Contemplative Learning and Inquiry across Disciplines

13 Transformative Pathways: Engaging the Heart in Contemplative Education

13 Transformative Pathways Engaging the Heart in Contemplative Education Diana Denton Entering In various spiritual traditions the heart is conceptualized as a site of liberation or enlightenment. Considering questions of freeing consciousness, I have attended to the tantric conception of liberation as hrydayangamibhuta—to become something that moves in the heart (Muller-Ortega, 1989). My understandings are inspired by the non-dual tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism.1 Paul Muller-Ortega (1989) in his exploration of this tradition notes that “notions of contraction and expansion of the Heart are directly related to the spiritual conditions of ignorance or enlightenment of the individual soul” (p. 122). From this perspective the heart or hrdaya is described as a site of vibration or movement that awakens as consciousness expands. Here the term “hrdaya refers most directly to the concept of the Heart cakra that emerged from Upanisadic and Yogic formulations” (Muller-Ortega, 1989, p. 75). The heart chakra has been described as the seat of the soul, a place of compassion and love, an embodied awareness of the Infinite—the very core of being (Maharshi, 1972/2001, p. 80). The practices of the heart are rooted in a somatic awareness of the movement of this center as it expands and contracts (Dyczkowski, 1987; Muller-Ortega, 1989). Through practices of the heart we move toward awakening and expanding consciousness. A heartfelt practice requires attentiveness to the stillness and movement of experience—to the multiple tightenings , contractions, fluidities, and expansions of immediate somatic 215 216 Diana Denton experience. Attentiveness is the doorway to a new curriculum of breath, silence, and listening—listening in the body, listening to feeling, listening to the ordinary experiences of life—hearing (and seeing) with the heart. (Denton, 2004, p. 137) As educator, I have followed this notion of movement conceptually, somatically and metaphorically through contemplative practice, imagination and thought as I ask: How is the heart linked to the freeing of consciousness? In trying to conceptualize an understanding that was not embedded in a specific culture or tradition, I turned to emergent somatic images. Using heart, stone, and flame as exchangeable metaphors, I explored discourses and practices to re-vitalize inner heart knowledge and embodiment (Denton, 1998, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006). In this chapter, through metaphoric innovation and a poetic sensibility, I deepen my phenomenology/pedagogy of the heart. Engaging the heart as both inner method and attainment,2 I ask how insights and practices of the heart might continue to expand a contemplative pedagogy and vision. How is the awakened heart embodied within self, relationship, and community? An important first step in such an inquiry is the recognition of the signs of contraction and expansion in these systems. If lenses of contraction narrow our reading of the world (Levin, 1988); how might the vision of the heart expand our perception? I take as my starting point the metaphors of the heart that have informed my understandings of the inner world of the self. As a teacher and scholar of communication, I extend these metaphors from the world of the intrapersonal to networks of relationship—the realms of the interpersonal and organizational. Kşemarãja, a tenth-century teacher in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism states that individual consciousness “becomes contracted in conformity with the objects of consciousness” (Kşemarãja as quoted in Singh, 1990, p. 55). I use a simple image to convey this concept (Denton, 1998, 2005a, 2005b): A large black pillow. My hands clutch together pieces of the pillow, like the self that holds impressions of experience, the pillow hardens, is compressed, as impressions are embedded and “defenses” formed. If I try to remove these hardened parts the pillow will tear; it will break. This hardening of the pillow is akin to the tightening of the ego—the crust or shell that hardens around the self—constricting the heart. As the movement of the heart diminishes, “the more does the subjectivity fall until it becomes inert like a stone” (Abhinavagupta in Muller-Ortega, 1989, p. 209). David Michael Levin (1988) describes the modern self as “a self deeply divided, a self in which reason is split off from feeling, from sensibility, and from the innate wisdom of the body” (p. 20). Citing Guenther, he notes 217 Transformative Pathways that “the process of ‘transformation’ which we call ‘growing up’ is actually one of ‘growing narrowness and frozenness’” (p. 59). I note the movement and restrictions...