Living From the Heart

Just as you are reading this, center yourself in your mind, in your head, in your thoughts. It may be quiet there, or it may be noisy and turbulent. No matter. Place your focus on your mind. Now take a deep breath, and then another, and center yourself in your heart, in your chest. Can you feel the difference?

The choice to center yourself in your heart is a simple one. It can be made over and over again, many times each day. The heart has an intelligence much greater than the intelligence of the mind. The heart's intelligence is very broad and very deep, but it does not come in words. It is a knowing sense that we can later assign some words to.

I believe that the heart is where poetry comes from, good poetry, great poetry. The heart is where compassion comes from, where acceptance comes from, for these are the wisest of responses to the world and the heart is very wise.

To live from the heart, centered in the heart, is to live from the part of you that is in complete acceptance all the time. It is to be in love. When we are heart-centered we are in love. The heart knows no judgement, no blame or shame. The heart is at peace with what is; it is in love with all that is.

Imagine living more and more from this loving center of yourself, so that you find it more and more difficult to blame, shame or judge anyone or anything. Imagine the peace of this living from the heart. This is where compassion lives.

Compassion is complete acceptance of the experience and feeling of the other person, so that you can be with them in their feeling. In compassion you are in silent witness to their being, in solidarity with them in their feeling. It is not sympathy, which is literally suffering with another, and it is certainly not pity, which has the quality of being sorry for someone's experience and feeling. Compassion is literally feeling with another. Allowing their feeling to be fully met by your acceptance and understanding is being compassionate with them.

Compassion is highly valued in our society, but why is it valued? I can't speak for others, but I can speak for myself. For me, compassion is an allowance on the part of one human being of the totality of experience and feeling that is in another human being. That allowance is so precious because it is so rare. We teach children not to cry, not to complain, not to nag, not to demand, not to want or to fret, not to feel unless the feeling is an approved one. And as we grow older, we learn to hold our feelings within us, unexpressed because unallowed. Compassion allows us to be who we truly are, to be all that we are.

It is commonly given only to certain people to be compassionate - priests and ministers and those who work in hospices with the dying. Some of us have been fortunate to know compassion from a wise friend, a loving parent or grandparent, or a teacher who managed to hold compassion even within the context of a modern classroom. Imagine if we could give and receive compassion from each other all the time. Compassion is kin to what I call 'true listening,' deep listening from the heart to the heart of the other, listening without any judgement, or labelling, or definition, or thought about what you're going to say, just listening with complete acceptance.

Living from the heart gives this kind of listening, this kind of compassion to the people around you, but it also gives it to the self that you are, to your mind's meanderings, your ego-self's anxieties, your oh-so-human needs and wants. Living from the heart brings peace because it is not opposed to anything, not in resistance to anything. It accepts all as it is.

Living from the heart takes us out of the mind somewhat. This is not a bad thing. Living always in the mind tends to find us thinking in circuitous lines of increasing complexity, becoming anxious and projecting our hopes and fears into a future that doesn't exist and may never exist as we have conceived it. Think again, and the whole thing changes anyway. Being centered in the heart quiets the mind and brings peace to the whole consciousness that you are.

It is a choice in the moment, whether to center your consciousness in your mind or in your heart. When deeply involved in some physical movement, we all tend to center ourselves in our bodies and that makes a wonderful change as well from being overly focused on our thoughts. But in the day to day living that we become so charged with, we can choose to center ourselves in our hearts, to live from there.

Living from the heart brings joy, for there is no fear there, no need there. There is only acceptance, peace and love.