Notice your limp heart until it becomes a rose-colored meteor

A brief personal guide to heart practice

I sometimes introduce loving-kindness practice to people as “friend crush” practice. For nearly all of us, there’s at least one person who’s shiny to think about. Even if the effect is slight, see what happens if you let your attention rest on that glow, that lift in your chest, longer than you would normally. Don’t grab at the sensation: make your attention like velvet on the feeling. Let that be as nice as it can, for one focused but relaxed minute. Let it fill as much of the pie chart of your consciousness as possible, probably with your eyes closed. If you have a strong visual imagination, this might involve imagining the person wreathed in light. If not, like me, you might just focus on the tactile qualities.

Try it now. One minute. If you like that, add more minutes. See if the emotion can enter and pervade the breath like incense.

This framing is designed to counter the main failure mode of heart practice, which is to make it aspirational. People hear about “loving-kindness” practice and they think, “alright, time to pretend I have the emotions of Jesus, time to love dictators.” You may get there, but you have to begin with your average post-industrial heart.

Take the emotions that already sweeten your life in small quantities, and notice that they multiply when given delicate attention. If the phrase “may all beings be happy” has zero here-and-now resonance for you, ignore it. Instead, pick up the appreciation for how music sounded when you were in college. Or the bittersweet transience re: the beloved friends who are off living separate lives somewhere. Gratitude that you are still allowed to be in society despite your previous failings. Whatever is effortlessly opening when you turn towards it internally. I also introduce heart practice as “corny feelings” practice. You have at least one of those within reach, right?

If your mind is jumpy, try conjuring a feeling out of a jumpy series of impressions. For awhile, I really enjoyed thinking of all the people in my life fleetingly, inwardly repeating “good job,” until I was awash in enough feeling to hold it as a concentration object. The technique that works for you might be stupid.

If your experience is tinged with sadness, that is fine. Also, I disagree with traditional Buddhist guides that tell you never to confuse heart practice with romantic or sexual feelings. Pick whatever is rich and involving as an object, right now—as long as you can stay with the feeling itself and not any attached fantasies. Stay with the feeling. And gently notice how pleasant and engaging that is, sliding into a relaxed flow state. That’s all you need to do.

When the feeling is large enough that you can let it overtake you like a tidal wave, do that. Let the feeling start steering. Getting there involves mastering your emotional system, which is more like befriending an animal than following a recipe. Force won’t work. Gently experiment with different coaxing. You will learn, in time, what stirs you. Some people, I’m told, get blissed out by remembering their favorite equations.

It might be completely insane, what happens to you. Heart practice is a great onramp to jhanas, the druggy bliss states you may have heard about. If you do heart practice for some years, as your main meditation or as a supplement, you might find yourself default loving everyone, even the people who annoy you. Approaching strangers as if you love them, because you do, has an effect. You’ll empathize even with your enemies as you are smiting them. With significant training, MDMA will seem like a mostly superfluous compound, just a stimulant atop your normal emotional spectrum. (Really.) You won’t be blissful 24/7, challenging emotions will still arise. But you can get closer than most people would believe possible to embracing everything, while still functioning sensibly.

You don’t have to believe me, any more than people who go to the gym have to believe that, with repeated application of resistance, the average person becomes muscular. You just have to show up. Feel what is rich and involving today, on many days.

If there aren’t any rich feelings available, you might be tensed up in a state of resentment. Try this forgiveness meditation, or try having the difficult conversation you’ve been postponing.

If there’s a big screaming billboard of anxiety or shame in the way of any other emotion, and you’re mentally stable overall, try focusing on the screaming billboard as if it’s a positive sensation that you want to appreciate every detail of. Just the physical parts of the sensation, not the interpretations. Could be cool, this book might help.

If you’re not afraid of the G-word, try the feeling that results from the phrase “remember that God loves you.”

If you’re sick of feeling positive emotion alone, if that feels a little insular and masturbatory, try tonglen. I fucking love tonglen.

There may be side effects to heart practice.

What side effects?

Meditation side effects generally fall into two categories.

The first category, not typically caused by heart practice, is perceptual weirdness—for example, after dry vipassana, where you carve sensation up into its constituent parts, sometimes reality will feel buggy, like a stuttering film strip.

The second category is “congratulations, you have been forced to do some helpful therapy.” Material is produced which has to be worked on. Mostly, the side effects of heart practice are like that. Behold these oscillating cones:

Distraction gets an undeservedly bad reputation. It’s a helpful method of concealing difficult things we don’t yet wish to confront. ADD behavior is an emotional regulation strategy, and subtler forms of distraction are useful ways of obscuring, say, the knowledge of death and transience.

After heart practice, your attention will be more open and stable, so you’ll contact the difficult parts of the human experience. Luckily, you’ll be armored with a sense of love and safety after a good sit. But the emotional glow won’t necessarily persist—so you might have to encounter these difficult sensations without that armoring. This can be done, but it’s intense, and you’ll have to feel out your capacity as you go. It’s like being sent out on a mountain with a pack full of delicious food. Halfway up you might run out of lunch and find yourself hungry out there. Before doing intensive heart practice, make sure you have someone who can support you when you’re halfway up, a teacher or friend or therapist or parent or whoever, someone who can hear your tantrums. If you can’t allow yourself vulnerability, I don’t advise this practice.

If you find yourself taking on too much, feel free to re-enter distraction. Most people are experts in checking out—draw on that skill when necessary. Have some carbs and video games until you develop more equanimity.

There is a far side beyond, where every sensation can be met with open tenderness. Heart practice will get you moving in that direction. Complete intimacy with all experience is an unusual place to live from. You will be, in some facets of your emotional experience, unrelatable to many people. This is the tradeoff; you will know that, at bottom, the mind is wonderful, in a culture that frantically tries to persuade you that life is essentially tragic. You will enter the small weird team of happy people.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.