“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
There is something special about the heart: a miraculous, continually pumping, life-giving organ located in the center of the chest, the heart beats 100,000 pumps a day, over the course of a life that’s 2.5 billion beats (more heart facts here).
The heart also contains neurons that allow for communication with the brain. While this does not mean that the heart is a brain, there is evidence of interaction between these two parts of the body, affecting one’s health and emotional state.
When I visited Andrea Patton‘s classroom earlier this week, we used heart-focused breathing with students before moving them into a prompt where they mined their own thinking about the process via journaling.
Click on this link to get directions for heart-focused breathing and watch a trailer connected to the practice from the movie The Little Prince.
-By Brandi Lust