The subject for today is "Living from the Heart".
Spiritual Life is not about knowing much, itʼs about loving much.
It is your doorway to freedom. Itʼs your doorway to what is eternal. Itʼs your doorway to what about you can't be lost or gained.
In many spiritual traditions the heart has been referred to as the seat of the soul.
That is because the heart is the very first organ to appear when you are coming into physical reality, in the womb.
It's the first organ that a fetus develops.
Thoughts which arenʼt contained in the brain, like most people think, are contained in the body field,
which is basically this energetic field which unites all of us which is in and of all of us.
Thoughts are communicated to the body through the heart first.
The heart then sends those signals to the brain which acts as an interface between that which is non physical and that which is physical.
The heart is the very first feed from non physical into physical reality.
So getting closer to the heart is your way to get closer to that which is eternal about you, non physical energy, Source energy or we could say God.
The heart is full of neuron transmitters.
It has one of the largest electromagnetic fields of anything in your body.
If not, the largest electromagnetic field.
In fact, it's electromagnetic field is unparalleled by the brain.
It is a hundred times electrically stronger and up to five hundred times magnetically stronger than the brain.
In order to move from the mind into the heart space, it's a benefit to treat the heart as if it is it's own entity because in a way it is.
We can let it speak itʼs own truth, we can let it express itʼs own wisdom and we can have it help us to make decisions in our day-to-day life, as if it was a mini ally.
We can involve it in our conversations with ourselves and with others,
and by doing this all our conversations and all of our interactions with ourselves and others become meaningful.
And all choices we make are lined up with the highest good for ourselves.
It's very easy in our modern-day society to feel like we are moving through this reality alone because the brain is what tells you that you are separate from everything else.
The heart does not buy into that illusion.
Therefore the heart can be like a friend, your best friend.
You can treat it like it is it's own being.
And when you have to make decisions in your life you can run those decisions by your heart, and your heart will always tell you what the right answer and the right direction is.
In order to move from the mind into the space of the heart, we need to make place in our lives for quiet.
Stimulus that surrounds us keeps us in our minds, it keeps us at the mercy of our mind which is always judging what it is that we're perceiving in our environment.
The heart is the center of intuition. And intuition will never interfere or compete with anything.
Itʼs voice though steady is very quiet.
So we need to find this space of quiet so we can clearly hear that voice.
Meditation is the best way, as far as I'm concerned, to achieve this kind of quiet.
Itʼs the best way to quiet the mind so that the heart can have its way in terms of what we're doing and what we are saying in our life here.
When we get the mind out of the way the heart can really have dominion.
In meditation we practice detachment from thoughts, from memories, from experiences.
And we get detached from our singular identity.
So when we are in meditation we can learn to simply watch our thoughts and the subsequent emotions that are the result of those thoughts.
And we can watch them sort of jump chaotically around our mind without entertaining them.
And when we are observing instead of entertaining those thoughts, they lose their charge.
Live from intuition, not logic.
Intuition is the perspective of the higher self. It is the most objective perspective that there is.
It is not cluttered by assumption and is not cluttered by judgments.
It doesn't have to justify its own perspective and it is always in line with the highest good.
So tapping into your intuition, getting in touch with your intuition is how to seat yourself in the heart instead of the mind.
We also want to cultivate honesty.
Until we are honest with ourselves and others, we are living in a prison of our own lives.
We need to let that conditioning and the illusions fall at our feet and fall away in order to let the heart, which is our true self, express itself.
Also when moving into the heart space, we need to begin to live our lives for joy.
We need to allow ourselves to fill up our own cup.
The heart knows that we are the center of our universes and therefore it wants your cup to be full.
I will explain it in this way:
You could imagine everyone on this earth as a cup. A cup which doesn't tip.
So when you are going around and trying to always bring joy to others, sometimes at the self-sacrifice that you are now experiencing, you are trying to tip a cup which doesn't tip.
The only way that you can help this world to become what you want it to become, is to understand that it is the center of this universe.
Your only option is to fill up your own cup. And let that cup overflow.
It is the overflow which then creates the kind of world which is full of peace and kindness and compassion.
The kind of world we all want to be living in.
So we have to be brave enough to follow our own joy, our own bliss and fill ourselves up with love, if we are going to live in the heart space.
To live in the heart space we also want to cultivate horizontal thinking which is the platform for humility.
