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This experience has stayed with me when I returned to the UK and it’s as if a whole new dimension has arisen in my experience of being alive. I find it the most potent antidote to negative feelings and emotions. Should these crowd in upon me (as they are wont to do in grey old January London!?) I simply bring my attention to the heart and circle around it with positive affirmations of emotions such as joy, loving gratefulness for what I have, rather than what I do not have and lo and behold my negative feelings evaporate. As I usually do this in the early morning I come down to breakfast and my wife says, “Why are you so damn cheerful?”

Also I think once we re-open this center in ourselves a compulsion seems to arise, and it certainly did in me, to be more honest with ourselves and more straightforward and honest with others. I found myself being much more critical of myself in terms of relationships, wanting things straightforward, nothing concealed, a higher integrity as if the heart could not stand anything not quite right, not straight and authentic. Finally it seemed to me as if one other essential faculty was restored to me through this heart center work and that was that my gratefulness heart meditations turned into what I can only describe as praise. This did not seem to be praise to a specific God, or even an idea like it, but to something out and beyond my small self, something altogether larger and more powerful than myself, to which the only right attitude seemed to be praise. This has given my life a new sense of direction in this respect and it is a joyful thing.