Heartfulness meets Theory U
Reconnecting with our Higher Self for the benefit of All
We are living moments of crisis worldwide. More and more we are alienated from the planet, from each other and from ourselves, which has been leading to all sorts of challenges at different levels (wars, natural disasters, violence, physical and mental diseases, etc.). How to keep our balance amidst chaos? That is what we’re going to explore in this dialogue.
Vishnu Paramita (ViP): Hi. Thank you for accepting to do this dialogue. Before COVID several people talked about a “VUCA world” (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), but now some are using a new acronym to describe the state of the world: BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible). In most places, we look we see crises going on at several levels: ecological, social, health, spiritual, and so on. Is there only bad news at this moment in time?
Vasco Gaspar (VG): Fortunately not everything is bad news. There is also lots of good news all around us. As Otto Scharmer from the Presencing Institute normally refers, there’s also a “new emerging world”. A world inside and outside us that is connected to our individual and collective deeper places of sanity and basic goodness. A world of connection, integration, compassion, of humanhood. We can see it in social movements that want to find solutions to fight the pandemic, climate change, poverty, wars, or discrimination. We can notice it in some companies that are operating from a different level of consciousness, as the work of Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, points out. Even some spiritual organizations, like Heartfulness, are opening themselves to the world and looking to integrate their wisdom with other traditions, a true sign of hope. And, if we look inside in an honest way, we can see it in ourselves as well. I firmly believe that our essence, our nature, is basically good and compassionate. For instance, I love a website called Karuna Virus (karuna means compassion in Sanskrit) that emerged during the pandemic to really share stories of those acts of kindness, compassion, and wisdom that are all over the place but normally don’t reach the traditional media. It is filled with goodness!
ViP: It seems a wonderful and creative way to respond to the current situation. How do you think we can bring more of this goodness to the surface?
VG: I believe we need to find ways to re-connect with ourselves first and then, from that space, to reconnect with one another and with nature. When we do it we’re no longer slaves of our past patterns, of our judgments, our cynicism, and our fears, but we’re one with the whole and our actions are aligned with a wider intelligence that pervades us, making our actions effortless and meaningful.
ViP: It seems easier to say than to do. Where to start?
VG: The first thing we need to do is to recognize where is the source of our disconnection. There is this interesting Buddhist parable that tells us that if we throw a stick at a dog, the dog chases after the stick, but… if we throw a stick to a lion, the lion stops and looks to see who threw the stick. This is a good metaphor for how we relate to our minds. We are constantly being bombarded by stimuli, either from outside (e.g. news, social media, emails, etc.) or from the inside (e.g. thoughts about the future, ruminations about the past, fantasies about the present moment, etc.), and without awareness of that we just simply run after those “sticks” without questioning if it is worth to run after them or not. It is like always being on the surface of the ocean, being run by the waves and not realizing that we can dive deeper and find in the same ocean a place of stillness, peace, and connection. We need to be able to turn our attention to deeper places inside ourselves and realize those spaces of wisdom and sanity that lie just below the surface. Otherwise, we will continue to create results that no one wants.
ViP: What is the role of science in helping find solutions for these problems?
VG: Science is very important and can be for sure a source of good in addressing several of our current challenges. However, it can be also used for bad purposes. It always depends on who is using science, and from which level of consciousness they are operating. If we look at wars, for instance, science has been used to discover ways to kill other humans more efficiently, which is not a good and ethical use of science. Even if we come to the ecological field, for instance, take this quote from Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council:
“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
We need to address the source of those problems by connecting to a place of deeper wisdom and compassion in order to bring to life a cultural and spiritual transformation that can benefit the greater good.
ViP: So how can we do it? How can we connect to that deeper space?
VG: We can do several things to cultivate that connection and several spiritual traditions and systems offer valid resources in that regard. We can tap into that knowledge, learning from the past, and integrate it into our day-to-day activities. By having spiritual practices to address the root causes of our behavior it makes it easier to manifest an action in the world that is saner and aligned with a greater good. When we cultivate that inner and outer connection we can also start doing something very special, which is “learning from the future as it emerges”, as the author Otto Scharmer suggests, or “sensing and actualizing future possibilities” as another author, Joseph Jaworski points to.
ViP: Learning from the future?
VG: Yes. We, humans, have this amazing capacity of sensing and actualizing emergent future realities. We can sense into the future if we create spaciousness inside and become aligned with a place of deeper Wisdom. And when we do it our actions become effortless and our impact is greater than when we are acting from a place of small self — based on our fears, desires, anxiety, and so on.
