Heartfulness: This season's top wellness trend explained
With the Hygge trend in full bloom and its focus on comfort and self-indulgence, there’s no better time for Heartfulness to step onto the wellness scene. Move aside Mindfulness, there’s a new guy in town.
What is Heartfulness?
Heartfulness is a state of being and an approach to life that focusses on what your heart is telling you rather than your mind. It’s about being more conscious of your heart and understanding the wisdom and clarity it adds to our lives.
Akcelina Cvijetic is one of the UK’s leading Heartfulness experts. She explains that Heartfulness is an alternative way to gain wisdom, especially in modern times when our minds are constantly overloaded and we can’t think straight a lot of the time. She explains that looking deeper inside yourself to your heart, for clarity and to understand how you are feeling, is a way to overcome this.
It is essentially about emotional intelligence rather than intellectual, to give us deeper life insights than our minds can provide. Akcelina says that this is the opposite to how we have been programmed in the Western world, so we need to actively practice Heartfulness in order to tune into this part of ourselves.
How to practice it
Akcelina suggests daily meditation to bring more Heartfulness into our lives. There is actually a UK charity, Heartfulness UK, which provides lots of free resources and videos to teach you how to do this. Heartfulness UK suggests that you:
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for around 10 minutes.
Sit comfortably and close your eyes.
Bring your focus from the world outside to the world inside – a source of light that’s in your heart.
If your mind wanders, bring it back to your heart. Be aware of it and really connect to it. They have a Heartfulness meditation soundtrack on their website that will help you relax and focus.
Akcelina encourages “visualising its [your heart’s] shape and colour to connect to it more easily. You can visualise a connection at the right level of comfort for you. As you do, ask your heart the following question: ‘My heart, what do I need to know and do to create solutions to the current issue I am experiencing?’ Listen for the insights that come from your heart via images, symbols, whispers or feelings. Give your heartfelt thanks when you have received it, open your eyes and connect to the world from this special, place.”
If you are enjoying the Hygge trend, this fits in nicely with it. Use your comforting environment to try some Heartfulness meditation – what have you got to lose?
It is, however, so easy nowadays to strap a buzzword onto something simple and make it a ‘thing’. Heartfulness, as indeed Mindfulness, is just about listening to your own body and what it’s telling you – something we do every day already. No matter what is trending, a healthy approach to life is to use both your head and your heart to make decisions – judgements based on both gut, passion and reason. There’s nothing wrong with doing things to help you become more in-tune with yourself though.
