We treat our Hearts as a commodity, offering love in exchange for security, support and a way to avoid own thought created demons. We trade our Hearts to each other. I’ll give you mine if you give me yours and all will be well until our Heart becomes lonely for Its own Home and wishes to return to Center. You can’t give your Heart away for long and trying to do so creates such dissonance in our system that we can go slowly insane if we continue to force the issue. Our Heart will always be drawn to centered stillness and awareness of all the pieces of Light and Shadow. Give your heart away to another and when it becomes tired of living as a stranger in a strange land it will move Heaven and Earth to come back to you and if our Hearts don’t depart for Home at the same time there is chaos and confusion, recriminations and fury.

You promised! You took a vow! How could you choose her, him, this or that over me? We become so indignant and offended that what was, is no more.

Your Heart was not meant to handed out to another no matter how dazzling their eyes or enchanting their company. It was not meant to be held hostage and distorted by advertising companies selling cars, hair dye, and clothing. It was not meant to hurt because the Body does or doesn’t possess the “right” house, partner or money in the bank.

To try opening the Heart as a tactic for some fantasized response is a sure path to pain. We do this all the time: I’ll open my Heart and expect you to do the same and if you don’t then I am crushed and closed again. Enough times of that and opening Heart again becomes harder and harder and yet, is this process really Heart? Are our traditional patterns of relationships with each other as family, friend or romantic truly Heart based?

I don’t think so. This pattern, which we all do and have done, sounds like Mind costuming Heart like a child on Halloween. This process sounds like a young child wearing her mother’s jewelry and shoes pretending that she is an adult.

What we think of as hurts to our Hearts are not. They are instead painful pinches in the mind that rails against the differences between what we want and what we have, what we are getting or not getting. Our open Heart can be hurt but since it doesn’t define hurt as something to be resisted or even defined, only felt, it flows through. The energy of anger, the energy of fear, of grief, of joy and even Love, flows through as endless waves of energy no different from sound waves flowing through our ears or the breeze across our skin.

Open your Heart for yourself only.

An open Heart gives total freedom for others to come and go, smile or frown, love us back or not for It knows no other way. An open Heart is so connected, so full of Its own mix of meat and Divine that there is no room for anything or anyone else to reside. Visit, yes. Interact, yes but reside? No.

Our ongoing practice is a welcoming of the conflict between our human experience and our awareness of All That Is. Our daily practice is comforting Mind with our Breath, unwinding the grip of our metaphorical fingers from around other’s throats, from around concepts, ideas and dogmas about shoulds and shouldn’ts. Our only job is many times a day, every day, practice returning to the simplest most timeless most oft-repeated concepts of being present with what exists right here, right now, in every moment.

with love from my heart to yours,
m