ViP: That seems interesting. However, most of us seem to be living from that space of small self, of acting out of fear, or even acting without any kind of awareness, as if we were behaving in autopilot. Is it normal?
VG: It is perfectly normal. It is very easy for us to keep “downloading” the same patterns and behaviors of our past. It is almost like we were constantly putting the past in front of us, thinking it is the future and reliving it, constantly thinking the same thoughts, having the same actions and so on. Some authors suggest even that 90% of our thoughts are repetitive and that the great majority of them are negative, like thinking about what is lacking in our lives, or anxiously thinking about what can go wrong in our future. If that is true no wonder the levels of stress and depression are skyrocketing. The good news is that if we are the ones creating that inner reality, with the right tools and practices we can also address them and cultivate a more healthy “inner garden”.
ViP: That seems like a sign of hope. How can we do it?
VG: We need to elevate our level of consciousness in order to be able to see a different picture and have more options available to act from. How to do it? That brings us again to the author Otto Scharmer that says that “to elevate the level of consciousness of a system we need to find ways to make the system see and sense itself”. In this case, the system is us, our body-mind-spirit-relational system. We need to be able to find ways to step out of the system and get new awareness about it. From that leverage point, with more awareness, we can have a sense of better choices that are beneficial for the system, and those better choices will lead us to better results.
Elevation of consciousness is truly essential to change, and change is essential to understanding any system — including ourselves — much more deeply. Consciousness is the key to evolution.
ViP: So one of the essential keys seems to be aware of ourselves. Is that enough?
VG: No. I believe that there are more elements than just being aware. From one side, it is also necessary to address and “clean” what is making us act on autopilot, our impressions of the past, or, in Sanskrit, our samskaras. We can imagine that our consciousness is like a lake, whose waters are still and clear in their nature. The experiences we live, good or bad, create ripples in the stillness of the lake of consciousness, leading to impressions that condition us and mold our behavior.
We need then to find ways to clean our inner landscape from those impressions from the past. It is not about forgetting the past but cleaning the emotional impact of the events of the past, the emotional burdens. Most times we are anxious or angry not due to the present reality that is unfolding in front of us but due to our projections of it, based on our past experiences. Imagine for instance that you had a traumatic experience with someone with blue eyes and blonde hair called Jane and that you accumulated an impression of anger related to that person in your inner system. If not correctly integrated it can become part of your subconscious and the next time you find yourself with a person with similar characteristics you might feel irritated towards her without any rational reason, just because that impression of the past is influencing the way you are relating in the present. That happens not only on the individual level but also on the collective one. That is one of the things that propel hate and wars between different ethnic or religious groups, for instance, the historic division between India and Pakistan, or between Israel and Palestine. People find themselves acting in ways that are not rational, hating each other just because of the impressions they inherited from their social environment.
Besides the importance of cleaning the impressions of our past, it is also paramount that we find ways to connect with a deeper source of wisdom and intelligence, and for that, there are also some practices that we can use.
ViP: Let me recap: awareness of ourselves, cleaning our past impressions, and connecting to a deeper source. Anything else?
VG: Yes. Action, Karma. Having an action in the world aligned with that same wisdom. Acting from a place of basic sanity that already lies inside us and all around us. That will make our actions to be aligned with higher intelligence, creating a constructive resonance around us, which will inspire others to also act from that space. It is like a string of a guitar. If you have two guitars and play one string in one of them you’ll find that the same string from the other guitar will also vibrate. This is if both guitars are tuned and without rust on the strings, which brings us once again back to the importance of having a “cleaned and tuned” instrument.
ViP: So which practices can we do in order to create that flow and alignment?
VG: There are several useful practices that we can use, and different traditions use different methodologies for each goal. But before we enter into the practices themselves, maybe it is useful to give a useful framework to integrate these same practices in one unique flow, to have an overview of how they can fit together. Although we can use different frameworks, there is one from Otto Scharmer that can be useful called “Theory U”. For some decades that this MIT senior lecturer is interested in how we humans can have an action in the world that is aligned with a deeper source of wisdom, on how can we can sense and actualize best future realities. After interviewing more than 150 people recognized as innovators, artists, cognitive scientists, entrepreneurs, and many others, he and his colleagues started to notice a common pattern in these people that were bringing the new to the world. They seemed to be operating from that deeper source, as if they were “learning from the future as it emerged”, instead of just learning from the past and repeating those patterns of thoughts and behavior.
