Ache in My Heart: Expression of Feelings and Appreciation of Failure

An occasional sneaker wave would pull me completely under. I would toss and tumble in grief for hours until I was spit out, exhausted. I trusted my inner knowing that my heart would eventually be more available. We got married sooner than I would have normally wanted. I am very grateful that I did. Christiane and I had a wonderful son, James, and a new chapter of my life unfolded as my heart gradually reopened to deeply love them both.

This underground spiritual classic is still largely known by word of mouth. It deserves a much wider audience.

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Lusseyran, born in Paris in to a middle-class family, lost his sight in an accident at school when he was eight years old. At first he felt anguish and despair, but he soon realized he was looking at his situation in the wrong way. This was more than a simple insight—it was a revelation:. He was seventeen when the Nazis invaded France and occupied Paris. Driven by an inner resolve from the core of his being, he became a major leader of the Resistance, organizing a group of over six hundred young men to clandestinely produce and distribute an anti-Nazi newspaper throughout France and to help downed airmen find safe passage to Spain.

Lusseyran, known as the Blind One, would personally vet each new member of his group in order to detect possible Nazi collaborators. He could read others with extraordinary accuracy and gained a reputation for being infallible. He was, however, ambivalent about only one member that he accepted.

This man betrayed him and the entire leadership a year later. Lusseyran and his comrades were arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, and shipped to Buchenwald. After nearly dying there, he became an informal spiritual counselor to many of the men because of his inner radiance.

He was one of the few to survive. For Lusseyran, this guidance took the form of great insight, courage, and compassion in the most demanding circumstances imaginable. Sometimes my spiritually oriented clients wonder whether self-love, self-acceptance, and self-care will reinforce the ego. Loving and accepting ourselves as we are allows us to step off the inner battlefield and to relax the knot of inner division. Self-indulgence is different from self-care. Self-indulgence feeds the sense of being a separate self.

When we become self-indulgent, our life is all about the little me. Self-care means that we listen to our core needs, set reasonable boundaries with others, and live in balance. It also means that we question all of our limiting beliefs that create suffering for ourselves and others. And it means that we live in growing integrity with a deeper truth that we are not separate from anyone.

Genuine self-care frees us to be more selfless. Our basic needs are fairly simple—food, shelter, rest, health, human connection, and meaningful work. Burnout—becoming exhausted, sick, and resentful—is pointless. There are times when we need to stretch beyond our normal limits in order to be there for others or to meet a work commitment.

At some point, however, we need to rest and replenish. The wisdom of the heart helps us to navigate these apparent dilemmas of when to say yes or no to the requests or demands of others. Sometimes a no will be the most wise and loving response in the long run, even if it temporarily disappoints someone. A no to someone else can be a yes to our inner truth.

Self-love and acceptance can easily begin as mental principles that transmute into ideals against which we judge ourselves. For this reason, sometimes it is not that helpful to encourage people to accept themselves. If they have a hard time doing so, they will feel like failures. Further, injunctions engender resistance. I noted in chapter 4 of my book that the conditioned mind only accepts conditionally. Find a quiet place, sit comfortably, and close your eyes. Bring your attention to your heart center. Take several slow, deep breaths and let your attention settle down and in.

Is there something within me that loves and accepts me just as I am? Let the question go and be quiet.

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Notice what happens in the area of your heart. If you can sense this place of self-love and acceptance, attune with it and let it in. Notice the impact as you do. Then imagine embracing the part of you that feels unacceptable and unlovable in the center of your heart. Let the love saturate this part for several minutes.

If you are unable to sense this place, ask yourself if there is a core belief about whether you are lovable and acceptable as you are. Then follow the experiment in chapter 4 about questioning core beliefs. We find unconditional acceptance in the depths of the heart. The deeper our attention goes, the more compassion and understanding we discover.

It is as if there is a secret spring in the core of the heart. In chapter 2 of my book, I described three levels to the heart: The egoic level is concerned with our self-image and its related feelings of pride, shame, self-esteem, and self-loathing. This level goes very deep, and much of our attention is ordinarily absorbed in maintaining an image acceptable to ourselves and others. The questions that arise from this level are: Do you see me? Do you like me? There is a natural desire and need to be accurately and appreciatively seen and to have what is seen reflected back to us—in psychological terms, to be mirrored.

A certain amount of mirroring is necessary for attention to move beyond the self-image and self-story. Receiving it supports our self-trust and the ability to stand on our own. My clients and students often report journeying through increasingly subtle layers of their hearts.

As they do so, they discover why they closed their hearts and put up a series of barricades in the first place. Each wall is connected to an old emotional injury—a deep hurt due to abuse or neglect that was too much to bear at the time. Sometimes these walls appeared suddenly, and other times they appeared incrementally.

It was easier and safer to shut down and armor the heart than to stay open and feel. It takes courage and vulnerability to reopen these sensitive depths. Wounds to the heart are usually relational in origin, so the healing will often come through the loving acceptance and attunement of another person, be it a family member, friend, partner, or therapist. This process of healing takes time. As the heart heals and clears, greater depths unfold.

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At some point, we may encounter what feels like a sacred core—what some call the soul. It is the place of greatest relational intimacy, whether we are relating as spiritual friends or lovers. Here the heart is undefended, innocent, and open. Each individual offers complete access to the other. It is a place of love, gratitude for life, compassion, appreciation, and joy. It is deeply touching to sit with people and experience their journey into this inner sanctum together. Will Johnson, author of Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved—The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine , offers the following poem, among others from Rumi, as evidence that Shams and Rumi spent most of their ninety days together gazing:.

