The Practice and Life Path of Opening Your Heart
There are many good causes to dedicate your life to.
Becoming a great parent, a devoted partner, an amazing artist or a prolific author are certainly admirable endeavors, worthy of the dedication and commitment needed to actualize those deep gifts.
Learning to serve the world with love and kindness and opening the hearts of those around you is another beautiful life path.
One endeavor worthy of consideration, because it can facilitate many other life paths, is the idea of learning to open your heart in the midst of all of life’s experiences. The telling word here is ‘all’.
Learning to open your heart in the midst of ALL of life’s experiences.
We imagine that it takes just the right situations, circumstances and conditions to experience an open heart. We believe that life has good moments that open our heart, and bad moments that close our heart. This is only as it seems.
Sure, exquisite moments such as childbirth, lovemaking, caring for loved ones and other acts of intimacy can seem to open the heart. Rejection, fear and loss can seem to close the heart, but you see, here’s the thing:
The heart can be opened in any and all moments, independent of situation, circumstance and condition, it just takes practice.
A good place to start is right here and now.
Notice that you are present and aware of your body and your surroundings.
Gently and slowly direct your attention into your heart space, in the center of your chest.
Fill that heart space with attention, and notice it gently expand and open.
Stay with your open heart for a moment and relish its delicious fullness and subtle joy.
Now, see if you can magnify that openness, enveloping your surroundings as you look around, and continue to give your open heart some attention while you bathe in its radiance. Live your life from that place and touch the world while living from your open heart, for the rest of your life. Seriously. Why would you want to live any other way?
Of course it isn’t easy, and the world may not thank you for it.
If you are called to commit to this practice of opening your heart because you have matured to a place where lesser life paths seem anemic to you, then you will start to notice some very valuable things.
First, you will start to notice those moments and situations that, for whatever reason, you close down instead. There will be many situations where it will be easy to open your heart, and there will be many situations where it feels impossible.
Opening your heart while making love is relatively easy, but when you can open your heart in the midst of pain, anguish, fear and uncertainty, you know you are practicing well.
“There is just one method which is obligatory for all:
To stand with the attention in the heart.
All other things are beside the point and do not lead to the heart of the matter.”
-Theophan the Recluse, from the “Philokalia”
If you are practicing well, you will be using the stuff of your messy life to find out where you draw the line, saying in effect, “no, I refuse to open my heart in this situation.”
Those are the situations you are watching for, because those are your triggers that cause you to close down, react, regress and in a sense, refuse to give your open heart.
Like a child who says, “If it isn’t my way, I’m taking my ball and going home…”, you may find yourself saying “If it isn’t my way, I’m closing my heart and withholding my love and kindness.”
We learned this kind of reaction to pain when we were young and immature.
We realized that it was scary and painful to be so vulnerable, and that we
could protect our tender heart by closing down. We may have developed habits of closure, where we automatically shut down to protect our tender heart whenever we were uncertain and feeling vulnerable.
But if you have committed to this kind of life path, this is exactly what you are looking for.
You know you are no longer vulnerable. Maybe you even know that, to quote Oscar Wilde, “hearts are meant to be broken”. Maybe you have grown to the place where you know that any love that you leave ungiven, will die with you, like a flower that has never bloomed.
Those moments where your heart cringes and you curl in on yourself in a feeble attempt to guard your heart, try to remember to open just a little bit.
By doing so you will slowly undo the habits that you may have acquired and maintained since childhood.
That way, when you are on your death-bed asking yourself, “Did I love well?”, you will smile to yourself and once again, open your heart like a flower in bloom.
