Keeping my Heart in my chest

Why is it that sometimes it's easy to slow down, and sometimes it really isn't? What makes the difference? And when it isn't easy, in other words when our resistance is so great that it takes a powerful motivator to get us past it, where does that motivation come from? How much motivation does it take?

In every moment you have the choice to slow down and pay attention, or not. Both choices are valid. Even if you can slow down enough to realize you really don't want to slow down, you've made a choice, which puts you more in the driver's seat of your life. The more you slow down, the more present you become, the more Life you get to experience. It's that simple. And yet it's not always, or even often, what we choose.

This morning I have a journey happening that has to do with self-containment and my heart. I had a great realization Friday night, and then I had a few more revelations yesterday. This morning my choice is to either ignore what I realized, and what that realization feels like, and go on into drama, which can be fun, OR to slow down and stay with this self-containment, which doesn't feel all that comfortable yet, as I haven't fully integrated it. This is my choice: deepen my self-containment or go into drama.

What choice? you might ask. Of course you make the choice for self-containment, right?

Or what choice? You go for what is most entertaining, right?

Or you go for whatever you feel like going for, right?

Because it's all good. It's all God.

Okay, this morning might seem too obvious of an example, because I have already slowed down enough to recognize that I have a choice. Given that awareness I'm going to choose self-containment every time. It may take me a while to get there, but I really do prefer it.

Ah, but here's a big part of the resistance to slowing down – If you do slow down you recognize you have a choice, and that can take the fun right out of staying in drama. If you slow down you start to remember that you are Responsible for your life. If you slow down you start to feel your emotions. If you slow down all sorts of things start to happen which threaten that great story you have going about who you are. Yikes!

So what gets us past that resistance? Sometimes it is that you just want to pay attention. Paying attention feels great. It brings in Life and Love. It gives you more of your Self. Once you're there it is much more interesting than drama.

But it isn't always all that easy to make the choice towards your Self, even if you've already made it a thousand times. Especially if you're going into a part of yourself that has been shut off for a long time. Then it's like going into a dark crawlspace full of cobwebs and spiders, maybe without even a flashlight.

That's when our Self has to use other ways of getting our attention. You probably aren't going to go into that crawlspace unless the plumbing needs fixing, or your child's cat is stuck under there. Often the only things that will get us to slow down into those most hidden parts of ourselves are that the drama starts to hurt, or we get tired of not having what we want, or our bodies start to show up with disease. Then we'll pay attention. Maybe.

Friday night I was in a great space. I was slowing down just out of the sheer pleasure of being present with myself. It was the middle of the night and I was wide awake. It could have been shakti, since I'd just spent two completely ecstatic hours at a Kirtan fully immersed in Divinity. It could have been the chai I had at dinner. Whatever it was, there I was, wide awake. I was thinking/meditating (yes, these can co-exist) about the evening and the week and what had been coming up. I was thinking about Love, and self-containment, and what it is to seek Love with someone else.

I started to see an image of my heart. It looked straight out of some Hindu painting - bright, orange and red like it was on fire, beautiful and illuminated, a sacred thing. In the image I was carrying it around outside of me, trying to find it a home.

I'd never seen myself that way before, but I could feel that that's how I've been pretty much my whole life. I could see myself approaching a long line of people saying "Hey, will you take care of my heart? Will you? Will you keep my heart safe? Will you?"

As if it had never occurred to me before in that moment of relative illumination I realized I could bring this heart I'd been carrying around into my own chest, into myself, where it belongs.

I did. It lit me up like a lantern. I could feel the energy of it radiating all through my heart chakra and up into my throat. It felt like a fire, a healing fire. I couldn't believe I had kept it outside myself for so long.

That lasted for several minutes, until I wondered how long I could sustain it, at which point it promptly ceased. I tried to restart the fire, but that was that moment and I had moved on.

That's another thing I've been thinking about this weekend – the flow between the ecstatic and the mundane, or between the Divine and the human. It is a flow back and forth, like breath. The movement back and forth is what allows transformation. If you just stayed in ecstasy your human would never get to evolve. If you just stayed in mundane you would never know yourself as Divine. In the space between the two, in the interplay between the two, thinking and meditating can co-exist as a conversation between your human self and your Divine Self.

This moment with my heart was a great revelation. But the revelation is only the Divine part of the story. I still get to flow back into my mundane human, with that little bit of Divinity clutched in my hand so I won't forget. That's when the job starts of integrating, practicing and retraining myself to pay attention in this new way to this old part of myself.

Yesterday I got to practice keeping my heart in my chest, so to speak. And it took some practice. I kept thinking of the phrase "Keep it in your pants, buddy," only it was "Keep it in your chest, buddy." Right! Got it. What was that again?

I went to a lovely class about Matrika Shakti, or the energy of sound, and sent all kinds of sacred vibrations into my heart and throat, and the rest of my body, too. Afterwards I went to the Green Festival, just for an hour, to see what I could see.

One of the things I saw was a booth where a couple of alternative medicine doctors were muscle testing people for nutritional needs. I signed myself right up. I've had a few things come up with my body lately – the sorts of things that just kind of bug me but don't seem that serious. Well, they don't seem serious except that they indicate something out of balance which could lead to bigger problems.