I have found that meditative gazing with an open friend or partner tends to evoke this soulful level of contact. A deep longing of the heart is fulfilled when this level of relational intimacy is touched. The taste of these sacred waters is extraordinarily sweet. Gazing with a partner is a beautiful practice that I highly recommend. When meditatively gazing with someone, it is best to have no agenda and simply be open to what unfolds in the moment.

It is never the same experience from session to session. You can go as long as you like, although thirty minutes is usually sufficient. The intention with this practice is simply to be open to what unfolds within you and between you and your gazing partner. Sit comfortably across from your partner. Close your eyes for a minute and relax. Feel your feet on the floor, your breath, and your whole body.

Trust Your Heart: How to Connect With Your Inner Wisdom

Open your eyes and make relaxed, non-effortful eye contact. Allow your eyes to be soft and receptive.

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Be natural and at ease. This is not a staring contest. Feel free to blink, briefly close your eyes to rest, or adjust your posture as needed. Stay at home in yourself and receive your partner. Be open and nonjudgmental. Silently notice what arises without trying to change it in any way.

“The Heart is another name for Reality and this is neither inside nor outside the body.”

As the heart opens and awakens, a universal, all-embracing love may emerge. When I interviewed my friend Dorothy Hunt, she described the awakening of her heart and the experience of this love:. The heart area in the body is the portal to the Great Heart. Some of my clients and students have experienced the back of their heart area opening up into what feels like infinite space behind and around their bodies, as Kelly reported at the beginning of this chapter.

It is as if there is a backdoor in the temple of the human heart that opens out to the cosmic heart. Only this Great Heart can fully embrace the collective suffering of humanity that is too much for an individual human heart to bear. As the heart fully flowers, we realize that we are all in this together, that the suffering of apparent others is also our suffering.

It is the deep nature of the heart to reach out and embrace this suffering—to gather it into itself. Love is willing to go to hell. Although she was raised in the Jewish faith, she grew up in a Catholic culture and felt an unlikely affinity with Jesus and Mary although not the orthodox teachings of Christianity throughout her life. At the end of our session, she was astonished at what had unfolded:.

I have trouble breathing; my lungs refuse to take in enough air. I look inside myself, and I am stunned to see my heart covered with gaping wounds flowing with immense grief. I ache deep in my chest and bones. Sobs burst out of me while my body contorts and the dark flow increases. I open to it as much as I can; my body trembles, my teeth chatter. The grief comes in waves, increasing. My heart stretches and stretches but still is not big enough to let it all pass through. I welcome the unbearable because there is nothing else to do, nowhere else to go; this river must fully flow through my heart to free it.

Our hearts get closer and closer. Drawn from the inside by that mysterious force, it stretches even more, touches It and finally enters and melts in It. Thorns are piercing my head and arms. I sense the rough wood of the cross against my body and the nails. It is as if I am being crucified. What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. We need not seek it out; we can all look back at moments when our lives were in utter chaos, desolation and despair. Growth comes when we respond to adversity by stretching just an edge beyond our talent and experience. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity.

It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there.

You live on in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here. The important thing is not to allow yourself to be stranded in the desert. The experience of grieving cannot be ordered or categorized, hurried or controlled, pushed aside or ignored indefinitely.

It is inevitable as breathing, as change, as love. It may be postponed, but it will not be denied.

Wise Words

You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better… and yet… you are sure to be happy again. It is part of the ritual, if you will, of putting sadness in perspective and gaining control of the situation. Grief has a purpose. Grieving is part of the tempering process.

It means that on the journey we will need safe pathways so that remembrance, which may be painful, is possible. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. Grieving is not about forgetting. Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again. First, each loss launches us on an inescapable course through grief. Second, each loss revives all past losses.

Third, each loss, if fully mourned, can be a vehicle for growth and regeneration. It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on what happens inside a person. I am grateful for every day… and that makes me happy. You become happy by living a life that means something. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in getting, but only in giving. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself. They think it comes from doing something on a big scale, from a big fortune, or from some great achievement, when, in fact, it is derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things in the world.

No self-centered person, no ungrateful soul can ever be happy, much less make anyone else happy. Life is giving, not getting. First of all, happiness must be shared. It is quiet, seldom found for long in crowds, most easily won in moments of solitude and reflection. It comes from within, and rests most securely on simple goodness and clear conscience.

It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are. Both attitudes are within our power so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Let the process happen. Trust that nature will do the healing.

Know that the pain will pass, and, when it passes, you will be stronger, happier, more sensitive and aware. Through the careful hand-holding of your own spirit, through recognizing, honoring, and expressing your feelings, by nurturing your body as the vessel that holds your spirit in the web of life, you will discover that you have, without your consciously knowing it, developed the inner sturdiness from which you can function on your own behalf. This interior growth is a miracle of intimate compassion, a seedling of loving yourself that will bloom, in time, into the capacity for truly loving others.

Your spirit, as surely as your body, will try to heal. The question you must ask yourself is not if you will heal, but how. Grief and pain have their own duration, and when they begin to pass, you must take care to guide the shape of the new being you are to become. So you should not fear tragedy and suffering. Like love, they make you more a part of the human family.

From them can come your greatest creativity. They are the fire that burns you pure. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.