The following is excerpted from Gift of the Body, published by the Essential Light Institute.
As an introduction, let me suggest a deep breath, taken with your hands in a prayer position over your heart chakra, which is in the middle of your chest, just where your hands naturally end up when you put them in that pose. Somebody knew what they were doing.
In the chakra system, the heart is the center in many ways. The simplest level is that it is geographically in the middle of the seven chakras. It also occupies the center functionally. The heart chakra binds the lower and higher centers together because it has aspects of both in its energetic band-width, which is wider than any other chakra. The heart is the only chakra that has two colors: a green (like new leaves in the springtime) and pink/magenta.
The green color is associated with the quality of the heart that comes from its universal connection. Some people call this quality a link with the transpersonal, which means that the heart is linked directly to those aspects of reality (meaning most of it) that are beyond personality, beyond individual identity; one quality of the heart is that it resonates with that which is universal in everyone and everything. In other words, the heart is linked to the spiritual realm that is both within us right now and beyond this life.
The pink color comes from the heart’s link to the lower personal self and to all the bodies, with its capacity of harmonizing all of the forces that make up a Human Energy Vehicle (HEV).
The entire energetic system of the HEV is designed around the heart’s multi-dimensional connectedness. When the heart center is activated to its fullest, all of the other systems line up accordingly. Like any system with a central organizing principle and someone in charge who takes the needs of all the participants in the system into account, everyone can relax and just do their part. One definition of excellent health is that the heart has been established and acknowledged by all components of the system as the center. The heart is the benign leader of the HEV.
Living through the heart is where we are all going, sooner or later, someday, in some lifetime. The particulars of how we each arrive at our heart—and proceed to live the renewed gift of our life through this center— comprise the story of our unique healing journey. And that then is the story of our spiritual growth in this lifetime.
The promise of transforming the lower-self material that has weighed us down is that when we do get to it, the heart is no longer a theoretical or rhetorical idea. It’s no longer about longingly listening to love songs; it’s about hearing and feeling the heart’s song in all of our bodies.
What I am saying is not metaphorical or fanciful.
The heart is not logical; it is vibrational
This is a hard thing to understand and to incorporate in one’s life, until you can feel it in your body. The vibration that the heart engenders and naturally infuses into the rest of our parts, and the resulting feelings, the primary one being joy, is real and immediate. Joy is a quality of the emotional body of the heart. When that body is cleansed and activated, the whole HEV is suffused with joy. This doesn’t always translate as jumping for joy, or laughing for joy. Joy can be quiet and internal as well as explosive. There is nothing more pleasurable to experience than an expanded heart, and every other pleasurable feeling generated by the other chakras is enhanced and amplified when backed-up by the heart. Even the contraction of pain is mitigated and infused with hope when the heart holds it in its arms. Sometimes pain even turns into laughter. With the heart, everything is accepted—and nothing is as serious as the mind would have us believe.
All true healing is generated and delivered through the heart. All true teaching comes through that same portal. Here is a simple rule of thumb for evaluating any opinion, perspective, teaching or help that you are offered: If whatever anyone offers you doesn’t have heart, meaning that the words and especially the energy with which they are delivered doesn’t literally ring like a bell in the center of your chest, don’t bother to listen to it. If your prayer is to live through your heart, you don’t have time for or interest in what doesn’t move you along that path. Seek out teachers who are a few steps ahead of you on that path, not ones who have no idea what their own heart feels like or don’t choose to risk the vulnerability of showing you their heart. These ones are offering you pretense, not heart. Their teaching may be brilliant and interesting, but your goal is the opening of your heart, which is where real meaning comes from.
It is characteristic of an early phase in the spiritual life that we become open to all kinds of influences. Our opinions have been revealed as just opinions. Our pain has been shown to be not nearly as important as we’ve previously thought, and our minds have been exposed in all their limitations. Even our previously sacrosanct sense of identity has been reduced to the level of a cloak we have previously worn. We are newly open and, like a satellite antenna, we can be inundated with a multitude of voices and feelings, all competing for our newly expanded attention. Frankly, it can be confusing. Many people find themselves being drawn this way and that, to this teacher and that workshop. This can be of positive use as a period of exploration of new possibilities. But one can also get overwhelmed, spinning about and ultimately getting lost in a cacophony of all the equally good raps offered by teachers and inner guides, some well-meaning and some with hidden agendas. It is necessary to sort out the one from the other. And even then, the well-meaning ones have different angles and ideas for how you can best proceed on your new path.
When I went through this phase, I spent a few months feeling overwhelmed, without an internal filter to help me discern what and to whom I should listen. I endured it for some weeks, sometimes trying to put my inner hands over inner my ears, to cut out the many voices using my newly-opened channel to compete for my attention. Trying to stop the voices didn’t work. I had opened the door and there was no shutting it. And I didn’t want to. But it was getting pretty loud inside my little house. One day, out of desperation, I made a sincere prayer for help. The response came in an inner voice that I recognized as mine alone. It was a voice linked to my own higher will. It/I said quite clearly and with absolute conviction, “If you can get to my heart, you are welcome. If not, I will have nothing to do with you.” Miraculously, the cacophony began to resolve into a chorus of just a few, much calmer voices. The ones who could join me in my heart came with respect, which is one of the qualities of the heart. The ones who, by their own incompatible vibration, couldn’t get to my heart, passed on by. Over time, as I learned to consciously center myself in my heart, my true teachers, both outer and inner, have taken up residence with me there.
