Cultivate Heartfulness: Live And Meditate With Heart - by Alison Potts

COURSE

Cultivate Heartfulness: Live And Meditate With Heart

With Alison Potts

In this course we are going to discover ways of developing heart-centred present-moment awareness and growing the instincts which magnetise us to spaces that nourish, heal and renew us. You will be shown how to develop your own personal heart-centred meditation repertoire and how to meditate your way – a way which aligns with your nature and individuality, the life you are in and your dreams, desires and creativity and the way you practice when you are naturally drawn into meditative states of heartfulness. You will discover and practice a simple definition for healthy and life-enhancing meditation, with a foundation focus on five states of being that should form the bedrock any healthy practice repertoire. These are states of : -feeling safe and at home and at ease in our body and environment - welcoming our humanity with compassion and honouring, reclaiming inner authority and permission and self-love -how much you enjoy being you. - nourishing ourselves from what we love about life, reclaiming joy and things that make us happy - letting our embodied heart - and not "shoulds" and "musts" guide us to taking conscious breaks to come off adrenaline and restore our heart's battery -being in the presence of loving-kindness and the bigger flow of love. The course is set out in nineteen lessons, comprising an introduction to heartfulness and its potency and benefits and a description of the course structure; a exploration of your natural and spontaneous experiences of heartfulness and heart-aware meditative states; an understanding of how heart-centred practice can balance our human negative brain bias and rewire neural pathways and then exploring and practicing with the five focusses described above. The course ends with reflections, questions and tips to support you in continuing your journey of the heart.

GroundedWisdomSecular MindfulnessOpen AwarenessHappinessHealth & HappinessHealth & HappinessSecularMindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Alison Potts
Brisbane QLD, Australia

Alison is a certified coach, yoga and meditation teacher and educator of over a decade's experience. Her training and influences are from the fields of Instinctive Meditation, compassion-focussed approaches and coaching psychology. She is the founder of Innate Meditation, which focuses on compassion-focussed and somatic practices that help guide people into their bodies, hearts and own internal wisdom. Her influences are both scientific, experiential and spiritual. Alison has been a teacher on Insight Timer since 2016, runs weekly live events, has a library of over 70 guided meditations and talks and hosts the group Alison Potts - Lightwalkers Collective. Her greatest joy is to inspire people to receive fully from the generosity of life and to love themselves exactly as they are.

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19 Days

449 students

5.0 stars

12 min / day

Grounded

English

Lesson 1

Taking The Journey Of The Heart: Course Overview And A Mini Practice To Tune Into Heartfulness

This lesson describes the layout of this course on cultivating heartfulness in your inner practices and outer life and describes the five key areas of focus (or states of being) we will be exploring. It includes a mini-meditation presence to come into the presence of your heart and bring a felt-sense of fullness there.

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Lesson 2

How Your Heart's Natural Wisdom Guides You To Healing And Nourishing Meditation

Simply put, meditation is a way of tuning in deeply to something which is important to us, for a short while that, after we engage with it, shifts us in positive, and sometimes surprising, ways. In this lesson, you are reminded of your own spontaneous experiences of meditation and how they are guided from your heart and what it loves and from which it finds nourishment and healing. You will learn how to harness this intuitive power as you move through life and in your own personal inner practice. I offer a simple understanding of, and technique for, heart-centred, embodied meditation.

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Lesson 3

How Meditation Rewires Our Beings And Changes Our Lives

In this session, we learn about neuroplasticity, our negative brain bias and how practicing heartfulness corrects this natural imbalance.we're going to touch very simply and briefly on the key ways in which meditating this way helps us collaborate with our nervous systems natural desire to heal and repair and recharge, and in particular, how we can harness the power of meditation to change our emotional states and our behaviour, and as a way of meeting the challenge that all humans have - of managing our stresses and dealing with our fears, such that life isn't ruled by them, and we can still sink into the vivid presence of things like ease, and joy, magic and love.

