Many of us long to have a more open heart, to be able to give and receive more freely. We want to experience more love more easily, but it can be so difficult at times. The heart chakra is the gateway to loving connection with others. At the same time, it contains pain from past hurts. This meditation gives you the opportunity to relax into whatever the heart may hold, allowing held emotions to resolve and the loving energy in the heart to be felt. The meditation takes you through a number of steps. First you relax. Then you connect with your heart, simply being present to whatever you experience. This is followed by visualization to help you expand the energy of the heart and connect with others. As always, be creative with the visualization and use it a way that works for you.

I've had many requests for a meditation for compassion and forgiveness. I do think these will come about, but hopefully this meditation will speak to these themes as well. Both compassion and forgiveness require the ability to be present to pain, our own as well as that of others. Both require an open heart.

I hope the meditation serves you well, and would love to hear about your experiences with it. (Listen to it here.)

I've been finding myself deeply affected lately by a growing awareness of the tremendous diversity of our Meditation Oasis "family". Facebook more than anything has made me aware of how different we all are and yet we are drawn together by our common human experience and the deepest aspects of our inner life which we reach through meditation. From time to time I like to click on the faces on the Facebook page. It's been so fulfilling to see people living in so many different countries with such different interests. Many of us could probably fall into heated discussions with each other at the drop of a hat over politics and find ourselves world's apart in our musical tastes. Yet we can all sit together and meditate and experience a place of complete harmony.

Many of us are busy with holidays now, but some are not. We all experienced the solstice yesterday, but for some it signaled the shortest day of the year while for others it was the longest. We moved into winter where I live, but some of you are experiencing summer. Awareness of these differences has caused me to pause before sending a year end message. Yesterday instead of writing "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Hanukah" (which most people celebrate where I live), I found myself looking for a more universal greeting. I could have sent out a "Happy Solstice" message, I suppose. We all experience the changing seasons thanks to the tilt of the earth moving around the sun. But then I remembered that for people on or near the Equator, the Solstice doesn't mean much. All of this has brought me to this place today where I want to send a different kind of message, one that we can all relate to no matter what we all do or don't celebrate and believe.

As I searched for the perfect holiday/non-holiday message, I remembered the message Richard and I have often used. That's the message I'd like to send to you all today. I think it's something we can all relate to and a desire every human being shares. And it's something many of us move toward through meditation --

"We wish you a peaceful mind and an open heart."

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