Hridaya meditation: the practice for recognising the Spiritual Heart
Hridaya meditation is a method of meditation to open to the Spiritual Heart, our essential nature. The actual practice consists of three pillars: the awareness of the heart centre, the awareness of the pauses in the breath, and self-inquiry. At Cave of the Heart Retreats we share it on 3-day, 5-day and 10-day Hridaya silent meditation retreats at Karuna Retreat Center in Monchique, in the Algarve, Portugal.
Where this begins: a teaching given in silence
Ramana Maharshi's first teaching was not spoken.
For years he simply sat, and people came and sat with him, and something was recognised. Not explained to them, and not handed to them, but recognised, in their own hearts, in the presence of someone who was resting in what he was. For years spiritual seekers came to him and he still did not speak.
At some point he wrote. His first written teaching was for his mother, who had come to take him home. What he wrote was this:
"Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try how hard you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent."
The silence he means is not first of all the absence of noise. It is not something you arrange by going somewhere quiet, although outer quiet helps and is why we hold retreats in silence. It is the silence of our own being, in which everything is simply happening, and which is already the case whether or not we have noticed it.
That is what this method points at. Everything on this page, the three pillars, the postures, the retreats themselves, is a finger. What the finger points to is not far away. It is the most natural thing there is: resting in what we already are.
If it is already natural, why practise at all?
It is the obvious objection, and it deserves a straight answer.
Nothing in this practice produces what we are looking for. It could not, because what we are looking for is not an achievement and not a state that begins at some point in time. The Sanskrit word jnana, wisdom, does not mean gathered knowledge. It means a knowledge that implies the removal of what obscures. The work is subtractive, and the practice is not building anything.
But something does have to happen, because the obscuring is real and it is habitual, and it does not lift because we have understood in principle that it could.
Ramana gave the clearest image for this in his own writing. The enquiry works its way through every thought until nothing is left to enquire into, and then, he says, the enquiry itself is consumed, "even like the stick used for stirring the burning funeral pyre gets consumed."
That is the honest status of every method here. The pillars are the stick. They are handled wholeheartedly, and they are burned in the end.
What the word Hridaya means
The Spiritual Heart, Hridaya, is much more than a physical place in the body.
Hridaya is the Sanskrit word for the Spiritual Heart. While it refers also to the physical organ, in Kashmir Shaivism and other non-dual traditions the word points to Ultimate Reality. To call Ultimate Reality "the Heart" points to the fact that our Heart and the Heart of the whole universe are essentially the same. Atman, individual essence, is Brahman, Ultimate Reality, or in Sanskrit: Ayam Atma Brahma.
Recognition of the Spiritual Heart arises by releasing the ordinary, discursive mind, or rather all its identifications, into luminous, spacious and silent awareness. To rest in that awareness, resting in the awareness of awareness, as long and as often as possible, opens us to the recognition we are looking for.
What grows from this, gradually, is a spiritual understanding of a non-dual reality, followed by an embodiment of the freedom to love, and of wisdom.
The three pillars
Hridaya Meditation is a powerful meditation to move beyond any limitation of the mind and open to a deeper dimension of yourself. Through this meditation, we learn to refine awareness and tap into a vibrant intimacy with our being and with life itself. We cultivate a serene and clear mind that allows for an open and loving heart.
It consists of three main pillars that can be found in various non-dual, contemplative traditions, yet most prominently, they are inspired by Ramana Maharshi and the Kashmiri Shaivist tradition. The combination of these techniques has been created by the founder of Hridaya Yoga, Sahajananda, and has been practised by our teachers for many years.
After years of practice and living in a Sangha, we have seen the immense transformation that this meditation practice can bring.
The first pillar: the awareness of the heart centre
The heart centre on one hand is a physical point in the body, in the middle of the chest, slightly to the right. On another dimension it functions as a portal to the Divine. It is the point in our being where, according to Ramana Maharshi and the experience of many, the I-feeling, the pure "I am", is perceived and felt most tangibly.
Think of the entire chest area as a throne room. It is a room in which the divine resides as the king. The heart centre is the throne itself. Bring your awareness there and recognise that you are one with the king.
Ramana Maharshi invited us to go beyond a specific point in the body. He said that the Heart is neither inside nor outside the body, that it is another name for Reality itself, and that "there is no need to know where and what the Heart is; it will do its work if you engage in the quest for the Self." The point in the chest is a doorway, useful exactly as long as we identify with a body.
The second pillar: the pauses after inhalation and after exhalation
Including the pauses after inhalation and exhalation in our awareness is more than simple object awareness. As the breath moves in and out, so prana moves down and up in the body. The short moments of transition, where in-breath and out-breath are equal, provide a moment of equilibrium and therefore of possible transcendence. It is in these moments that the perception of time dissolves into eternity. Here we can look behind phenomena, towards the background of silence.