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Lesson 4

Feeling Safe And At Home: Exploration

We are ready to explore our first foundation practice area. Cultivating a safe home base is an instinct that all animals and humans have in order to fill a fundamental primal need. In this lesson, you are invited to tune into experiences of feeling safe, at home and at ease in your own body. We learn the powerful benefits of having repeated experiences of internalising a sense of security, for our psychological safety and healing capacity, and to feel safe to live in an open heart.

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Lesson 5

A Meditation Practice To Feel Safe And At Home

In this lesson we practice a guided meditation, set to music, that uses some tools and techniques implied in heartfulness and embodiment. As we feel ourselves come off adrenaline and land in an internal space of home and safety, We use affirmations and the mantra "Hello Friend, Welcome Home"

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Lesson 6

Feeling Safe And At Home: Reflection and Suggestions

This lesson allows you to reflect on the practice you just did and how it felt in your body. It summarises the tools that were used and encourages you to use these in your own practices and to adopt this practice as necessary. It suggests ways we can use our heart's guidance to bring a more felt sense of "home" in our lives, and a home base to return to, whatever is coming up for us.

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Lesson 7

Welcome Your Humanity: Exploration

Every human deserves and benefits from feeling welcomed and accepted just as they are, rather than being seen as someone with faults and being offered kindness and respect and being forgiven for the mistakes they make. I this lesson, we explore how important the heart qualities of compassion and welcome are, as we prepare to practice these in the next guided meditation.

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Lesson 8

Welcoming My Humanity: Meditation

In this meditation we use conscious, heartful qualities of awareness to embody a welcoming, accepting and cherishing self-approach. We especially practice tending to our inner life and all our parts with gentle curiosity and spaciousness. We use embodiment techniques to stay close to ourselves and have a felt sense of relaxing into our beings without having to change a thing about ourselves in the moment.

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Lesson 9

Welcome Your Humanity: Reflections And Tips

In this short lesson, we reflect on the practice we just did and how it felt in our body. We remember the way we accessed our heart's qualities to create a felt sense of the experience we wanted to have - that of meeting ourselves and our humanity with a flow of grace.

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Lesson 10

Soaking Up Goodness: Exploration

In this lesson, we learn how our hearts guide us into the presence of goodness and can open up to receive and benefit from the good things in our lives. We remember the things that literally magnetise our hearts and how we can use this awareness and our simple technique of lingering and absorbing, to correct our tendency to over-focus on worries or threats.

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Lesson 11

Soaking Up Goodness Meditation Practice

In this lesson we practice meditating with all the sources of goodness that are flowing in our lives and being in the presence of that goodness with the fullness of our hearts and the entirety of our beings. We continue to practice with our simple definition for meditation and use techniques to install the goodness we are calling in.

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Lesson 12

Soaking Up Goodness: Reflections And Suggestions

This lesson offers you ways to reflect on your experience of meditating with the heartful focus of soaking up goodness. It reminds you of some of the specific techniques you brought in and reminds you to keep following your heart and its access to so much that is kind, uplifting and inspiring.

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Lesson 13

Take A Break To Rest In A Peaceful Heart

One of the most beautiful heart-qualities we have is that of peace, so part of cultivating heartfulness must involve creating more peaceful spaces in our lives. While our hearts may be guiding us to taking restorative breaks, our minds can guilt or punish us into accumulating more stress.In this lesson, we learn about why our nervous system needs us to pay attention to our heart's desire for peace, resting and healing. We learn how anxiety and worries create a chemical load on our body that resting in a peaceful heart, for even a short amount of time, can dissolve away.

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Lesson 14

"Do Nothing" Practice

This lesson is a guided practice to help you "be" rather than do - something that our heart is craving in order to recharge. It uses the "Do Nothing technique" where you allow yourself to have some time completely with yourself and your inner world and whatever is arising, letting your inner energies do do their natural drifting daydreaming, remembering, planning or just drifting off. This can feel delicious and relaxing and is a practice which can strengthen us when it comes to putting in boundaries to protect our sacred energy.