They also seemed to go through a similar process, independently of their field of action. They called it “the U process” because it has the shape of the letter U, inspired by a sharing of Brian Arthur, the founding head of the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute. Let’s go through it.
First of all, try to picture a U figure in your mind and divide that figure into three: the left side of the U, the bottom of the U, and the right side of the U. They correspond to the three main phases that we can cultivate in order to have an action in the world that is aligned with Life itself:
- 1. The first phase, the left side of the U, is mainly about Awareness, about sensing what is present in the moment. This implies suspending the voice of judgment and the voice of cynicism, stopping downloading our habitual patterns, and opening our Minds and our Hearts in order to be able to see and sense things in a fresh way and truly connect with the reality inside and around us;
- 2. The second phase, the bottom of the U, is related to connecting with a deeper source of wisdom. Instead of going directly to action, it is about retreating and reflecting. Here there is the need to be courageous in order to open our Will and let go of everything. Letting go of our ideas, our judgments, our wishes, and ourselves. To really “die” and connect with something higher, with Source. To create space and to wait. Wait for something to emerge. To let come. Here we connect to two fundamental questions of our existence: “Who is the Self? What is my Work?”. Basically, it is about SURRENDER. Not to someone or to our small self (our desires, fears, etc.), but to our Higher Self, to what Life is wanting to live through us.
- 3. The last phase, the right side of the U, is about acting in an instant. Here we try to give a shape to what we sense that is waiting to emerge from us, what Life is wanting to live through us. We try to translate intuition into something tangible, a concrete action. It is about crystalizing and creating quick prototypes to test this future that we sense wanting to emerge. It is about learning by doing, by failing fast to learn fast and being able to iterate and refine our actions towards that emerging future, so we can finally bring the new into the world by embodying it in our actions.
ViP: That seems like a lot of information. Maybe it is useful to recap in one or two sentences and then move to the practices that we can use?
VG: Yes, thank you. So basically we are conditioned by our past experiences that create patterns of behavior. Our still and clear consciousness is affected by those impressions of the past, which makes it difficult to have an action in the world that is really authentic and aligned with the present moment. To bring that authenticity to life we can go through this U process, which implies first cleaning the patterns of the past that block us from seeing things clearly and then becoming more aware of our current reality. For that, we need to open our minds, our hearts, and our will, and we’ll share in a moment some practices that we can use in that regard. Second, we need to find ways to connect with a deeper and higher Source of intelligence that lives inside us and outside us. By connecting with that Source we get a glimpse or intuition about what is the right action or “move” we need to do. Lastly, it is about having the courage, and the will, to crystallize that intuition into our actions in the world. And, of course, about constant learning, being in constant dialogue with the results of our actions, refining our attunement with that place of wisdom and connection.
Now, about the practices, there are several useful ones that we can use to cultivate the different phases of the U process. Here we’re going to point mostly to Heartfulness practices and put them along the U.
Let’s start with one that is even prior to the U process. If we find ourselves too overwhelmed by the reality around us or with the contents of our mind (e.g. feeling anxious, stressed out, or angry) it is very useful first to try to calm ourselves down. In Heartfulness there is a practice we call Relaxation that can be very useful in that regard and very easy to practice.
Most people find the heartfulness relaxation practice very easy and useful and you can give it a try to see if you find resonance with it.
So this first practice is mostly designed to cultivate a balanced state, to regulate ourselves. With that state, it is easier to develop an awareness of our own behaviors and patterns of the past. And with better awareness we can make better choices about them, and we can bring the light of consciousness into the dialogue.
ViP: So this practice seems to work especially on the physical level, helping the body to relax and get centered, therefore contributing to a mind that is also more relaxed. Is that it?
VG: Yes, it is mostly what is called a “bottom-up” practice, which means that by changing our bodies we are impacting our minds since both are part of the same body-mind-spirit system. In this case, we want to move our system to what is called a “ventral” state, activating the ventral vagal/social part of our parasympathetic nervous system, which allows us to feel safe, be centered and grounded, and able to connect with ourselves and with what’s around us, from a place of curiosity and openness, instead of being in “survival mode” and seeing the world through that filter.
