Living From Your Heart

Excerpted from The Wonder of Living in the Heart in Sacred Fire Magazine Issue 10

. . . That place inside is where your heart beats its gentle rhythm, that place you point to when you point to yourself, that place where your deepest, truest self lives. Babies are born living from this space. Small children still know how to live there. But we, in Western culture, teach them to live in their minds rather than in their bodies and their hearts. We may be the only culture that does this. Aboriginal peoples grow up still living in their hearts, still connected to nature and wonder.


We do not. We grow up living in our heads, disconnected from our deepest experiences, from our connection to the Earth and to all of life. I am convinced that this is part of why we are destroying the Earth and aboriginal peoples are not - because we (unlike them) are out of touch with our bodies and hearts, where our sense of kinship with the rest of life lives. By learning to live in our hearts again we can reconnect with that sense of kinship and with our deepest experiences of life. We can reconnect with the wonder and immense power of nature.

. . . You feel as though you are coming home after a long absence, and in a very real sense you are doing just that. You are coming home to the way life was meant to be lived. You are coming home to your truest, deepest self. You are coming home to . . . well, life.

. . . It is in the heart center that we feel our inherent worth as human beings, and that we feel the inherent worth of all other beings. The heart center is a place of love for yourself and for all Creation. It is the place where you experience your larger self - where you know, as one of my teachers kept telling me that "you are so much more than this."

This morning, I read this upon waking . . . and realized that my focus could be turned away from the area of my body that is numb, towards my heart. Because ultimately my heart is the root of all else, and has the ability to transform anything that I feel elsewhere. I laid one hand in my heart space, and one hand on my lower abdomen, breathing deeply and repeating the mantra, 'Here in this moment, is who I am.'

And slowly I understood myself to be larger than the pain that this process of facing the sexual abuse and rape has brought to me. I felt little need to 'understand' how those experiences shaped me. And instead fell into the rhythm of my body, into its softness, and into its wholeness. I recognized the safety that was inherently found in being present to my heart center. As I did this, the numbness dissolved.

This will be part of my waking meditation each morning.