Tag Archives: Open Heart

Three Truths and One Wish

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heart-shaped petal with a heart-shaped hole

1. Truth: the work of my heart is gentle, quiet and simple yet fierce. Spreading love and kindness, cultivating courage and joy, generating a sense of wonder and gratitude, allowing for play and rest, offering encouragement and inspiration, creating safe and open space where natural wakefulness can manifest, showing up with an open heart even when it’s hard and even when it hurts–easing suffering feels like my true calling.

2. Truth: the work of my heart may never be directly paid in dollars. I’m okay with that. It doesn’t need to pay my bills. I will get paid in understanding and awareness, connection and compassion, love and gratitude, joy and tender-hearted sadness. I will see and be seen. I will notice what longs to be noticed. I will be amazed and tell about it. I will be awake and alive, with my heart wide open. In this way, I will be wealthy, will have everything I need, more than enough.

3. Truth: the work of my heart softens me, scares me, makes me tender as it terrifies me. Sometimes it feels too big, too much, too hard, overwhelming, and I shut down, numb out or hide or run away, attempt to deny it, to escape. And yet, when I resist it, I suffer. I try to remember what Katherine Center said, that “you have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.” I try to remember that this is what life is, both beautiful and brutal, and that to open my heart and experience all of it, pleasure and pain, is why I am here.

One wish: There is an aspiration, a mantra, a chant that Susan Piver has shared that I’d like to offer here as my one wish today, that we all know this to be true, practice it, embody it:

I possess basic goodness.
All beings possess such goodness.
Knowing this, my heart opens.
When my heart is open, the whole world changes.

P.S. Basic goodness is our fundamental, inherent, natural condition–awake, wise, and compassionate. “Our most basic qualities (those we were born with) are openness, intelligence, and warmth,” (Susan Piver, from her post You are Good).

Three Truths and One Wish

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1. Truth: The secret to flight, to freedom is to open your heart. For the longest time I’ve been gluing found feathers to my sleeves and in my hair, drawing ink outlines of wings on the skin of my back, buying angel wings intended to be used for Halloween costumes, reading books on the mechanics of flight, imagining that in this way I would eventually learn to fly. Flight–the journey through space, movement through time, escape from fixed ideas and expectations, freedom doesn’t happen this way. Instead I have to relax, let go, leap or float away, open my heart and let it all in, soar in a way that is entirely different than birds do.

2. Truth: Unravelling, being broken can wake you up, give you back your life. When this started to happen to me–trauma, loss, grief, suffering–I imagined myself a perfectly constructed sweater being unravelling loop by loop, stitch by stitch, falling apart, but it turns out it was more like a tangled mess of Christmas lights, usable and workable only after they were unravelled–only then could they be lit up, only then could they color the darkness. I lost so much, only to discover what was true, what was real, what mattered in the ashes of my life after the burning. At times, it felt like dying, but it was only after, shaky and raw, that I felt fully alive, broken open.

3. Truth: Courage and vulnerability are essential, the only way to stay awake. Courage is the ability to do something that scares you, to have strength in the face of pain or grief. To be vulnerable is to be exposed potential harm, to possibly be hurt, wounded. To love what is mortal, to open my heart and be present with whatever arises, to be fully alive, awake and present, to accept impermanence is to be both vulnerable and courageous.

One wish: May we be brave even as we are broken. May we keep our hearts open knowing that we are vulnerable, that we’ll be hurt. May we have the courage to unravel, to fly, to love, to stay awake to life as it comes, whether terrible or tender, beautiful or brutal.