Brian has studied the art and science of meditation for over 50 years and is a Heartfulness meditation trainer. He is one of the most viewed writers on Quora for the topics of spirituality, meditation, and enlightenment, and is a regular speaker at corporations and universities. Brian is an artist, musician, writer, photographer, and corporate interior designer. He is married with an adult daughter and four grandchildren, and is currently working on a book about his spiritual experiences and travels.



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Brian Jones

<h4
 class="has-black-color has-text-color block-heading"
 id="h-brian-jones-is-a-corporate-interior-design-artist-and-writer-who-has-been-meditating-for-50-years-he-is-also-a-heartfulness-trainer-brian-has-been-a-regular-contributor-to-the-online-question-answer-sessions-on-quora-for-several-years-sharing-his-stories-lessons-and-experiences-https-www-brianjonesconnect-com"
 >
 BRIAN JONES
 is a corporate interior design artist and writer, who has been
 meditating for 50 years. He is also a Heartfulness trainer. Brian
 has been a regular contributor to the online question/answer
 sessions on Quora for several years, sharing his stories, lessons,
 and experiences.
 <a href="https://www.brianjonesconnect.com/"
 >https://www.brianjonesconnect.com/</a
 >
 </h4>

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 Why are we human beings so hard on ourselves?

 
 We are good-hearted, loving beings by nature, and even the smallest
 emotions, judgments, and criticism send our hearts into ripples and
 sometimes shockwaves.
 

 
 The heart is the field of our feelings. The mind, on the other hand, is
 very tricky. It always interprets our feelings through our past
 experiences, our filters of right and wrong, our opinions and
 prejudices.
 

 
 The mind is a great storyteller. It doesn’t care if it’s telling the
 truth or lying to us about how we are feeling; it just creates a story
 from what it already knows.
 

 
 On returning homeward to being compassionate and kind to our hearts, we
 must acknowledge that “my thoughts and stories are just not going to
 have power over me anymore.” This takes a little practice and
 persistence.
 

 You can try this practice at night:

 
 Sit on the side of your bed or on your bed. Think of all the
 people who have been important to you in your life. Feel a sense
 of love and gratitude for them percolate up inside. Then feel you
 are sending them your love and gratitude.
 

 
 Do this at bedtime for a few days. Then include other people too,
 perhaps someone you have not forgiven.
 

 
 Now, remember to include yourself in this process. Send yourself love
 and gratitude.
 

 
 This is a powerful technique. The secret is that it is the same feeling
 whether you feel you love others or are loved by them. So, it is for you
 to send your love. The more you practice, the more you will become
 loving, and you will feel your inner walls melting away.
 

 
 So, I don’t like to think that there are barriers in the way of
 self-compassion. There are only the stories you tell yourself.
 

 
 Create a new story. One that is your aspiration. One filled with love
 and compassion.
 

 Believe it.

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 This article first appeared at www.quora.com, September 6, 2022.
 

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 <h4 class="has-text-align-center block-heading">
 Illustration by JASMEE MUDGAL
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Are there barriers to starting a self-compassion journey?

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<h4>
 <spanundefined>BRIAN JONES explores unity in a world
 full of challenges and diversity. Through different analogies and his own
 personal experience with meditation, he finds effective ways to achieve
 unity through the silence of the heart.
</h4>
<hr class="vertical-space1" />

 <spanundefined>It was a long flight from Los Angeles to Singapore. Somewhere over the
 Pacific Ocean I took another one of many walks from my seat to the back of
 the plane for a much-needed cup of coffee.
 


 <spanundefined>Three women stood there, all from different countries, each one holding a
 small baby. A lovely and nonsensical conversation was going on; each
 mother amusing the other’s baby with an assortment of gaga and coo-cooing
 baby sounds. It was apparent that none of the mothers spoke the languages
 of the others, and yet three babies were having quite a fun time,
 innocently laughing, not caring what language or which mother was
 entertaining them!


