The Heart

 

I wake recently to a mind on full tilt with all of its wonderings and worryings. At some point, the words “The heart knows the way,” comes in, and I am immediately quieted and stilled. It is the felt sensation of stepping outside after a blizzard where everything is muffled and the stillness and clarity against a vast blue sky is breathtaking.

Later, memories, thoughts and understandings flood into me filling in the blanks of the morning’s experience. There is the fact that the heart has 60 times the electrical charge of the brain. There are the teachings of traditions who locate the mind in the heart.There is the fact that the word courage stems from the French root for “heart.” There is the statement my teacher once made: “The world will break your heart, but you are not your heart.” And there is it; the call to live with a blend of the open-hearted innocence of a child wrapped in the strength and wisdom of life experience. Could there be any more powerful medicine than that?

There are so very many ways that our hearts have been broken, beat up, abused and misused. Sometimes by our own hand. And there are so very many ways that the world will push into those wounds, re-injuring and reminding us of what we are most desperate  to protect. And yet, more armor is not the answer. Getting them before they get you is not the answer. All of our fighting and armoring creates a kind of self-induced amnesia–where protection becomes so impenetrable that we forget what is underneath and come to believe that we are the armor itself. And so is everyone else.

Where do we start? Not with the world. Not with the ones from the past who made the first and deepest cut. The bravest of all choices is to go home to the places of our wounds, and own them. Name them. Tend to them. Claim them. Heal them. This requires that we allow ourselves to feel. This requires suspending judgment. This requires letting go of blame. This requires getting curious and most especially, RESPONSIBLE for our own hearts and how it is that we will walk them through the world. This is never an allowance or an acquiescence to bad things. This is a revolutionary act of self-care and of planetary contribution.

My sister once told me that bearing grudges, hardness and resentments towards those who have harmed us is the equivalent of holding a burning coal in our hand with the intention of throwing it at another. To walk the path of the heart is not easy. It is, in fact, excruciatingly difficult. It is not the path of least resistance. It does not come bearing gifts of easy comfort or lifetime guarantees. It is, instead the arduous path of alignment to Life Herself, Truth and The Greatest Good. We underestimate and infantalize the magnitude and the reach of the heart when we romanticize it or fear for its safety.