Getting Discomfortable with Silence: Day 3

On the third and final day of my silent meditation retreat at the Hridaya Yoga Centre, I made it my mission to experience one of these “heart orgasms” I’d heard so much about. It turns out that thinking about sex while meditating leads to embarrassment, not an orgasm in your heart, so I needed another strategy. I focussed instead on a method they called “blowing on the embers of the heart”, which is a breathing and visualization exercise that concentrates love and attention on the heart centre. And it worked…

During the lecture that day, they tried to link their philosophy with science by pointing out that there was an anatomical basis for Ramana Maharshi’s assertion that the gateway to the heart centre (not to mention “reality/God/everything”) was on the right-hand side of the chest and not the left where your heart resides. Presumably unbeknownst to Maharshi at the time, there actually is something on the very right edge of the heart called the Sinoatrial node. This tiny cluster of cells is the pacemaker of the heart, stimulating it into beating with rapid electrical pulses.

As I sunk into the most peaceful and focused meditation of my life, I was surprised to find that there really was a tiny fluttering sensation in the centre of my chest, to the right of my heartbeat (which I could also feel vividly) that really did feel like some kind of profound electrical sensation. It kind of blew my mind. Is it really possible that one could get so focused on their body that they could actually feel the Sinoatrial node in action? I wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, it felt amazing!

I spent the rest of the day experimenting with this fluttering rhythm, which at one point I started to visualize more as the flickering flame of life keeping me alive. I discovered that it reacts strongly to emotion, or perhaps more accurately, it felt like its reactions are what we call emotion. This flickering flame of life took me down an internal rabbit hole that led not only to a possible heart orgasm but even potentially to the “feeling” of God that I spoke about in last week’s episode.