Overview of the practices
Heartful consists of a library of guided meditations. But you don't just pick from a list. Instead there are many different paths that can be taken through the library. The instruction and guidance adapts to your experience and preferences with the different aspects of each practice.
The first time you encounter a new technique or a new concept the guided meditation will provide you with an introduction and then a high degree of guidance. This guidance then decreases as you become familiar and experienced.
Focus Areas
Meditations have one of three primary techniques
Heart
Heart focused practices consist mostly of Compassion, Self-Compassion, and Gratitude. More advanced practices focus on our inner nature and goodness.
Body
Body focused practices include body scans and deeper work where we attune to our inner field of awareness and feel into subtle energy channels.
Mind
Mind based practices consist of traditional mindfulness like focusing techniques and breathwork
Compassion
Compassion practices consist of techniques for developing loving kindness and compassion for others. We learn to be happy for people as well as wish them an end to their troubles. We learn to recognize the compassion show toward us throughout our life.
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The practices here consist of traditional Metta practices paired with wisdom. These are mostly visualization exercises.
More advanced practices engage visualizations of mentors and recognition of our inner compassionate nature.
Self-Compassion
There's no doubt we add to our suffering by not appreciating our own difficulties as difficulties. Self-Compassion is more than just turning compassion inward, it is the a cultivation of an inner self-nurturer.
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Using any of the Heartful practices are acts of self-compassion and some practices will specifically focus our attention on all the things we do for ourselves. Self-compassion brought into daily life can be a powerful way to help us develop trust and confidence in ourselves.
Gratitude
A great set of heart centered practices focus on developing and recognizing gratitude. We can find gratitude for all sorts of things we take for granted. And from this we find an opening to the awe and mystery and wonder of life and our world. We can also cultivate gratitude by learning to pass it from one subject onto another.
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Gratitude can also serve us in our relationships as we learn to see and appreciate the efforts made by others.
Body Scans
The body can serve as an anchor for our awareness in mental focus practices but we can also explore the body and learn to find our grounding there. These practices can be great for when you cannot sleep or need to relax. Over time we can develop a sense of being in our bodies and bringing a portion of our waking perspective out of our heads.
Inner Fields of Awareness
We can experience our inner self physically. Various traditions and modalities speak of winds, drops, channels, and fields. The category of Inner Fields is about experiencing the inner subtle nature of the body. In these practices we focus on sensing and maintaining focus and not trying to change or control anything in our experience.
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It is possible with these practices to experience shifts, movements, energy flows and other changes but the focus of practice here is attunement.
Mental Focus
These practices are the most well known and comprise most of what the western world calls mindfulness. Here we may use the breath or other body sensations as an object of focus but the core practices are about awareness. Awareness of the mind, body, emotions, sensations all fall into this category. This mental focus is a pre-requisite to further analysis where we can investigate what comes into awareness. We can take some of these practices into our daily life as we learn to not get entangled in mental content.