ViP: What if we find ourselves with a lot of emotional baggage (the past patterns or samskaras we’ve talked about) that even those practices cannot help?
VG: Sometimes it happens, for sure. Here there are other practices that can be useful, in this case, more “top-down”, which means that our starting point is the mind, which will influence than the rest of the system. In Heartfulness there is one practice specifically designed for that purpose called “Cleaning”. In the cleaning practice, we use our will together with our imagination, the capacity that we humans have to use our mind to imagine things, to start a process that impacts the whole system. Our imagination can be used for good reasons or bad ones. For instance, if you think of something that stresses you out, your body will start to react accordingly — the heart rate increases, the muscles contract, and the blood pressure raises. On the other side, if you think about something that relaxes you, you’ll find that the body will relax as well. So here we use that principle to impact positively our system. We set the intention and then use our mind to imagine that all the impressions that we have accumulated during our day are leaving our system from the back of the body in the form of smoke. Those impressions include the complexities of the mind (e.g. worries, to-do lists, etc.) and the impurities of the heart (e.g. emotional burdens). By the end of the practice, we start feeling lightness in the system, and then we use our imagination again to suppose that there is light entering from the front and filling our system with purity and simplicity.
Most people find that this practice helps them to clear their minds and open their hearts, two fundamental steps in going down the U process that we’ve been speaking about. Without a clear and open mind as well as an open heart it is very difficult to access the deeper layers of our being, to touch into our essence, our divine nature, the Source. So we can use this cleaning practice on a regular day-to-day basis, almost like a “mental and emotional hygiene practice”, and also use it whenever we find ourselves too out of balance, like after a discussion with someone.Another possibility, still on the importance of cleaning the mind and opening the heart, is to have regular sittings with a heartfulness trainer or facilitator, since that helps us go deeper in the practice and especially clean the deeper impressions that sometimes we alone cannot get rid of by ourselves. In Heartfulness, with the help of yogic transmission, that process becomes easier and more profound.
Just try both practices, cleaning, and sittings, and see if it works for you. All comes down to finding your own ways of getting into balance in a practical matter, of first-person experience, not a question of belief. As Kamlesh Patel, the Heartfulness guide, says, you are the scientist, your heart is the laboratory and you are the judge.
You can try these guided practices using the app HeartsApp or the app HeartinTune in your smartphone and make your own evaluation if you find them useful for regulating your mind and opening your Heart.
ViP: Are these apps available for free?
VG: Yes. You can download it and have access to guided practices, including with live trainers, completely for free. Actually, to be clear, they are not free. They are a Gift. Someone that you don’t know takes his or her time to give you a sitting, the same way they can receive sittings from other people, creating a chain of generosity that has no beginning or end and is aligned with one purpose: if we evolve as humans and manifest our gifts in the world everyone will benefit from it. So Heartfulness practices are always offered as Gifts to mankind. Decide for yourself if they are useful to make you a better human being, wiser, more compassionate, and more aligned with your Essence and Divine nature.
ViP: What other practices can be used and how do they relate to the U process we’ve been talking about?
VG: As we clean our minds and open our hearts, we start seeing and sensing things in a clear way, with better awareness. To increase this awareness we can also use some additional practices like mindfulness, which basically develops our innate capacity of witnessing, to be able to notice things in a more clear and discriminating way: the stimulus that reaches us from the outside world through our senses, the sensations we feel in our bodies, the contents of our minds.
As we develop our awareness and open our hearts we start moving from thinking to feeling and from that space we can connect easier with a higher and deeper source of knowledge, the bottom of the U. Here two other practices can play a major role: prayer and meditation. With prayer, we establish an intention of being connected with our divine nature, our essence, and ask for guidance from that Source with the sincere wish of benefiting all, not only ourselves. So it is not an egoistic prayer that we do to achieve some material gain or something like that. It is about recognizing that we want to spiritually evolve and that we need guidance for that, being humble enough to recognize that we are not perfect (and most times we are the ones that create the barriers to our own development), and having a sincere wish that all may benefit from that connection. There are some specific words suggested for the prayer but in essence, that is what we are aiming for. We can do it before going to sleep, to establish that connection during that time, or before we do the meditation, to become more receptive and enter deeply into the practice.
