My Heart is Finally Open..and I'm Upset

While the title of this post may be a lame reference to a catchy Drake song, the sentiment is very much real. Have you found that sometimes the biggest revelations are the least talked about? There seems to be no room to wax poetic when the Truth hurtles toward you like a great boulder.

When I got up this morning, Spirit was compelling me to at least try and explain my experience, so here I am: Let me backtrack by saying that I had hit a point in my ‘presence practice’ where tuning into presence felt like walking across an arid desert. Maybe I wasn’t resting in presence long enough to actually feel very much or maybe I wasn’t resting there precisely because I wasn’t feeling much, but whatever the case, my experience of life felt like one of endlessly processing emotions only to return to this same barren landscape. So I did all I knew to do, which was pray for true peace, joy, and love. Might as well cut right to the chase, right? And I was promptly guided to re-read Alchemy of the Heart. Clearly, I hadn’t paid enough attention the first time.

Have you ever read a book where the text itself doesn’t seem to do much for you, but there was a certain transmission of knowing from the author’s own energy? That was precisely my experience this time around. I understood very clearly that while my heart felt quite numb (as had the entire field of presence throughout my body) that I now had no choice but to wait quietly at its doorway, willing, pleading, and praying for it to open. If this thing called attention/awareness/consciousness was indeed as powerful as I believed, then it should be powerful enough to open the heart.

It was on Mother’s Day, symbolically enough, when the heart started to open. I had organized a date for that afternoon that I abruptly canceled because I knew I had no choice but to tend to this growing flame. And so proceeded several weeks of returning home from work to lay in bed and meditate for hours on the heart space. At times, there was so much bliss and joy coursing through me, I felt like I was on MDMA. I guess one of my first teachers had been right after all, and this heart-opening psychedelic had only been giving me a foretaste of this inherent quality of my own being.

Around this time, someone I had dated 8 years prior re-entered my life, expecting me to be as casual and free-flowing with intimacy as I had been back then. Little did he or I realize, that returning to my heart in this way had made it all but impossible to reduce intimacy to a physical exchange. Along with reliving a long multi-life arc of being abandoned by him yet again (at least this time I didn’t end up pregnant!) I started to see and feel more deeply than ever that opening to this level of love meant stepping into a new level of soulful integrity and responsibility. I could no longer frame these painful experiences as ‘burdens’ of earthly life, but came to see they were the very firewood that was quickening the flames of my inner alchemy. Every tear shed, moment of confusion, and getting lost in the head, was drawing me closer and closer to the utterly simple sweetness of just BEing in the heart. And it got to such a point that stepping out of the heart energy started to feel like hell and staying in it felt like heaven or stepping out felt like fear and staying in it felt like love or stepping out felt like forgetting the LOVE that we are and stepping in felt like the relief of remembering or insert whatever dual construct you want to use. Suffice it to say, I’m upset it took me twenty years of spiritual seeking to be granted entry to the very cave in which I have been dwelling my whole life. So there you are, Spirit! I hope you’re happy you’ve turned my life into a running joke of epic proportion! Grrrr…