SUSTAINING HEART PRESENCE
Let go, let die, accept
One of the questions I get asked the most is “how does a person sustain heart presence?”. It seems that we are falling in and out of the heart all of time. In one moment we feel love and in the next moment we feel rage, disappointment, hurt, apathy or hopelessness. We swing. Sometimes we make big swings and sometimes small swings, but nonetheless our capacity or willingness to stay rested in our heart is often not as stable as we want it to be. Why is it so easy to leave? The primary reason we leave is because the appearance of life doesn’t agree with our ideas of it. When life agrees with what we want it to be it is easy to be the heart. When life doesn’t match what we want, we fall or rather unconsciously choose, to be out of love. The key is that rather than life agreeing with us, we need to agree with life. This is surrender and death. Death of the conditions we impose onto life and death of the feelings that come along with our ideas not being met.
This is the liberation we want and yet most of us aren’t willing to die. Die to our ideas, hopes and dreams being met in some particular way. Because we aren’t willing to let those things die we suffer. We feel disconnected, frustrated and at war with life. Our energy level is low. Sometimes we barely have enough energy to keep the processes of our body functioning. Our immune system doesn’t work as well. We can feel confused or like it’s hard to focus. We definitely don’t have the energy to actualize our soul’s mission. We are much more primally focused. We blame our body, our parents, our past partners, our life circumstances or situations, and even ourselves. Somehow we think that all of the projection and disownment of power will help. That it will make someone or something else responsible. That something or someone will change and then we will be okay. Maybe things do change and we feel temporarily better or maybe they don’t change, but either way we are still suffering and stuck. What might change that seems to be in agreement with our ideas, will always change again and we might find ourselves in disagreement. This is the definition of our stability being outsourced. Most people cycle here for their entire human life not knowing that something more is possible.
We can’t get to more until we let what we are currently holding onto die. We associate death with failure. We look at it negatively. We feel bad about it, so bad. So what do we do? We choose survival and then wonder why we are living in survival mode. Survival of what isn’t here or what isn’t working. We attempt to make life be something other than it is and are unwilling to accept what actually is. This is because acceptance most often equals failure in our mind. We think it means that nothing is going to change, but this is a confused perspective. Everything changes when we accept what is. When we stop using our energy to fight reality we can use it to participate in reality instead.
HEART STABILITY
Self-seeing & self-injury
It should now be clear what keeps us out of the heart. When we can’t or aren’t willing to accept, let go and let die of that which isn’t, we are out of the heart. Only when we are willing to do so can we start to hear the whispers of the heart again, calling us back home to rest in ourselves. We finally stop blaming and shaming because we see that doesn’t create what we want. It just burns up our energy and then we feel depleted and like we have nothing to give to others or life. This is depressing or what we call depression. The most energizing thing we can do is start to see what IS actually here now. Those things that we couldn’t or wouldn’t see before because we were so busy focusing on what wasn’t. What wasn’t working, what wasn’t showing up like we wanted it to and what wasn’t meeting our hopes, desires and dreams. Now we have the energy to take action and work with life rather than insist or hope that it was or will be different. This isn’t to bypass what we are feeling, but it is to move through it. We need to move through the feels so that we can keep growing and actualizing ourselves into more coherent and refined versions of ourselves, which ultimately the heart is the most coherent.
I say this often but it bears repeating. The heart doesn’t come and go, it is us that leaves it. We leave it when life doesn’t match what we want it to be in any and all ways. We don’t need to figure out how to get into the heart or activate it somehow. It is always there, just being, and we can join it at any moment. We are never disconnected from it, ever. It is just that we sometimes leave it. To sustain heart presence is simple. Notice when you leave and then return. Do that for the rest of your life or until you stop leaving and just stay stably rested. You might wonder how to know when you leave it. The answer is that you feel bad. The heart is goodness, it is good feeling. Even if there is sadness or disappointment, when you are rested in the heart you just include it. You don’t have to make those feelings go away. You recognize them as part of your experience, like waves on the ocean that rise and fall. They don’t create a sense of separation because you know that even when a wave rises the entirety of the ocean still exists.
The first piece in being able to move forward in this way is self-awareness. You must develop self-inquiry and self-seeing. You need to give yourself time to look and question yourself when you are feeling stuck, triggered or disconnected from the heart. See where you are leaving. See what it is that you don’t want to let go of, let die, or that you don’t want to accept as being what it is. Once you see this give yourself a moment to be with it. Feel yourself choosing to then let go. You have the power to do so. No one else can do this for you but you. If needed you can use strategies to help yourself redirect your focus and awareness into the heart. You can place your hand on your heart and breathe into it, not forcing anything to happen, but just allowing. You can feel your spine get straighter and more upright as the energy of love increases in your body. If there is something you need or want to do, or someway your body wants to move, allow your body to adapt and mobilize. You are now listening to life rather than informing life. It is a different relationship. One that you might have never considered before. Your mind steps out of the driver’s seat and the heart slips in instead.
While your mind is mostly well-intentioned and has your survival as its prime objective, your heart includes even more. Your heart knows, where your mind has to think and strategize. The mind doesn’t let go without a fight, but eventually it does let go. It has to surrender to something more because what it knows is limited and as you become more self-aware you see that YOU are not limited. You are limitlessness, bound up in a mind with stories. You can unwind, but you have to let go and let die, of that which isn’t so that you can experience the fullness of what is.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado
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