Having Heart in Difficult Times
I just finished teaching the Awaken Your Heart workshop at Kripalu. It’s such an inspiring and healing workshop for me to teach. Such an incredible opportunity to dig deep into my own heart and ask myself “how can I help awaken my heart and other’s hearts in our week together?” I deeply appreciate the intuitive knowing as one of the gifts the heart has to offer us that we can all tap. Our hearts have intuition, wisdom and love available for us at any time we connect to it’s presence!
In this column, I want to share with you an idea in how to awaken your heart and bring it into your life. But first, let me give a quick shout out to let you know that another SomaSoul workshop is happening at Kripalu called Trust Your Gut December 4-9.
So the title of this enews is Having Heart in Difficult Times because when we witness the political climate we are in, we see a distressing stirring up of hatred and bullying as we witness a political debate like we just did. Without question, Donald Trump was embodying hatred and intolerance, the opposite of an awakened heart. I found this so profoundly distressing to witness. I found it outrageous.
All the more reason to consider what Michelle Obama urged the nation at the Democratic convention and what Hillary Clinton reminded everyone in the midst of this maelstrom of hatred during the last debate, when they go low, we go high. I would add when others spew hatred, come back home to your heart, especially to protect your heart, to trust the power of heart, of love and creativity verses hatred and destruction.
As we approach this third debate, I invite you to do what I did before the first debate. I sat down to meditate for ½ hour right before the debate to calm my mind and connect to my heart and send love and grounding energy to Hilary. If that has meaning for you, I encourage you to do so and trust the healing power that exists in our hearts to help our planet in this way.
An awake heart pulses an energy of love, kindness, warmth, and acceptance. It carries intuition and wisdom. Our physical heart pulses blood throughout the body, nourishing the billions of cells within with oxygen and nutrients. Our spiritual heart or emotional heart pulses the energy of kindness, love, and acceptance to the billions of cells within and awakens our intuition and wisdom. Embodying our heart, embodying our love, embodying our wisdom connects our being with the presence of all humanity, helping us feel safe and at one with others.
One of the simplest and most powerful questions or quests that I offered to my Kripalu group that I’d like to offer to you is: Can I invite my heart to be present right here, right now? Then wait. And wait some more. Invite your heart to awaken and be part of your life here and now. You may even want to touch, to hold your heart as you invite it to be here, as you welcome it, just like you reach out to hug a friend or loved one when you want to welcome and greet this person. Notice any subtle feeling shifts that occur in your mind and body. Invite your hand to melt in towards your heart as you invite the bones and muscles in front of your heart to melt. Visualize your hand actually holding your heart.
Given that most of us are in our heads, in our brains, for much of our day and may be minimally connected to the sense of our bodies let alone our hearts, this may be a huge descent and reconnection. We need to descend from the lightning speed activity of the mind and brain and begin to reconnect with the subtle felt sense of our hearts that can help ground us and open us to an energy of kindness.
So be patient…don’t try this question once, but numerous times in a day and for many weeks, in order to begin to build a bridge into your heart, to let your heart know you mean it, you would like to have your heart participate in your life.
Also, in order to touch the inherent healing energies of acceptance, kindness and love that live within our hearts, we may also need to heal the wounds that live in our hearts. We can’t get the “goodies” of our hearts without attending to the unhealed wounds that get recorded within our hearts.
The second question to help heal those wounds is to ask your heart, what wounds may live here that need to be acknowledged and lovingly accepted? Is it the wound of rejection, of being unseen or devalued, of being dismissed, humiliated, betrayed or annihilated? Yes, hearts can be damaged and can be healed. To your wounded heart ask your spirit, your intuition to bring to your heart loving mothering and fathering energies, maybe different mothering and fathering energies then what your kid bonded to tho’. Trust your spirit, your deepest knowing and intuition to show you the kind of love your heart needs.
May all our hearts know healing and reconnect to their essence of love and kindness,
Dan
