Heart Meditation is a gentle yet powerful way to open your heart and connect with its natural vulnerability, gentleness, and compassion.

The human heart beats around 100,000 times a day, pumping nutrient-rich blood around the body via the circulatory system. A healthy heart is the key to life and it's essential to maintain it by avoiding risk factors such as high cholesterol, diabetes and stress that are associated with heart disease.

Practicing Heart Meditation is a simple, but profoundly effective way to enhance heart health and increase resilience to stress. It is a powerful practice that can be done alone or with the guidance of a skilled teacher, and can help you connect to the softness and tenderness of your heart.

You can also use this technique to release any repressed feelings that are stored within your heart, such as fear, sadness and anger. Simply sit, relax and breathe in and out gently, allowing the feelings and emotions that come up to surface as you focus on the gentle flow of your breath.

Breathing into your heart is a gentle and powerful way to bring awareness of the liveliness of the billions of cells that make up your heart, connecting you to their vitality and fluid power. You can practice this for a few minutes, or you can use it as a tool to reconnect with the tenderness of your heart at any time during the day.

The American Heart Association recently released new guidelines on how to incorporate meditation into your daily lifestyle to lower your risk of developing heart disease. But they caution that meditation should not replace other proven heart-health strategies, such as diet and exercise.