INTIMACY OF THE HEART
Connection starts & ends with you
Awakening the heart is the journey of our lifetime. Coming alive into feeling, relationship and vitality with life is the intimacy we desperately seek. We look for it outside of us in careers, projects, living locations, partners, friends, pets and family members. We might feel excitement, aliveness or wakefulness when we get into a new relationship, our business takes off or we land the perfect new place to live, but soon enough it wears off. We wonder where it went. What changed? WE did, yet we don’t realize it. We think something else changed. We believe that the person, the place, the job or something else outside of us shifted and now we don’t feel like we did before. We try to go back. We attempt to manipulate the things and people all around us so that they match what we think they were before. We fail, and inside of our failure to make things look or act a particular way so that we can feel connected and alive again, we feel powerless.
Powerlessness is a state of feeling disconnected from life. We feel apart from or at odds with the very essence that we are. The projection is that we are disconnected from life, but truly we are disconnected from ourselves, including our heart which is the primary source of life. We stop feeling, because feeling equals pain and we move further and further away from intimacy with life. We stop being motivated, stop taking action, and don’t feel directed, guided or purposeful. We are just surviving and going through the motions of having a body and living a life without really feeling alive. We have our routines and we do them over and over. Our life is about what we eat, consume, and how we will keep it all the same the next day so we have some sense of safety and stability, and while we are slowing dying inside. As sad as it is to say this, this is what most people think life is and as good as it gets.
Since I am implying that there is more, what is this more and how do we live it? The first piece is the recognition that we are the source of the connection we feel. We can’t get connection. We can only be connected and then feel connection. How do we be connected? It is not something that we do, but rather something we accept. We accept that we are connected. We see it as an unchangeable fact, rather than as something that comes and goes. It is not negotiable or up for philosophical debate, that is unless you want to continue to experience connection coming and going. You must own it, because the truth is that you already do own it. You are just believing and acting like you don’t. You think other people and things own your feeling of connection and this forever puts your heart, and your feelings of aliveness and passion, in something or someone else’s hands.
THE HEART THAT STAYS
Making your heart unconditional
Making your heart unconditional is the work of staying in intimacy with your heart. The unconditional heart remains open and with itself despite any and all conditions. This or that person or thing can come or go. They can move, change or shift however they need to and your heart stays with yourself. If you embody an unconditional heart you will become so radiant and so bright that you illuminate everything you interact with. You won’t mind at all what things or people are doing because you know that all of those things or people are contained inside of you and not in opposition with you. Things come and go, people change everyday, absolutely no conditions stay the same. The only “thing” that remains unchanged infinitely and forever is the heart. It never ever goes anywhere. Always there, always here. We see and feel it the moment we stop trying to get connection from something or someone and rest into the connection that is already here.
The aliveness of the heart is like magic. You see connection and synchronicity everywhere because you are living in connection. This doesn’t mean you are clueless to tragedy or to the pains of physical existence. You still notice them and interact with them however you see fit, but they don’t disturb your connection to your heart. You include them rather than fighting or trying to fix them. Through inclusivity everything finds its home. It’s when we try to throw things out of the whole that life fragments and sickness of the body-mind-soul ensues. Aliveness of the heart is vitality, it is life force itself. Nothing can live very long without it. I believe this is one reason why we humans have such short lifespans. We live barely vital, barely in connection with the intimacy of our heart, and the form of our physical body while incredibly adaptive can’t survive without a source of life.
Everything runs on energy. Our bodies, our minds, our hearts. Our heart generates the most coherent source of light, so when we are living connected we are fueling our body and mind with a pure source of clear light. Our mind however has the capacity to distort and bend the light of the heart, making it less coherent. The mind is the relay between our body and our heart. It decides how the light of the heart comes through our physical form. This is why investigating and aligning our thoughts, beliefs and perspectives with that of wholeness and unconditionality is the only way to allow that clear light of the heart to infuse our physical body.
If we believe in disconnection we will experience it in our physical reality because the mind has decided that disconnection is fact. Based on how the mind perceives what it looks at, the body will then respond to that perspective. Again recognize that the heart does not come and go, but rather the mind chooses, consciously or not, what is and what isn’t, and what gets to be included and what doesn’t. The formula goes like this: believe that you are not the source of your feelings, be convicted in disconnection, and your mind is conditional. Or: recognize yourself as the source of your feelings, know that the heart never leaves but rather that your conditions remove you from it, and drop back into the intimacy of your heart, the connection that is so close to you that it could never leave you. Intimacy doesn’t live out there. It lives in you and you are the one that brings the vitality of life, passion and connection to your experience. The heart has never, even for a moment, even the most blissful ecstatic moment, ever been outside of you. You have always and will always be the source of connection.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Somato-Respiratory Integration Facilitator, Boulder, Colorado
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