Horizontal thinking means this: "I am not better than." "I am not less than." "I am not even equal. We are one."
To explain what I mean by horizontal and vertical thinking:
It's very easy when you are in the judgmental mind to not understand equanimity, to not understand that when you are walking into an experience with another person,
your perspective and their perspective are not in competition and they are of equal value to the universe that is.
When you have feelings like shame or like pride, that's vertical thinking.
Instead when you walk into the room with compassion and understand this equanimity and cultivate a type of appreciation for that which is other,
as long as that which is self, you are thinking horizontally which is the way that the universe views life.
We also want to cultivate detachment.
In this spiritual community we talk about detachment a lot, and that is really what the heart is the very best at.
We need to sit with ourselves where ever we are.
Your heart does not seek to escape, anything about the present moment.
It doesn't want to escape where you are, it doesn't want to escape how you are feeling, because it understands that enlightenment can only happen where you stand.
Where you stand is the truth of the experience which it seeks.
It is not good or bad. It just is.
Detachment, contrary to popular belief, does not mean to remove oneself from the experience and not let it impact you.
It means to let the experience penetrate you fully.
If you try to avoid going all the way through the emotions of the experiences that you are having, you will never become detached from them.
Becoming detached means to dive into the emotion of the experience, in the depths of all of those emotions and understand that you will drop out the other side with full understanding.
So it is that very understanding that you come to, which we could call the wisdom of the heart.
We also need to learn to live in the present moment.
It is all there is. The heart knows it.
If we live mentally in the past and in the future, we will never fully awaken the lives that we are living.
We will never fully experience the feeling of water falling over our skin when we are in the shower.
We won't really be living life.
We will be living a life which is asleep instead of awake, and that is not the heart's way.
Appreciation, which is the same vibrations as love, will soften you into the heart space, it will open you up to your experience and to understanding your emotions fully.
I want to speak to you for a bit about appreciation.
When you are in the attitude of looking around your environment, to your life and yourself for the things which feel good to look at, you are in the vibration of appreciation.
You are in the point of view that Source sees things.
And thus, you will be allowing your true self into your physical experience because you will not prevent the flow of it.
The minute you get into the aspect of focusing on things you appreciate and things you feel grateful for, you will be allowing the full force energy of your source self through your physical body
And that is a state which is not compatible with ill health. It is not compatible with poverty. It is not compatible with any of the states which you find uncomfortable in your life.
The heart space is one of compassion.
Cultivating compassion is one of the core important things to do in spiritual practice.
It is what tells us that there is no separation.
Other people's joy is our joy, other people's suffering is our suffering,
my story is your story and vice versa.
Compassion allows us to live according to unity, free from the illusion and the prison of our own individual experience.
Practice listening to and understanding other people...deeply.
This will help you to forgive and to connect with the world.
It will help you to move past judgment.
Judgment is a mind process. Understanding is a heart process.
The heart does not want walls between itself and anything.
To it, there can be no such thing as an adversary or an enemy.
It simply is in the state of receptivity and offering.
So, when you are with people take the opportunity to listen deeply.
Reach for understanding, because that will cause us to see ourselves, really truly without illusions.
And what's more amazing is that when you move into the space of compassion, we will become the love that we are seeking in the world.
Living from the heart means to emanate your true essence.
It means to be fully present and become the embodiment of love, equanimity and freedom.
It is your truest and most natural state.
We have really been conditioned away from it.
It is possible when practicing being in the heart space, after a while,
to pull the mind and the brain and our thought processes into alignment with the heart space, with living from the heart.
And once we do that, we will be experiencing a kind of wholeness in our lives, which is so far beyond duality and conflict, that we will know what it is to live as our essential selves.
This is the point at which we will discover the Christ and the Buddha which resides inside every single person and every single thing on this planet.
Every single person we meet at that point will be exposed to us as the Buddha and the Christ that resides within them.
We will see their intimate potential.
We will see all it is that they are capable of doing.
We will see who they truly are not who they are being.
It doesn't matter how closed off someone else is to their own Christ or Buddha consciousness.
When you are living in the heart space, you are adding to that aspect of another person that you were looking at.
And then, it will become much more easy for them to awaken to it in themselves.
Likewise, opening up and living your life from the heart space instead of the mind-space is how to awaken to you the own aspect of your personality, that is a Buddha and that is a Christ.
This Christ-like nature and Buddha-like nature is not just an aspect of ourselves...it is our true selves.