First Stage
1. Recall a memory that brings a warm feeling to your heart, it can even be from a song or a movie.
2. With or without keeping the memory in mind hold the warmth in your heart as if caring for the flame of a match strike, tenderly and not like Chris Tucker’s gaze upon the match held by Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element.
3. Practice maintaining warmheartedness until it is second nature.
Second Stage
1. After developing skill in warmheartedness expand the warmth to fill your body. It may help to visualize your heart and it’s warmth as a small sun, campfire or fireplace radiating warmth.
2. The visualization works like a mantra, a point of focus, upon which to tether the monkey mind or a mind jumping all over the place and unable to be still.
Third Stage
1. Bring an anxiety or problem to mind and hold it within warmheartedness, see the problem through the warm energy.
2. Our brain tends to separate pain and pleasure it is not the usual thing to hold them in awareness together. This stage is for de-escalating and de-conditioning a mental/emotional fight, flight, freeze response to a threat. It is also for de-escalating reactiveness.
3. Observe the anxiety or problem using warmheartedness as the lens through which you view it.
Fourth Stage
1. When you feel proficient at holding an anxiety or problem in your warmheartedness, contemplate the anxiety or problem from within warmheartedness. This is just another angle or view through which to look, just as looking through fear or logic are also useful and necessary point of views. The more angles the better.