 <spanundefined>I was gleefully immersed in this special moment. I found the innocence,
 love and happiness that so effortlessly flowed a wonderful example of how
 we are all inextricably united. We come into this world with such purity,
 with a heart wide open, but quickly we begin to realize, “These are my
 hands, this is my foot, these are my toes.” Soon enough, I, me, and mine
 are here to stay.
 


 <spanundefined>“Unity” has many levels of meaning. We are united by love as well as by
 hate, we are united by country, by race, by culture, and even by the
 football team we support. But in these cases, our experience of unity is
 limited, accompanied by a feeling of exclusiveness – my team is better
 than yours, my political party is better than yours, my religion is better
 than yours, etc.


 <spanundefined>If we look back through time, there has hardly been a moment when there
 wasn’t a war, an uprising, or a tribal dispute. We may wonder: Is it
 possible that we live on a planet that is only united by divisiveness?
 Imagine, we’ve all come into this world with such purity, acceptance, and
 non-judgment. What happened?


 <spanundefined>By nature’s design, we are soul, spirit, essence, or
 something that manifests in an infinitude of ways through this
 complex, wondrous and beautiful vehicle of a body. But isn’t that the
 dilemma? We perceive everyone as different and forget that our soul, our
 essence, our HEART is the same. Our outer perception hides the truth
 within.
 


 <spanundefined>Though the world faces many challenges, occasionally we see glimpses of
 that “united heart.” We witness how hardship and tragedy bring us
 together. In difficult times we forget our differences, our hearts open
 and we extend a hand of help and friendship. Through hardship we are
 reminded that we all laugh the same and we cry the same, too. When we
 witness deep emotion in another person it stirs our hearts. We exclaim,
 “Oh! My heart really goes out to that person.” We feel them. What they are
 going through. We’ve been there ourselves. We resonate with them. In such
 moments, it’s the tenderness of the human heart, that feels our
 sameness.

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<hr />

<h5 style="text-align: center">
 <spanundefined>By nature’s design, we are soul, spirit, essence, 
 or something that manifests in an infinitude of ways
 through 
 this complex, wondrous
 and beautiful vehicle of a body.
 
</h5>

<hr />

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 <spanundefined>Having been a musician for most of my life, I’ve experienced another type
 of unity when playing music with others. There have been a few rare
 occasions when I entered a room of musicians, plugged in my guitar, and
 with barely an introduction began playing with four or five other
 musicians who themselves had never played together.
 


 <spanundefined>Sometimes genuine magic happens – the playing spontaneously begins and
 for the next forty minutes the most authentic and extremely sophisticated
 music simply flows. Soft notes, intense rhythms, solos, mood changes, key
 changes, each musician having their chance to shine, spontaneously playing
 the music of their soul. It is like sitting on the very edge of creation
 as it emerges, pure, alive, with a wonderful adherence to unspoken
 principles.
 


 <spanundefined>Then, as the music winds down and reaches its natural finale, everyone is
 left speechless, perhaps with an incredulous smile, feeling, “Wow, what
 just happened?” In moments like this we bypass the mind, and the silent
 feelings of the heart flow out through our fingertips, genuine,
 unprocessed.


 <spanundefined>We are like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, each of us connected at the
 hub or center of the wheel. The spoke is the timeline of our existence,
 all of us coming from the same “center.” The farther we “spokes” have
 moved away from that center, the farther apart we’ve become from each
 other. Our sense of separateness has increased more and more.


 <spanundefined>This is apparent in daily life; we continually face diversity juggling
 work, family and friends. We engage in many relationships, we agree, we
 disagree, we try to please each other and ourselves, too. We spokes
 interact, we’re separate units, but we tend to forget we are all still
 connected at the center. We just don’t remember how to connect
 there.