Regarding heartfulness meditation, it is designed to cultivate and strengthen the connection with that divine Source. It is as if prayer creates a vacuum in the heart that allows us to be more receptive, and then meditation reinforces that connection, cultivating our inner alignment. With the meditation practice, we root ourselves more and more with the Source, with our Divine Nature, allowing also our consciousness to evolve. Since Heartfulness practice is aided by pranahuti or yogic transmission, our practice becomes easier and effortless, making us progress faster and allowing us to be more receptive to our inner guidance. And from that space, the bottom of the U, several times we get access to glimpses of wisdom, of divine intuition, that we can bring into action, which will lead us to the right side of the U.
If you want to know more about these practices you can access the Heartfulness website or ask a certified trainer. Once again, this is something to be practiced and not something to be held as a belief.
ViP: Let’s recap where we are: we started by realizing the importance of having a relaxed system in order to be able to start looking inside. When we have that capacity we start going down the U, becoming more aware, opening our minds and our hearts. For that purpose practices like cleaning or mindfulness can be useful. After becoming more aware the next step is to go deeper inside yourselves, to establish a connection with our Essence, our Higher Self, which we can do through Prayer and through Meditation. What now?
VG: Now it is time to be courageous, which curiously is a word that has its root in the word “cor”, the Latin for the heart. The bottom of the U implies opening our will. Implies letting go of our assumptions, our desires, and our needs, to connect with the deeper Source and then letting come what Life is wanting to live through us. That implies courage, implies suspending the voice of fear, since what is new can be inspiring but also can frighten us, especially because we don’t know if it is going to work or not. There is a potential for failure. It is much more comfortable to keep doing the behaviors of the past, our old mental blueprint, because there is this false notion that they will work as they did because we already tested them, and we’re already familiar with them. But the new implies some risk. Implies being vulnerable. Implies being “naked” in some sort, letting go of control, and being an active player in the play of Life.
ViP: So how to do that? How do we have that open will and action that comes from the Source?
VG: In Heartfulness there is a practice called Constant Remembrance, which points to this notion of always being in connection with the Source, so our actions come in alignment with that deeper place of Wisdom. The more you practice staying in contact with that inner wisdom through meditation, the easier it gets to have an action that is effortless and meaningful. And the more you act and see the results of your action, the more trust you have in being connected and rooted in that place. It doesn’t mean constantly remembering to be connected; it means knowing and trusting that you are connected and that you can rely on that connection in your day-to-day activities, having an action in the world that some authors, like Arawana Hayashi, calls a “True move”, a “move” that is completely in sync and aligned with Life itself. So you can never predict what you’re going to do at each moment. You cannot “download” your desires and your expectations. Please note that there is nothing wrong if your find yourself doing that from time to time. But when we can have an action that is completely in sync with Source, it becomes the natural thing to do. And when we do it, not only we are contributing to something larger than ourselves but the good news is also that we are not accumulating impressions, not accumulating samskaras, making our spiritual evolution faster. And then it is a matter of learning, of practice, refining our actions in the world, of embodying that way of living. By doing that we allow ourselves to be surprised by what Life offers us.
ViP: Great. Seems like good practices to be explored and integrated. Should we do a final recap?
VG: Yes, of course. We’re now living challenges in our collective story where the solutions of the past are not enough, and we need to explore new ones. We need to be connected with a deeper and higher source of learning and acting in the world in order to bring new answers to the new contexts we’re living in. This deeper source of knowledge is aligned with the intelligence of the Heart and with Life itself, as it reveals itself at each moment; it is connected with our capacity as humans to envision the future and to tap into the highest future possibilities that serve the greater good.
Selfishness, greed, and apathy are no longer answers to the world’s crisis. Actually, they are their root cause. We need to regulate our minds and connect with our hearts to have an effortless action that comes from a place of total surrender to reality and that doesn’t create any disturbance in the field, like a bird that crosses the sky effortlessly, leaving no trace behind but being totally part of it — a “True Move”.
To achieve and cultivate that way of being we can use the Heartfulness practices we have at our disposal, like Relaxation, Cleaning, Meditation, Prayer, and Constant Remembrance, and we can integrate them with other practices that are meaningful and useful for us like mindfulness, yoga, Presencing, and others. The more we practice, the more we evolve as humans, becoming more and more aligned with our inner divine nature, manifesting that in the world for the benefit of all. Basically, it seems a lot but it boils down to something very simple: intention and practice.
ViP: Thank you so much. Now it is time for practice, right?
VG: Exactly. It all comes down to practice. Thank you so much for your inquiry. May you and all the readers be blessed in your Journeys.
