Workshop and seminar leaders Puran and Susanna Bair co-founded the Institute for Applied Meditation where they teach Heart Rhythm Meditation for integrating our physical, emotional, and spiritual life. This process enables individuals to get in tune with the sound, speed, and force of their own heartbeat. In this paperback, they present their meditation technique and exercises to help grow the heart in different dimensions:
• The Width of the Heart improves the ability to tolerate, sympathize, cooperate, and influence others in a harmonious way.
• The Height of the Heart raises your standards to idealism and perfection, and gives the optimism needed to strive for it.
• The Depth of the Heart brings the sensitivity and connection with others, the ability to feel emotions with great richness and completeness.
• The Forward Dimension of the Heart gives you the energy to that drives you forward with passion, initiative, and courage.
• The Inner Dimension of the Heart gives you potential, inner peace, connection with all things, and self-reliance.
Although many will be attracted to the meditation approach because of its health benefits, we found the Exercises for Life which are sprinkled through out each chapter to be the best things in the book. Here are a few from the section on the Depth of the Heart:
• "See yourself reflected in another. See how that person is similar to you. See how they become more similar as you feel more accommodation, respect, admiration and love for them."
• "Feel another person. People are very different than they appear and even different than they think they appear. Your feeling of another tells you more than their words and actions can."
• "Identify what irritates you about yourself when you see it reflected in another. Recognize that it is your own emerging quality you see in the one you admire."
