Heart Petal Meditation

This guided heart meditation works with the petals of the heart. The heart has 12 petals. Each petal is associated with a virtue or quality that needs to be developed to open the heart chakra fully. According to the Ageless Wisdom tradition, there are love petals, knowledge petals and sacrifice petals.

The petals tend to close when we are hurt on a physical, emotional, or mental level as a protection against feeling pain. They also unfold gently and slowly through many years of study, service, and applied practice. These three activities include meditation, prayer, group work, life experiences, forgiveness, working with the devas of the plant and other kingdoms, and calling forth the virtues of the heart like we will do in our guided meditation.

It is a good practice to take one of the twelve virtues of the heart every month and to meditate on it, contemplate it and practice it seeking its inner significance. Every month you can come back to the meditation and choose a new quality and thus you complete a yearlong self-guided course in the Way and Wisdom of the Heart. In this way, we are adding to the field of energy within the environment with these positive and loving qualities and doing our part to help open the hearts of other people as well. Once we open our hearts, we have access to a much greater experience of life and our own being because opening the heart causes all our other chakras to come into balance. It is very beneficial to meditate on the heart petals opening. So before doing this meditation, choose a heart quality you would like to work with.

The 12 Virtues are:

• Joy

• Peace

• Love

• Harmony

• Bliss

• Clarity

• Purity

• Compassion

• Understanding

• Forgiveness

• Patience

• Kindness

In many Eastern traditions there is the concept of chakras, which are likened to lotus flowers because they are seen as having a certain number of petals in the subtle body, which you could look at as being the energetic blueprint of our physical body. Chakra is a Sanskrit word meaning wheel, disc or spinning vortex.

These chakras or lotuses have petals on the etheric level that are open or closed depending on the consciousness within. The chakras are centers of activity for the reception, assimilation, and transmission of life energies. They exist in many dimensions simultaneously. For example, on the physical level, the electromagnetic field of the heart is at least 50X greater than the physical brain’s electromagnetic field, according to the research done by scientists at the Institute of HeartMath.

The lower chakras have more to do with survival, relationship, social life, and establishing one’s personal power in the world. But the heart… is that center where altruistic feelings of generosity, love and kindness for others can be generated. That is the direction where humanity needs to go in now.

Handout: 12 Qualities of the Heart (Please print or view this handout before doing the meditation.)

Length: 15 Minutes
Facilitator: Laurie Ferreri
Categories: Healing

Like this meditation? Attend a live meditation class or listen to another guided meditation by Laurie Ferreri.