Every being at their core wants love, because every being is made of the active substance of love-Light. This is true—no matter what manner of distraction we might create to avoid the simple act of receiving it. And every spiritual teaching worthy of your precious time will bring you another clue as to how to receive, activate and give more of that love through your own heart.
Contrary to what some people who have never been there would have you believe, the heart is not wimpy. When you truly arrive at your heart, you don’t go around quoting Hallmark cards all day and stare deeply into strangers’ eyes. The true heart is not sappy or sentimental. Sentiment comes from the throat chakra, and it is a distortion of desire. Most cultural expressions that would claim to be from the heart are really coming from longing, not love. The heart doesn’t whine.
Harmony
To be in harmony means that everything in you is functioning according to the heart’s organizing unity. This is also a good definition of health. This internal harmony will automatically put you in harmonious relation with nature via the microcosm-macrocosm relationship, of which the heart is the intermediary. Since the heart is, in its transpersonal aspect, in resonance with the natural order of the universe, your HEV, and through it, also you, will be in harmony with that macrocosmic level as well. The universal order is represented in the alignment and movement of planets as well as the 200 billion constellations in this universe (not to mention the universes we can’t yet access) down to the way that your digestive system functions from ingestion to elimination as well as how you move your body through space. Everything has its place in the organized swirl of the whole.
How do you know what your place is? The answer to that question is not conceptual. When you are in your harmonious place, following the path that most suits your soul’s purpose, you feel it in your heart. Intuition is the heart’s voice in you. It is the bell that rings from the gentle impact of the cosmic clapper. When we are doing, thinking, feeling, and living in sync with harmony, we feel it as a calm knowing, a feeling of security and safety, a ”yes” that sings gently in our chest. Our intuition is saying: “Yep, you got it. It may not make sense, but it’s making harmony. Relax. You’re fine. Keep going.”
When we are in harmony, we can afford to let down our vigilance. This is possible because real protection for any part of the great whole is best afforded by being in rhythm with the greater balance. Protection and divine guidance don’t come from acts of begging or praying, or from staying contracted, scared, and controlled. That posture limits the ability of the Divine Forces to get to you. Protection and guidance come from making conscious contact with the heart, feeling your humility, entering into harmony and unity with that which is both within and beyond you, and then praying and begging. And even then, it’s not the particular words or even the fact of praying that gets us in step with the Divine Forces. No one has a scorecard counting up the number of rosaries that you’ve said, or the number of times that you’ve castigated yourself as a hopeless sinner. Really. When you step across the boundary of consciousness as you leave your body, there is only one criterion for how you did in this lifetime, one lens of evaluation: How much love did you receive and pass on? Regardless of whatever words you used, whatever you did with your time and will on earth, whatever you manifested on the material level, all that matters beyond this lifetime is how you served the great plan to put love in the driver’s seat.
The heart rejoices in the felt presence of nature’s harmony and simplicity. Feel how your heart expands and you breathe more deeply in a beautiful natural setting. You don’t just feel better because you finally are getting some clean air in your lungs. That helps, no doubt. But it’s also because your heart is getting a break from having to discern among all the swirling energies and thoughts that float around so-called civilization.
The heart reacts to cacophonous complexity, internal and external, with warning, self-protective contraction, and even anxiety. Sometimes we just feel uncomfortable in a particular place or in the presence of certain people, often without knowing why. Sometimes we just know intuitively, beyond our mind, that something isn’t right inside us or with someone else, even if we seem to feel fine and even if the person denies that anything is amiss. If we stop when we get these hints from our intuition, breathe and tune into our heart center (an excellent habit to cultivate in any case), often we find it warning us that there is something causing disharmony in the person, the situation, and/or in our HEV. Heeding the ‘heads up’ from our heart can help us immensely to know how to help in a given situation: what to say (or not say) to our friend or colleague, and what to do for our own wellbeing. Ignoring the heart’s warning often results in the situation going over an edge into disease. And while it is almost never too late to call for healing, the earlier we recognize the problem and begin to address it, the more leeway we have in how we can help.
Learning to recognize how your heart speaks to you, and then to make the conscious leap of trusting the messages that the heart gives, is an important step in the transition from living through the third chakra to living through the heart. To be able to say, “I trust my heart”, is a sign of recognizing the wisdom that a grounded heart can provide. For most of us, the step preceding that declaration of trust involves a conscious choice. We declare, “I choose to trust my heart.” Then we watch as the evidence of the heart’s trustworthiness is shown to us by what happens when we make that sometimes-scary choice. Eventually—when we are able to take a giant step and say, “I obey my heart in all things”—it is a sign of living a new life.
Teaser image by Tony Alter, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
