“An open heart is stronger than 10,000 shields.” Kathleen Hanagan
Living with an open heart
This time is unlike any other time we have known in our current lifetimes. It is a pivotal turning point at which we cannot fail if we ask what would Love do?
She would ask us to open our hearts and soften our minds and be very strong.
Learning to live with your heart wide open in a world of covid, conspiracies, and chaos is the work of our souls.
It is what Love asks of us at this time.
Being born on earth is heroic, and right now we have the most amazing opportunity. As things appear to be dangerous out there, it’s easy to become confused and to feel powerless. about the real source of our protection.
Being fully born on earth
Stephen Levine, one of my most important spiritual teachers, says that very few people are what he calls “fully born.”
Says Stephen, “Most people live with one foot in the womb, hopping around the world, never quite coming out…. Completing our birth is a process of becoming grounded, putting both feet on the ground. It is taking responsibility for being born. We are not responsible for our incarnation, we are responsible to our incarnation.”
To be responsible to our incarnation means that we cease resisting what is, and open our bodies, minds and hearts to experience our lives fully. We elevate our vibration to the highest level we are capable of, because we know that is how we effect change. We know that our life is not a mistake, that nothing is random, and we are here for a reason at this particular time.
It’s natural to want to pull away and shut down in the face of the pain all around us. We need to allow Spirit into our bodies, so that we are guided by an inner light during this time of outer darkness.
I have heard a few “why bother?” and “my vote doesn’t count” groans, to which I want to say that not only does a single embodied life matter, but it can make ALL THE DIFFERENCE ON EARTH!
Tend to the unattended sorrows
One of the thousand ironies of becoming fully embodied and learning to live with an open heart is that the more open the heart becomes, the more closed it can feel. The more it has opened, the further it has to go to close. People who allow great joy in their experience, open the gates to great sorrow as well.
In her exquisite poem, Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”
In the human experience, joy and grief are both natural and utterly common to our daily experience. Grief is an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent. Not being fully embodied, we don't know what to do with our pain, and we never have.
Most of us have been taught to bury our feelings, and get on with our lives as though loss were something to ignore, deny, or get over quickly. As a result, our sorrow goes unattended and shows itself in our addictions, our depression, anxiety, and our despair.
Listen to your mother
Since the Goddess Corona has spoken, it is more important than ever that we commit to living fully embodied with an open heart to offset the rampant fear that is the virus itself. Fear weakens the immune system at every level.
Rather than the voice that pushes and drives you beyond healthy limits, this is a good time to listen to the internalized voice of your own mother, if that is helpful. For many, that inner voice of the mother is harsh or not an example of good self-care, and you may struggle with caring for the physical body in a balanced way. You can consciously develop the inner voice that urges you to take care of yourself, eat well, sleep enough, exercise, etc. by forming a healing relationship with a coach or therapist or friend who cares.
This is a good time to mother yourself, and allow yourself to be mothered when you can. This nourishment will help to make you strong!
Cultivate devotion
True devotion requires total surrender, which scares the wits out of most humans with their intricate wiring for survival. But there is a way in which we can surrender so profoundly that we release the fear and simultaneously leap into the next phase of our evolution.
Surrender and devotion are the best of friends on the path of growth and transformation.
I turn to Stephen Levine again, who was a master of surrender as he offered his entire life as a practice of loving:
“When being loving becomes even more important than being loved, true devotion is experienced. A loving that does not depend on getting what we want but on offering what the world and our hearts cry out for.”
Ask yourself who or what requires your devotion at this time, and see what you can do to surrender your resistance to that.
Is it your family, your intimate relationship, your personal growth, your health, some cause that breaks your heart open?
Be devoted to being devoted, and you cannot go wrong!!!
Attack is really just a call for love (Course in Miracles)
If you look behind the veil on anything, all the way back to the source, you will find the longing for love. More than ever now, we must learn to look beyond the form to see the brother or sister in need of love.
Attack in the form of shaming, blaming, shouting, accusing, judging, punishing, raping, killing—yes, all of it—-is an expression of deep egoic pain. If we respond with our own egos, we will typically react with anger or frustration and perpetuate the cycle.
If we are rooted in our own being, fully embodied, we can respond in an entirely different way that remembers what is behind the attack. We can cultivate the quality of mercy, which is strong strong medicine!
It is so important that we are awake enough to realize this, because there is much more chaos to come, as the way is cleared for Love to come through, and be the guiding force in the New World we are creating.
Remembering this helps us to become very strong!
Your life is a prayer
I had a beautiful experience last week, when I tended to some unattended sorrow inside. As I was moving through memories of old pain I had stored in my body, I began to feel lighter, more clear, and this poem emerged as a gift:
Your life is a prayer
Sent by love
To bless this earth
With Her splendor
She realizes how much She asks of you right from the start
The shock of birth
The forgetting Her upon entry
The longing for Her sweetness
The bitterness of loss
Your life is a prayer
Sent by love
To experience on earth
All Her beauty
She shows you in every which way
How proud She is of you
as you face the pain,
forgive those who hurt you
and place Her at the altar in your heart of hearts.
Your life is a prayer
Sent by love
to remember on earth
Her infinite mystery.
If your life is a prayer my friend,
then toss away doubt and fear and the feeling of loneliness.
A prayer is meant to be offered to the One who sent you,
as the imperfect offering,
the prayer of all prayers,
that declares,
“Thank you Love for everything!”
Kathleen Hanagan August 12, 2020
May I learn to soften my resistance to what is.
May I allow more and more Spirit to enter my body and guide my way.
May I be fully devoted to offering my strength at this time.
