Feeling That Supports Empathy

In the following exercises we use steady attention as a tool to investigate the nature and domain of the great heart. Any and all of these should begin with adjusting your centre of perception from the abstract brain sense to the heart sense.

The brain sense holds experience in generalized learned categories, such as ‘Monday,’ ‘me,’ ‘the living room.’ The heart sense gets experience in direct, present, specific detail: the clock is ticking, there’s the smell of wax from the shiny polished table, my mood is quiet, slightly tired, my breathing is shallow.

Whenever you take in the specific quality of how something is manifesting right now, the heart-sense comes into play. To allow it the room to do so, you must put aside all other imperatives and attitudes of what is important or necessary - be mindful in other words. You may notice a softening of the visual focus and a sense of relaxation. From there you can bring up the enquiry into feeling that supports empathy.
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Spend some time, five to ten minutes, to get in touch with your bodily sense and with a few specific details of the world immediately around you, that which you can know through your senses. Notice that some give rise to agreeable and some to disagreeable feelings. Let that be the way it is.

Then consider how you are right now, how you feel as an overall sense. Maybe it’s a good day, or you’re relaxed…how does it feel to feel that way? Can you appreciate the health, happiness or ease and just be with it?

Bring to mind an occasion when you felt really good: fulfilled, at ease, welcomed - whatever feeling good means to you as an expression of heart.

Or imagine what it would be like, right now, to feel at ease. Keep bringing that memory or image back until you can linger in its effect, feeling the feeling and letting go of the idea or memory that evokes it.

Contemplate how that feels in your body, especially around the heart area. Feel your breathing move through that area, through your entire chest and open into that feeling. Imagine widening and softening, and keep steadily relaxing the chest, solar plexus and jaw. As these areas unlock, let the breath-energy bring the heart-feeling to the entire body.

Distil the sense of that into something sacred, something that is a part of your heart independent of time and place.

Holding that as a wide field of awareness, contemplate whatever felt senses arise and move through it. Relax any attempt to understand or react to tingles and shifts; keep returning to the wide field of heart awareness as if it were a pool of water through which other energies could pass, and within which they can dissolve.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the book, Meditation - A Way of Awakening, (pdf) pp. 109-110.