Heart-seeking meditation

One of my favorite meditations is to seek the perception of my heartbeat.

If it is challenging to find, there are two things I find helpful.

1) Tactics: Anything that gets the blood pumping or alters normal flow, like pushups or body squats, the rest interval between long breathholds, or inversions. The lower the cardiac output and blood pressure, the more challenging it will be.

2) Strategy: Remembering that it’s not the actual feeling of the heart beat but the seeking that brings me to the present moment. If I find the heartbeat then it’s easy to think about the heartbeat, which is just another thought about the beat, that by the time I am thinking about it already happened in the past.