 <spanundefined>Of course, we do create times of unity in our lives, sharing a movie or a
 hobby, taking a vacation and sharing a vocation. Sharing the same goal
 brings unity. How many times, when we are collaborating on a team project,
 do we hear the phrase, “We need to be on the same page”? It’s a reminder
 that when we understand our objective, our goal, we will connect with our
 shared goal and work efficiently to achieve it.
 


<hr class="vertical-space1" />
<img alt="unity-world-diversity2" class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/unity_world_diversity2_e4b4b504a0.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-07T09:24:53.532Z" />
&nbsp;
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<h5 style="text-align: center">
 <spanundefined style="color: #a8a93f">Soft notes, intense rhythms, solos, mood changes, key changes, 
 each musician having their chance to shine, spontaneously playing the
 music of their soul. 
 It is like sitting on the very edge of creation as it emerges, 
 pure, alive, with a wonderful adherence to unspoken principles.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

 <spanundefined>All of this is our external work. What about our internal work? Realizing
 unity within my own self, in a very tangible way, requires personal inner
 work. In this process we soon realize our inner goal is not merely about
 being on the same page, as that would be a very short story indeed!


 <spanundefined>Each of us is a chapter in the same book creating our unique storyline,
 sometimes lighthearted and other times sad or tragic, but all the while
 being bound by the same cover, a beautiful story in the book of “Life.”
 


 <spanundefined>We are many threads of many colors, woven through the fabric of time and
 space to complete the cosmic quilt, each essential to the whole.
 


 <spanundefined>Nature likely has a larger purpose in creating intelligent, thinking
 beings, and perhaps a hidden lesson as well, for each of us to learn to
 see the center and not the spokes.
 


 <spanundefined>So how do we connect to our Center?


 <spanundefined>I believe there is indeed a solution, a way to unite us, to overcome our
 differences and return to center, a way to point our world in a new
 direction. “We cannot solve our problems by the same thinking that created
 them,” is a famous saying often attributed to Albert Einstein. If this is
 indeed the case, can we achieve unity by changing our thinking? Hardly an
 easy task. Is there another, more effective way to reach unity?


<hr class="vertical-space1" />
<img alt="unity-world-diversity2" class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/unity_world_diversity3_e01ff8d3f1.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-07T09:26:09.816Z" />
&nbsp;
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 <spanundefined>When I was twelve years of age, I was introduced to something that would
 forever shape my life: meditation. I learned that it is possible to find
 relief from our incessant thinking and to experience daily deep states,
 where the mind returns to a simple state of purity. We can call this our
 original or pure mind. Let’s simply call it our center.
 


 <spanundefined>When I first experienced a deep meditation, it felt like I was at home in
 myself for the very first time. Soon my meditation time became the best
 time, the essential time of my day. It began to permeate, sort of exuding
 into everything I did. In the depth of meditation, there was an emptiness
 and yet that emptiness was full of potential! It was fresh, unconditioned.
 


 <spanundefined>After a bit of practice, I found it natural and easy to see our sameness
 more than our differences. It made me pause and take a moment to feel what
 is behind our actions. In the meditative state, the heart speaks, so there
 is no room for personal opinion or motive.
 


 <spanundefined>I have spent a few decades now meditating with others, both individually
 and in a group setting. I have witnessed and felt, again and again, how we
 “spokes” merge into this beautiful Oneness, the unity experienced by all.
 


 <spanundefined>I’ve always loved the Indian tradition of Namaste: I bow to the divine in
 you. It is a needed reminder to acknowledge that essence, that sameness
 that makes us one family. In meditation I experience that state of
 innocence and purity with which we enter this world, and sometimes I feel
 a sense of wonder – of simply existing!
 


 <spanundefined>Perhaps our quest for unity may only come when we connect without words,
 in the quiet of the heart. We let go, rise above, and share the unity of
 silence.
 

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<h4 style="text-align: center">
 Article by
 <spanundefined>BRIAN JONES 
 <spanundefined>Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
</h4>

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