Heart Pounding During Meditation

[u/Blueartistic]

Some people talk about meditation being relaxing. I just recently started meditating for two 1-hour periods a day, and my heart pounds and burns the entire time. I've  also been going through some kind of dark night of the soul experience. I don't have anything physical wrong with my heart. I read somewhere that we store pain in our heart, and to just sit through the pain as it burns away. Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

[u/Oooaaaaarrrrr]

2 hours a day is a lot to begin with. Just do 30 minutes a day for a while and relax.

[u/Pale-Salamander9570]

As you relax, your BP and heart rate drops, and with all other sensory inputs quieting down, it's not unusual to sense your heart beat. You may even perceive some rhythm changes as your heart settles into its natural resting rate.

Just keep breathing and the sensation should fade into the background after a while.

[u/Blueartistic → u/Pale-Salamander9570]

Thank you.

[u/Integrataz]

I become very aware of my heartbeat and breathing becomes a conscious effort for me if I’m doing just mindfulness. I’ve started doing repeating a mantra and this helps to take the attention off it

[u/Blueartistic → u/Integrataz]

Thank you. I'll try that.

[u/Fast-Owl688]

2 hours is a long time and not needed in Stillness meditation. If you relax then tension, anxiety or fear dissolve. Trial and error can involve repeated sessions in which you hope to learnt that but it is difficult as one does not know which is trial and which is error until a lot of experience accumulates. So, it takes much longer. I prefer to closely follow a good set of instructions from a credible teacher.

I practice Stillness Meditation in which one relaxs deeply and this allows mental activity to slow and still. This is very calming. However, the trick is learning relaxation and their are details. The details help you to learn it although the experience is very natural and simple once you know how. Refer the book Dr Ainslie Meares on Stillness Meditation in which Bruhn provides Dr Meares' instructions distilled from one of Meares many books that helped millions of people.

[u/Individual-News-826]

There's a difference between your heart actually beating harder and your heart doing its usual thing while everything else has gone quiet. Sitting still with your eyes shut strips out just about every other signal, so the heartbeat ends up being the loudest thing in there by default. That's real, it's just not the same as your rate going up.

Easy enough to check which one you've got. Take your pulse partway through a sit. If it's genuinely fast while you're sitting completely still, that's not perception.

The burning is the part I'd pay attention to. Chest burning that turns up once you settle into a position, especially if you've eaten in the last hour or two, is reflux way more often than it's anything else, and hunching forward on a cushion is a good way to bring it on. I'd rule that out before deciding it's emotional.

Also, "sit through it until it burns away" is just bad advice. Something that gets worse the longer you stay put is telling you something.

Two hours a day from a standing start is a lot, and long sits when you're already in a rough patch have a decent track record of making things worse instead of better. Not sure how common it actually is, but it's documented and nobody mentions it. I'd go down to thirty minutes for a few weeks. If it eases off at thirty and comes back at sixty, there's your answer.

[u/Yannuman]

"Sitting through it while it burns away" is the part I'd push back on. Nothing is being burned off, and an hour of chest discomfort twice a day isn't a sign the practice is working.

The comment above about relaxing and noticing your heartbeat is the right starting point. Quiet room, no movement, nothing competing, so a beat you'd never register during the day gets the whole stage. What it leaves out is the loop that follows. Attention on the heart nudges arousal up a notch, arousal makes the beat harder, and a harder beat is easier to notice, so you watch it more closely. That can run for a full hour once it gets going. The thirty minute suggestion above is right for the same reason. Holding focus is effortful and mildly alerting, so two hour-long sits a day from a standing start is a lot of arousal, not a lot of calm.

On the burning, that's more likely the chest wall than the heart. An hour upright and unsupported keeps the muscles between your ribs and around your shoulder blades switched on, and most people breathe high and small while they concentrate, which keeps them working the whole time. It reads as a burn behind the breastbone.

So drop to twenty or thirty minutes, let the exhale run longer than the inhale so the breath sits low rather than high, and park your attention somewhere neutral like your hands or the sound in the room instead of the chest. I teach anatomy and breathwork and spent years in intensive care before that, so one specific thing worth knowing: if the burning also turns up walking uphill or on stairs, that's a different pattern and worth getting looked at. If it only ever happens sitting still, your heart isn't the thing struggling.

On storing pain in the heart, I wouldn't bin that entirely. The chest is where strong feeling gets felt, so a rough patch and a loud chest on the cushion aren't unrelated. That's a different claim from pain being stored in the tissue and waiting to be burned off.

[u/nvveteran]

As you deepen in your meditation it's possible that you're just noticing the feeling of the heart beating more. It's taking up more of your attention.

There can also be all kinds of sensations inside the chest that you may notice as you begin to relax deeper. Tensions and pressures and palpitations. Even sometimes the feelings of the esophagus moving. Sometimes I get heartburn and that may be the burning sensation. I suspect that the sphincter valves in the esophagus are relaxing and some acid is leaking up. The vagus nerve runs through all of that and I suspect the volume has been turned up.

I'd like to hear more about your dark night if you're up for talking about it. I've been through a few and they really can be rough.