2024-25 Punta Ballena retreat
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Opening the heart chakra
The heart chakra (Anahata) is a crucial focal point for both daily life and meditative practices, precisely because it serves as the bridge that connects the grounding of the lower chakras with the transcendence of the upper chakras. Its dual role integrates physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, making it central to holistic well-being and spiritual growth.
The main learning for this retreat was that opening the heart chakra is essential to the effortless stabilisation of the eyes resting in the third-eye position for long periods of time.
In the 2020 retreat I had realised that the resting of the eyes in the third-eye position was key to the continuous non-identification with thoughts. Actually just the long term stillness of the eyes is sufficient for this, but locked into the third-eye position also has the benefit of being particularly beneficial to higher connection and insight.
Keeping the eyes locked in position is extremely tiring and there is only so much will power to do this, so it cannot be sustained for long meditations. In a retreat setting, this depleting of the will consumes ones energy and the quality of the meditation inevitably degrades as the days go by.
Many teachings say that we need to connect to the abundant inexhaustible vital energy of the universe to overcome this obstacle, and the most accessible way to do this is by opening and connecting with the heart chakra.
For example practitioners such as Swami Sivananda and Paramahansa Yogananda have noted that without an open heart, attempts to engage the third eye rely more on personal willpower and effort, leading to exhaustion rather than effortless flow.
In Dzogchen and Mahamudra teachings, the heart centre is associated with the natural, spacious quality of awareness. An open heart allows for the effortless integration of body, mind, and subtle energies, supporting higher meditative states.
Typically this is done by balancing our focus-oriented meditation practices with compassion-oriented practices such as Tonglen, but I've never really clicked with this kind of exercise as it always feels contrived for me - I'm not really great at visualisation exercises in general.
But in this retreat a solution came to light that really works in opening the heart chakra well for me. It comes from both unregulated breathing, particularly exhaling having no control, this gladdens the heart. But in addition to this, I found that the chin mudra (thumb and index finger connected, palm up) makes the heartbeat very discernable, and using this mudra allows the mindfulness of the unregulated breathing to naturally expand to include the heartbeat and eventually even more of the bodies subtle rhythms.
Krishnananda mentions that heart-centred meditation benefits greatly from natural processes like unregulated breath, as it mirrors the deeper rhythms of life. Compassion, he suggests, should be expressed actively in daily living rather than being forced during meditative absorption.
The subtle rhythms of the body
Stillness acts like a filter, removing the distraction of external and internal noise (e.g., thoughts, emotions, environmental stimuli). This allows finer, quieter sensations—such as the body’s rhythms or the subtlest movement of breath—to emerge into awareness. The salience landscape is essentially the "map" of what the mind deems important or worthy of focus. In ordinary states, this map is cluttered with competing stimuli. Through stillness, the salience landscape becomes simplified and reordered, prioritising finer, subtler aspects of experience over more gross or transient phenomena. As louder inputs fade away, the system dynamically recalibrates, assigning more weight to subtle rhythms, sensations, and patterns. This reordering is not forced but arises naturally as the mind settles into stillness.
The subtle rhythms of the body are founded in the breath and the heart creating pulsing waves of pressure in the blood, and there are many other more subtle layers of rhythm too. As one observes these and settles into stillness they become clearer, it's much like listening to the wind, water and insects in the forest. One starts to appreciate that we are part of nature and that we can bathe the inexhaustible flow of vital energy within our own bodies just as we can do so by sitting quietly in a forest.
