AWAKENING THE DEVOTIONAL HEART OF SERVICE
Your heart’s calling
The most fulfilling, nurturing and rewarding state of existing is being of service to life from the heart, while bringing something of true benefit to others. What is true benefit? To me it is the giving, providing or sharing of one’s self that meets a need of another. A need could be something physical like food, shelter, clothes, touch or other services or resources. It could also be something nonphysical like connection, recognition, inspiration, joy, levity, remembrance or unconditional love. One of the key points of being in service in a way that is fulfilling, is that it comes from your heart. It is not something you do to get anything, rather you do it because you care. You care just for the sake of caring and that alone makes you want to give, share or provide in some way. Your service could be expressed through your job, but service is not a job. Service is a natural arising that comes from the awakened heart of devotion inside of you. It springs forth from knowing your essence and recognizing that same essence inside of everyone.
Many people don’t know what is important to them. They don’t know what they care about and haven’t investigated their inner self. Rather they just go along with the societal ideas about what they think they are supposed to care about, all the while remaining apathetic or disconnected from what really lights them up. Then there are others who know what they care about, but they don’t value it (or themselves) enough to generate momentum and take action on it. They dismiss their heart’s calling, making it small and insignificant, and do what they think they should do rather than what truly matters to them. Just to be clear your heart’s calling is not a thing that you do. It is not a role, title, career, business, project or any of those types of things. It is more like a current. A wave of energy that moves through you, and if you allow it, moves you into action and guides your direction. Because it is a current you can stop it. You can push it away, ignore it altogether and take a different route. A key sign that you might be doing that is that your like feels mechanical, like an endless list of chores. There is no fulfillment outside of immediate sensory gratifications that come through things like consumption of food, information or buying stuff.
In order to have energy we have to generate it. We get energy by giving energy. While that seems like a paradox, it just works that way. I am not saying that we should burn ourselves out doing a bunch of stuff, no. What I am saying is that when we come from the heart in service it is so fulfilling and energizing that it increases our capacity. We have more to give because we are giving. We still need rest, but even in our rest we stay connected to our heart. This increases our coherency. Coherence = wholeness = healed. Awakening your devotional heart of service and actualizing it in the world brings about the most healing on this planet, including within yourself.
HOW TO CARE MORE?
Softening & feeling impact
While it might seem strange to ask the question “how do I care more?” well here we are asking it, because the reality of it is the world is in dire need of care. We are care deprived. Starving. Overfed and under nourished of the most vital nutrient. I am not saying it is true for everyone, but for the majority it is. The focus for most is to ensure that they can get or have enough in order to survive. We are playing the survival game rather than the caring game. The hearts of many are numb, frozen, withdrawn and asleep. We can ALL up level our caring game. If each of us did I believe there would be no more sickness and no perception of lack. That’s a big statement, but imagine a world where there was only care and everyone was in service to everyone else, each person expressing and sharing their heart. How would you feel inside of that world? It would be so fulfilling, nurturing and energizing that nothing could be kept out of wholeness. All needs would be met and all heart’s actualized.
One of the first steps towards caring more is our willingness to soften and feel impact. Many of us are hard, tough and sometimes sharp. This hardness is built after years, or decades for some, of pain. The pain of not being seen, met, heard, felt, self-expressed, loved and understood, all of which can become physical. This toughness is our defenses. It keeps things out and pushes things away, including other people. It is unwelcoming and uninviting. It is self-protective and self-serving. It does not receive and is not open. It hurts, both ourselves and other people. While often not intentional, it is still our responsibility to see this in ourselves and do the work to dismantle our hard, tough, sharp and non-receptive exteriors. Remember your defenses are not who you are, but rather only the protective armor you’ve built up around yourself to survive.
Once we soften and open into receptivity, then we can feel. We can feel what is important to us, what matters, and why we care. Feeling moves us. When we are defended and protected underneath our armor we don’t feel as much pain, but we also don’t feel our heart. We must soften in order to feel our heart again. Feeling propels us into action. It mobilizes us to orient and organize ourselves in ways that are aligned with our heart’s calling. We are less in our head attempting to “figure out” what is important to us, but rather we find ourselves within the current of our heart’s stream. Everything we do gets moistened and touched by the waves of our heart’s flow.
Being in the awakened heart of service is effortless, but getting there requires work. It is the work of remembering, reconnecting and coming back over and over again to the heart. Our defenses don’t just fall away in one big swoop. It takes time to work with them, to get them to soften, and to feel safe and trust the heart again. The heart always has our back, but it easy to forget that when we’ve relied on our defenses to keep us safe and alive for so long. The heart seems like the enemy to our defenses. This keeps us out of feeling, out of caring, not being able to hear our heart’s call or actualizing ourselves in service to others. When we can feel and hear the heart again, we intuitively know how to serve and nothing interferes with it. Serving becomes our only focus because it is so fulfilling, nurturing and energizing. It makes us come alive and we rest into our devotional heart of service.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractor & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado
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