Think of it as the symbol of yin and yang. Speaking metaphorically, on the in-breath yin is dominant, and on the out-breath yang is. In the pauses they are in perfect harmony. Wholeness arises, and pure awareness can be recognised as the ground of being. Another way to see it is that the pauses are the meeting point between in-breath and out-breath. Stillness is there when they meet, and duality can be transcended.
On a mental level, the breath is linked to the activity of the mind. Once we consciously slow the breath down, mental activity slows too. You have probably had moments of pure astonishment, and in those moments the breath stops. There is even a saying: do not measure your life by the number of breaths you take, but by the number of moments that take your breath away. In such moments there is pure presence.
When awareness becomes more refined through resting in these pauses, we also open to the gaps between thoughts. And there, again, that background of Stillness, the formless canvas from which phenomena appear, can be recognised as such.
With this practice of the awareness of the pause we open to the recognition of the background of Stillness, the unfathomable silence of our being.
"No particular thought can be mind's natural state, only Silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience, or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence."
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The third pillar: self-inquiry, the question "Who am I?"
Self-inquiry is the last of the three pillars and yet the most essential, because it is the most direct path to recognition and to liberation. Self-inquiry is the movement of awareness towards itself, and the abidance in it.
Discernment and clarity are necessary for inquiry to happen. We ask the question "Who am I?" and investigate the nature of our being directly. For this question to unfold its meaning, two things have to be present: your longing for truth, and your insight into the mind's limited understanding of who you are. Without them the mind will simply answer the question, and it cannot find an answer that goes beyond concepts, beyond the relationship of subject and object, or simply beyond duality.
In that case it is better to emphasise the first and second pillars, until they are fruiting and spiritual understanding or a longing for truth is dawning. Nothing is forced. And what you truly are may very well remain a mystery.
Ramana put the whole movement into two verses of his own:
"The mind is merely thoughts. Of all thoughts, the thought 'I' is the root."
"Whence does this 'I' arise? Seek for it within; it then vanishes. This is the pursuit of Wisdom."
Ramana Maharshi, Upadesa Saram, verses 18 and 19
The pillars support each other in offering depth
These pillars work in synergy. Each one of these pillars, or the combination of them, points to the essence of our being. Be honest with yourself and understand which of them can be supportive for you at each moment.
How Hatha Yoga supports the practice
Every day of a retreat includes a session of Hridaya Hatha Yoga.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the foundational texts of hatha yoga, is unambiguous about what the practice is for. Svatmarama opens by saluting the knowledge of hatha yoga as a staircase for those who wish to climb to raja yoga, and says plainly that he is explaining hatha yoga for the attainment of raja yoga. Raja yoga here means the meditative path. Read that way, Svatmarama's position is blunt. Hatha practised without meditation is time spent.
Not because the postures do nothing, but because their whole capacity is to prepare. Yogic practices prepare not only the physical body, and with it the subtle and the emotional dimensions of our being, so that meditative states become available, and so that the conditions in which recognition can happen are actually present.
Through the postures and practices we explore the chakras. Different energies related to qualities and aspects of the human experience to which we open while resting in stillness and while keeping self-inquiry alive. Two things are happening simultaneously: we rest as the witness consciousness and we are aware of the movements of energy without identifying with them.
The longer we rest in that natural awareness, the clearer something becomes. The energies moving through us are not personal. Hatha yoga practised this way helps us recognise their universality. When the energy of love opens in anahata chakra, what opens is not our love. It is the recognition of love as something universal.
That is what allows the practice to go deeper and eventually to point where everything else on this page points, towards the essence, the background of stillness. And it does so while everything is recognised rather than excluded: the expressions of the chakras, and also sensations, emotions, thoughts, any part of the human experience at all, arising in that background of presence.
The freedom of your own experience
Rather than following a dogma, meditation invites us to our own direct experience. The teaching is not sectarian and asks no belief of you. Across the days of a retreat the talks draw on different traditions like Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, Sufism or Kashmir Shaivism. All are pointers to our essence, which is beyond a specific culture or teaching.
There is an old story about blind men meeting an elephant. One touches the leg and says the elephant is solid, like a pillar. Another touches the ear, another the trunk, and each describes something different and none of them is lying. We meet the same essence from the angle of our own individuality. So the invitation is to open to your own direct experience of it, in whichever way is available to you, rather than to accept a description of what it should be.
The lifelong journey of meditation invites us to abide in the freedom beyond concepts, beliefs or preconceived ideas, since we comprehend their limitation to describe the deeper Truth of our being.
