Mind/Heart Unity – BionicOldGuy

I’ve been doing well in meditation lately, reaching the first important step of “muting the default mode network” (which I discussed here). But something was missing. Sometimes I felt calm and quiet but dull or empty. I had seen meditation teachers talk about connecting the mind and heart, and I thought that might be what was missing, but they didn’t make much progress on it. I got some tips about it from the book “The Heart of Focused Prayer” by Cynthia Borgeault. I will discuss that book a little later. But the breakthrough for me was when Cynthia discussed the neuroscience implications of the mind/heart connection. I used to think that the “heart” was meant to be metaphorical here, but he insisted that it was physical. This book was written in 2016 so the neuroscience research on this has been sparse but still compelling. Since then it exploded, and now there is a whole field of “neurocardiology”. The brain and heart communicate strongly through the vagus nerve, and it helps in mental and physical health when they “synchronize”.

To understand this more I asked Google Gemini to do some in-depth research on it, and the resulting report is here. There is a lot now about things like “vagal tone”, which I thought meant doing things for the brain to slow down the heart. But it turns out that 80% of the traffic along the vagus nerve is from the heart to the brain, and only 20% is brain to heart. The important thing is that if the heart and brain can work together, it becomes a healthy and relaxing state. The details are summarized in the infographic:

I was already doing one of the suggested methods for this, which is breathing about 10 breaths per minute during meditation. That was by accident, naturally the level of breathing I settled on. It is also suggested to do “heart-opening” activities. In my case thinking about my loved ones works well for that. Adding that to my meditation was a night and day difference. No longer feeling silent but empty. Now when the chatter of the mind dies, it is quiet but full, when the fullness is a sweet feeling in the heart area.

“The Heart of Focused Prayer” is highly recommended for those interested in meditation techniques and theory. Centering prayer is a practice that originated in the Christian tradition but is useful throughout the world. It’s kind of a combination of open awareness and mantra meditation. Instead of repeating the mantra continuously you use the word only occasionally as a reminder to “focus” when your attention wanders. That summary doesn’t do it justice, to understand the nuances you have to read this book.