Teachings

The Heartwood is focused primarily upon mindfulness meditation (satipatthana sutta) and the boundless heart teachings (the brahma-viharas). 

Mindfulness practice includes the opening of awareness via the four foundations of mindfulness:

• awareness of the body;
• awareness of feelings;
• awareness of mental phenomena (thoughts);
• awareness of the Dhammas (the truths of experience);

As we make our way through these four establishments of mindfulness, we deepen our capacity to maintain concentration and to establish present-moment awareness or wakefulness. Mindfulness meditation helps us to calm the body, heart and mind, and invites us to pay attention to what is happening in the here and now. Mindfulness meditation is an invitation to understand this yourself, to come to know this through your own practice and experience. The ‘sati’ part of satipatthana also means ‘remembering’ – in a nutshell-all we need to do is to remember that we are trying to be mindful, remember to take a breath before we go into reactivity, remember to feel our feet upon the ground. This practice of remembering helps us cultivate mindfulness in our daily lives.

The heart teachings or the brahma-viharas include the practice of cultivating goodwill, compassion, joy and balance. These states are usually familiar to us in some capacity, but the invitation here is to deliberately turn our attention to cultivating these qualities in our lives to not only increase our own happiness, but also the happiness of others.