What Hridaya meditation is not
It is not a relaxation method, a concentration exercise or a stress management tool. A serene and clear mind is part of what the practice cultivates, and it is the ground rather than the goal.
It is also not a way of acquiring anything. The movement here is subtractive. If anything, the practice makes us emptier and more transparent, and in this, the intrinsic fullness of our being can be experienced.
Meditation, and what therapy does
Thoughts and emotions belong to what we call the personal domain. That is a real domain and important work happens there. It is where therapy works, and where healing on a personal level happens, and nothing in this practice replaces it.
Meditation connects us to something else: the space in which all of that is appearing, the space that holds everything. Consider crying, and then resistance to the crying, and then anger at the resistance. Each of those layers needs space in order to move at all. What the witness does is expand that space. The heart space becomes larger, and we can encompass more, and there is a kind of healing in that too.
This is not therapy and it is not a substitute for it. It is a different relationship to the same material.
How the practice sits inside a silent retreat
A retreat day is built around this method rather than decorated with it. There are several periods of sitting meditation, a session of Hridaya Hatha Yoga, a teaching talk, and a daily question and answer session, all held within continuous silence.
The pillars are taught from the beginning and returned to every day, which is the real reason the method is taught over consecutive days rather than in single classes. The attitudes themselves are simple. What takes time is the settling that lets them do anything.
We describe a full retreat day hour by hour in what to expect on a silent meditation retreat, and the shared silence that holds it in noble silence, or mauna.
How to begin
Hridaya meditation is learned by practising it, with guidance, over consecutive days. Everything is taught during the retreat, from the beginning, and no previous experience is needed. Beginners are welcome at every retreat we run.
If you are weighing up a first retreat, our honest guide for beginners goes through the questions people actually write to us about.
You do not have to wait for a retreat to begin. You are welcome at our free weekly online meditation on Tuesday evenings at 9pm CET, you can practise with our recorded meditations at any time, and our one-day online silent retreats are a gentle way to spend longer in the practice from home.
See our silent meditation retreats in Portugal.
Rumi gave the shortest instruction anyone has managed: close your eyes, fall in love, and stay there.
Frequently asked questions
What is Hridaya meditation?
Hridaya meditation is a method for the recognition of our essence, the Spiritual Heart. It consists of three pillars: the awareness of the heart centre in the chest, the awareness of the pauses after inhalation and after exhalation, and self-inquiry through the question "Who am I?". It is inspired most prominently by Ramana Maharshi and by Kashmir Shaivism, and the combination as taught today was created by Sahajananda, the founder of Hridaya Yoga.
What does Hridaya mean?
Hridaya is the Sanskrit word for the Spiritual Heart. It refers to the physical organ as well, and in Kashmir Shaivism and other non-dual traditions it points to Ultimate Reality itself. To call Ultimate Reality the Heart is to say that the core of our being and the core of the whole universe are essentially the same.
What are the three pillars of Hridaya meditation?
The awareness of the heart centre, the awareness of the pauses after inhalation and after exhalation, and self-inquiry through the question "Who am I?".
Is Hridaya meditation the same as mindfulness?
They differ in aim. Mindfulness practices generally cultivate open attention to present experience. Hridaya meditation turns attention towards the one who is aware, with the recognition of our essential nature as its purpose. Calm and clarity may appear along the way, and they are the ground rather than the goal.
Is Hridaya meditation religious?
No belief is asked of you and no religion is required. The teachings draw on several contemplative traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, Sufism and Kashmir Shaivism. What is asked is an openness to look honestly at your own experience.
Is meditation a replacement for therapy?
No. Thoughts and emotions belong to the personal domain, and that is where therapy works. Meditation connects us to the space in which all of that appears, and expands it, so that more can be held. The two are different relationships to the same material, and neither substitutes for the other.
Do I need experience to learn Hridaya meditation?
No. Every practice is taught during the retreat, from the beginning, step by step, and repeated each day. You can also join our free weekly online meditation before ever attending a retreat.
What if I cannot sit cross-legged?
Then use a bench or a chair. It is possible to go very deep sitting on a chair. Cushions, benches and chairs are all available at the retreat.
Why is Hatha Yoga part of a silent meditation retreat?
Because in its own foundational texts hatha yoga exists for the sake of meditation. Svatmarama, the author of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, presents hatha as a staircase to raja yoga and says the two do not succeed without each other. Asana and other yogic practices prepare the physical, subtle and emotional dimensions of our being so that meditative states become available.
Where is the heart centre?
Ramana Maharshi associated it with the chest, in the middle and slightly to the right. Through the awareness of the heart centre we can open to the recognition of the Spiritual Heart, which, as Ramana Maharshi says, is neither inside nor outside the body and is another name for Reality itself. The point in the chest is a doorway, useful while we still identify with the body.