One person can enact change and that change must begin within the self to have a most profound effect, for to look only to others to enact change leaves the self untethered, disconnected from the true reality of the heart and that which matters most. The heart knows what real change looks like, for the heart has its connection to all that is, to the heavens and the earth, to the smallest and the greatest, to all that lives in earthly realm and all that exists in infinity, that which you cannot see but can feel. The heart is the organ of connectedness, knowledge, wisdom and love. You can’t go wrong if you stay heart centered every step of your changing journey. The heart knows where to go. Let it lead.
Let everything become a matter of the heart. Let everything become the most important heart-centered thing in your life. Let everything be of the utmost heart-centered significance, for when the heart leads everything matters, everything is meaningful, and everything is possible. Love is the energy of the heart. So let love permeate everything and return you and your world to a place of beauty, wonder, and awe. Keep love in your heart, at all times. With love as your guiding light, remain in awe. Life is too short and too important to do otherwise. May love rule.
Stay connected to your heart’s intent no matter what comes to disturb or challenge, no matter the intensity of outer disturbances or the troubles you may face. Remain heart centered and loving, for love is the healing balm that all seek though they may not know this. Love is the answer.
Do not let outside events stir you too far from your heart’s knowing and your heart’s content. Remain heart centered so that your equilibrium is not disturbed, for your inner peace is of utmost importance and concern for your own wellbeing and that of the planet you call home. Seek connection to nature, even in just sitting still, listening and breathing; even in just turning eyes toward the sky, day and night, for a glimpse of the heavens; even just a sense of the wind upon your cheek can remind you of your connection to the Great Mother and all she provides, and how she nurtures you in simple yet profound ways. For beyond the ways of humankind lie the ways of the Divine. Reach for that and all will be well.
The feature song of Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance, asks the deepest question of all, what happens to the heart when we leave this world? The heart, after all, houses the deepest treasure of our Earthbound odyssey, love.
Love, as we experience it in this life, is a developmental process that begins post-birth in the raw emotion that cries out for attention, for comfort, food, and security. This is the love of primal attachment, facilitated by the inborn post-uterine archetypes triggered upon arrival at birth. Thus the rooting reflex in the infant, and the instincts to nurture, protect, and bond in the parents, combine to initiate the love odyssey of a lifetime.
Emotion is the love energy that roots us to this Earth as it compels us to attach through sensual desire and hunger for fulfillment. Without emotion we exist only on a mental plane, out of body, or in the head. No disrespect to the mental plane, but without emotion, there is no real connection to life.
Nonetheless, emotion as experienced through passion, need, and want is merely the outer wrapping of love that must be peeled away for love to truly take up residence in the heart, where love loves all. The overwhelming tantrum of anachronistic narcissistic, infantile entitlement to attention in adult years must transmute, to include the world beyond its own self, before it can reach another in the utter calm of true love.
What makes love such a powerful driver in this life is its intent for us to rediscover our lost wholeness. Life in this world of time and space, where people come and go, highlights our experience as distinct separate human beings. This is contradicted in quantum physics, where it can be demonstrated that, at a subatomic level, everything and everyone is energetically ONE. And that ONE only becomes separated into distinct physical particles when human beings interact with it.
Thus, we are fundamentally an interconnected ONE, having the solid dream of a life, that begins and ends as a separate human being. This manifest dream is merely a surface version of our true underlying interdependent Oneness. Thus, the love dramas of our lives are our surface attempts to find our way home to the latent reality of our underlying wholeness.
When Carlos Castaneda asked don Juan Matus which was the true reality, energetic or physical, don Juan’s reply was that both were real, although energetic reality was the ultimate reality. Physicists would agree. Newtonian physics and quantum physics are both right. One deals with the dream of physical reality, the other energetic reality. What is solid and separate is ultimately energetic and ONE.
We are apparently in this dream of separateness to fully experience the glue that binds us in our ultimate oneness, love. From childhood attachment to family, onto adolescent crush beyond the family, then onto the multiplicity of adult relationships throughout the life cycle, we project all that is missing in us onto people and objects, as we desperately seek to unite with, then mercilessly must let go of, everything, in death. This labyrinth of love teaches us, in dream after dream, to arrive at our One true love, love that loves all.
Though I know Leonard Cohen now knows the answer to the question he posed before he left this world, I venture an answer from this life.
Q: What happens to the heart when it leaves?
A: Transformation into the love of pure equanimity—love that loves all.
Beyond the stormy and cloudy skies of now, this is the love that our physical world dream is inevitably approaching. Full steam ahead!
