Heart Healing as a Compass

The universe is full of so many things. So many possibilities. What shall we do with our time everyday? Think of all the directions there are: apples, music, sleeping, CrossFit, chocolate, dogs, massage, root beer, wake early, yelling, silence, water, sex, pencils, loneliness, rainbows…. ok, you get the point. Different things are better or worse for us at different times depending on what we want and what we need, and then our wants and needs interact and build on each other, and we have to sort through all of it to find what is the one right thing to choose to do in this very moment, to keep us going where we want to go. It’s a lot! Our minds are important to help sort through the information- that’s what they are good at after all- organizing and efficiency. But our hearts are needed to orient us in the right direction. Our mind isn’t so good at helping us know which direction leads to our fulfillment, because our minds can see the good and bad in everything. Our mind is kind of like a computer: very efficient at sorting through and organizing information, but not able to have feelings and desires of its own (at least computers can’t do this yet.. and hopefully we will somehow stop developing technology before we get to that point, because that seems scary… I mean haven’t we learned from scary cyborgs like the character Ash in Alien that computers with too much consciousness are scary? But anyways that’s a side rant…). In our case, there has to be something operating the computer, and this is our heart, our inner self, our soul, our gut feeling…whatever you want to call it. The place where we feel our deepest desires, our deepest knowing. I am calling it our ‘heart’.

Our hearts almost always know what we want, what we need, what is right for us. But we might not be able to hear this wisdom from hearts because we aren’t in the practice of listening. Our hearts also can be scarred and wounded, from past hurts, things we heard and/or saw from parents, siblings,  teachers, friends, lovers, media, world events. And sometimes it’s none of these things in specific that hurt us, it could just be what we came here with, what we have to deal with in this life. We all have ‘heart scars’ that we are born with. And if we haven’t been able to recognize those hurts for what they are, then they can guide our decisions without us knowing it.

How can these ‘heart scars’ guide our decisions? There are a few things going on here: one is that when we carry these wounds without knowing them, it is like we are carrying a heavy backpack and when our back starts hurting we think we need to sit down and rest, or that we need a massage, or that we are simply too weak to do what we are doing- when in reality, we need to take off the backpack. This is one way that not being aware of our wounds can influence our direction in life- if we don’t know we are carrying this backpack (read: wound) then it will guide us, it will decide our direction, we will spend our time trying to heal that wound but we won’t be able to because we don’t know what the real problem is. We think we have some tight muscles, or that our back is weak- but in fact we have a backpack on. Perhaps we do also have sore muscles and a weak back and those things can be taken into account, but if we don’t first take off the backpack its going to be useless to do the other things.

Not knowing what wounds you have can change your life direction by:

1. we live life trying to fulfill or avoid those wounds- and that fulfilling or avoiding becomes what we spend our time and energy doing. For example, we were told we are incapable by adults early in our life, so we spend our life trying to prove we are capable and seeking praise and status from the world- rather than spending our energy on the creative projects that we really want to do, or we spend our life believing we are incapable and therefore also not spending energy on the creative projects we want to do because we have the belief that we are incapable. Either way if we could see and understand that we were told we are incapable by our parents but that it may not be true and that it is an attitude we carry due to our upbringing, then we can make choices outside of that belief. We can see it, and we can label it as outside of us. Knowing this attitude we received from our parents allows us to separate ourselves from it, and that sets us free. It may still be with us, it may be in our minds and hearts, but we can see it and label it as separator from us. 
2. without knowing the real source of pain we cannot heal it. as in the backpack analogy if our backs hurt but we don’t know to take the backpack of the pain with not go away. as in early trauma, if we don’t know that our parents told us we are incapable, we might think that our pain is because we don’t have a good job, and so we keep seeking a higher paying more prestigious job but that doesn’t heal the pain. only recognizing that we were told we are incapable and then giving ourselves that love can we heal .

So to bring clarity back to our hearts we have to come into contact with what they (our hearts) are holding–the desires, the joys, and perhaps most importantly the pain. Its not that the pain is more important to know or to experience than the joys, its just that we have a natural aversion to painful things so it is likely that we try to avoid/ignore/block out the pain- and this is where the problem arises. Whatever is pushed away persists. Whatever we are unaware of, rules us and can hold us back. So, we often have to very consciously work to discover and then sit with the pain we carry. Its just not a natural thing to do, we aren’t wired to do that, and we aren’t taught to do that by our culture. But as we take time to be with the pain ( again this is not easy to do, and maybe with a therapist is best) we integrate more and more of it into our consciousness. Which means we integrate more and more of ourselves into our consciousness. Then that heart voice becomes clear and we can more easily see which choice is best … apple, sleep, chocolate, dancing (some things I might choose to do from that list)… Healing the heart, is healing the self, is making more of ourselves conscious, is seeing in the shadows so we can see in the light. 
Next time more on the process of doing that heart/self healing.