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Lesson 15

Taking A Heartful Break: Reflections and Suggestions

In this lesson we reflect on the practice and whether we encountered any resistance. We learn about where that resistance may come from and how to challenge it by giving our bodies repeated beneficial experiences of allowing our wise hearts to govern our schedule, not our pushy minds. We learn about the health benefits of doing so and particularly the value of daydreaming and how some meditation instructions are not helpful when it comes to allowing ourselves to "do nothing".

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Lesson 16

Installing States of Loving Kindness

This lesson explores the beautiful and life-changing qualities of love and kindness. We remember how capable our hearts ae of generating the qualities of compassion and self-compassion and how these resource us with a potent suite of inner strengths. We learn how acts of loving kindness that touch us become stored in our blood and in our marrow, to be accessed at times when we need the strength and comfort they deliver and we begin to explore how to initiate that flow, and install it, in practice.

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Lesson 17

Installing Loving Kindness: Meditation Practice

In this meditation, adapted from the work of Chris Germer of the Centre for Mindful Self-Compassion, we use the three universal expressions of compassion: soft gaze, soothing touch and gentle vocalisations, and we behave towards ourselves the way we usually behave towards others when we offer them love and compassion.

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Lesson 18

Installing Loving Kindness: Reflections and Suggestions

In this lesson we reflect on how we felt before, during and after that loving presence practice. We consider how consciously installing loving kindness might benefit our hearts and lives. We consider ways you might adapt the practice and the many ways that we can bring these memories of love that are stored inside of us into more vivid presence

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Lesson 19

Reflections On The Heartful Journey

Our final audio allows you to reflect on your journey overall, now that you have completed the course. It offers some key reminders of what you have learned and how to integrate them into your life, as well as encouraging you to share your discoveries with others, using the comments boxes. I give you details of where to find my resources here on Insight Timer and let you know that I would love those of us taking this journey in heartfulness to enrich the experience by getting into conversation in the comments, at live events, and/or in my group Alison Potts- Light walkers Collective. Thank you - from my heart to yours.

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Ask your teacher

This course includes 71 community questions and 10 audio replies from Alison Potts. The community classroom and teacher audio replies are only available via the app.

71

5.0 (19)

Recent Reviews

Tim

February 9, 2026

Excellent course. I like how Allison shows that meditation doesn’t have to be a set formula, in a set rigid way. I found cherished memories of lost loved ones to be a heartwarming contributor to my watering holes. I will integrate the teachings from this course into my daily life.

Robin

December 8, 2025

This was a great course. Coming from someone who has been meditating for years, there were many new discoveries for me. Now I get to be more away of my pauses and transitions and take those times for my heart and body to meditate in my own way even if it’s for only a moment. This brings me back to myself, my home and my calm. Thank you

Lisa

April 28, 2025

I learned so much, it's difficult for me to express. My heart has discovered more deeply than ever how much creation loves me. Thank you!

Jamie

August 8, 2024

Great course. I found it very helpful and heartful ❤️thanks

Chris

July 31, 2024

Excellent course full of useful tools, tips and mindfulness practices. But it also contains a lot of references and explanations of the underlying science. Loved it.

Katy

July 21, 2024

As always, your courses are thought-provoking and give an introspection that helps me better myself in so many ways. Heartful practices aimed toward myself in ways have helped me become a better person. I'm much more adept at showing compassion and heartfulness to others when I first show it to myself. Thank you for thiscourse and all the insight it brought.

Tatyana

June 3, 2024

Amazing course !❤️Much love and gratitude for creating it ! 🙏❤️🕊️

Christina

April 17, 2024

These are positive practices that help create some powerful shifts.

Apryl

February 16, 2024

This course has so many wonderful insights! It’s one I plan to repeat again because I want to soak in the wisdom of living a heart led life. Alison delivers her insights with compassion and gentle guidance that cultivates trust and understanding. 🧡🧡

Maria

January 24, 2024

Thank you

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