When it was my turn I was told that my thyroid and my heart are in distress and that this is throwing my hormones all out of whack, causing my symptoms. There's a lot of information on how all of those work together which I am not going to go into. Suffice it to say what I learned sobered me right up. The message? "Pay attention and take care of it!!!"

The stunning, and obvious in hindsight, part of all this is that these organs in distress are right where that sacred fire was sending all that healing energy once I brought my heart back into myself Friday night.

I guess you could say that holding your heart outside yourself and trying to find other people to take care of it rather than holding it within yourself might possibly create a lack of balance within yourself. You might say that. You might also guess that bringing your heart back in might start a rebalancing. One can hope.

This morning, as I was meditating and feeling that choice to keep integrating my self-containment, or to take a break and head into drama I could feel the appeal of the drama. It's juicy. I'm familiar with it. I even kind of like how it feels sometimes, especially the part about what I think I'm going to get from someone else loving me. But, you know, I didn't want to hurt my thyroid anymore and I knew my heart could use more support, not more adrenaline. And, fortunately or unfortunately depending on if you're talking to my ego or not, I've seen the difference now with this whole offering up my heart thing. Outside me = empty. Inside me = whole. Okay then. Motivation noted.

I brought my focus into myself, into my heart, into my thyroid. I could feel how much I had still to integrate of the revelation and the sensation of bringing my heart inside myself. I could also feel how much healing my physical heart and thyroid have to do. If I needed any more motivation to slow down I have it now. My physical body has spoken loudly enough for me to hear.

I flow back and forth between my human and my Divine, integrating both ways. In this moment I feel a great deal of compassion for my human body, and its willingness to just be whoever I am, to manifest whatever my journey is. And I feel a great deal of gratitude that my body will bring my attention to the rest of me, the non-physical part of me, in case I need help getting focused.

It's all good. It's all God.

Saying Yes and Joy

 

This came in my inbox this morning. It's a quote from Abraham Hicks:

"Life is supposed to be fun. You said, "I'll go forth and choose. I'll look at the data, and I'll say, yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this, and I'll paint a picture of the things that I want, and I'll vibrate about them, because that's what I'm giving my attention to. And the Universe will respond to my vibration. And then I'll stand in a new place where a whole new batch of yeses are available, and I'll say yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this." You did not say, "I'll go forth and struggle into joy", because from your Nonphysical Perspective you know it is vibrationally not possible. You cannot struggle to joy. Struggle and joy are not on the same channel. You joy your way to joy. You laugh your way to success. It is through your joy that good things come."

Excerpted from the workshop in Los Angeles, CA on Sunday, August 2nd, 1998

That's such a nice picture, and on one level it's all true. But it's missing at least half the picture. That part about "You joy your way to joy," well, I was going to say it was right on, but there's something missing in that, too. How do you joy your way to joy? What does that mean? I guess what seems to be missing to me is the rest of the human part, the part about what brings you to Joy, and just what true Joy is.

When I set out on my journey to earth I think I said something along the lines of "I want a great journey. I want to know myself completely in this new medium called human life. I want to feel the experience of living in the physical dimensions, and I want to experience bringing unlimited God consciousness into limitation. I want to experience waking up."

So what I keep wanting to say "yes" to is human life. I want to say yes to my experience.

Now this involves a lot of Joy. Saying "yes" to what you are experiencing is a brilliant recipe for moving out of struggle and into Joy. For some people and in some experiences it really is that simple. You just say "yes". Bingo, everything's great.

Sometimes it isn't quite that easy. Because sometimes what you are saying "yes" to does not immediately feel like Joy.

When you look at the chakras in your human body, and what emotions are associated with what chakra, Joy lives in the solar plexus. This is a disc-like section of your body roughly from the bottom of the sternum down to the belly button. The solar plexus houses most of the integration organs, like the kidneys, the liver, the gallbladder, the pancreas and the stomach. This is where your physical self integrates higher energies with denser energies.

Another way to phrase what happens, physically, emotionally and spiritually, in you solar plexus is to say this is where you take Responsibility for your human life.

So here's what taking Responsibility means: Slowing down, recognizing yourself as the creator of your life, allowing yourself to experience the journey you have created, and thus stepping into this present moment. Therein lies your Joy – the Joy of getting to have this amazing experience called human life.

Note two things – the capital 'R', which distinguishes Self-Responsibility from social responsibility. My description of Responsibility didn't include taking care of other people, or doing things you don't want to do, or earning enough money, or getting enough sleep or any of that. Responsibility means paying attention to your emotional journey and letting yourself have it.

And, secondly, notice that I'm talking about Joy in human experience, not just Joy in happy times. The human experience is about all sorts of emotions and thoughts and creations. Sometimes it includes struggle. Probably the biggest struggle we face is this struggle against being in the moment and taking Responsibility for our lives. And yet there it is – struggle. One of the most brilliant things about this is that if you can slow down into whatever experience you're having, even struggle, you can find Joy in it.

Yes, it's fun to struggle. Why do we do sports? Why do we want action and conflict in our movies? Why do we like roller coasters? Because they're fun! Because they involve some level of struggle.

Every step you take to actually let yourself feel what you are feeling will take you closer to that Joy.

There's another part to this all, which is about what keeps us from feeling our journeys, which is basically the biggest barrier known to human and Divine kind, which is self-judgment. I'll get into that next.

Until then, slow down, pay attention, let yourself feel.