religion or anything else. Nor do we believe in unity of thought. Each American is truly unique.”

“Each person has myriad identities from race to ability, profession, hobby, interest and much more. We the people get along in our daily lives with all kinds of folks. We don’t like or admire everyone. That is not necessary. What we the people do is get along as individuals who connect in a zillion ways. Please join us if you want to send a message to America’s ‘leaders’: We want to be united. Not united in agreement, but united in the common goal of living together peacefully and freely.”

The current polarizing social and political environment is moving more people to the realization that it’s time for a more universal care, respect, and cooperation to be practiced; a practice which extends beyond the limitations of our personal viewpoints, preferences, and other inherent biases.

Such a practice can change the course of many unfavorable events in our personal and collective lives.

Thank you for reading this and considering these suggestions to help create a more peaceful national and global unity.

Signing off from Crestone and Beyond

Associated Reading

1. North Korean Defector Shares Her Story…highlights of this article include: “Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist, sees clear parallels between the United States and North Korea…Our educational system has been infiltrated by socialist and totalitarian ideologies, which is driving the loss of freedom we see in the U.S….Totalitarian brainwashing tactics routinely deployed in American institutions of higher education include anti-American propaganda, the stifling political correctness enforced through shaming and cancel culture…America is slipping into tyranny, but we can reverse this by getting engaged in our local communities and taking local action to safeguard American principles, rights and freedoms.”
2. James Madison University student speaks out against “shocking” orientation training…a college student offers insightful and balanced commentary about critical race theory indoctrination in educational systems.
3. Prayer… a writing on this website about what prayer is in our lives and how it moves through the heart.
4. The Spiral of Life: Heart Electromagnetics, Part II…a writing on this website about a very important feature of heart anatomy known as the helical ventricular myocardial band. This heart muscle feature is what enables prayer, our lives, and our connection to everything.