The Strength of Having an Open Heart



The Strength of Having an Open Heart

I love the Teachers who share their humanity, their flaws, who are transparent about their own Path. Pema Chodron is one of my favorites for this reason as well as her wonderful teachings. My own Teacher is another. I never expected to have “A Teacher,” ever, especially for over three decades. I love my Teacher because that Path is designed to address flaws as well as the divine, teaching us to love them all, not to worship the divine and hide the flaws, and not to try to “excel” in so-called spiritual “gifts” or so-called spiritual “talents” or to use them to escape one’s work on Earth as an incarnated human. Choosing to be transparent and authentic is a risk; you risk vulnerability, getting hurt,  and attacks by people who will use your transparency to step on you on their way up some ladder they imagine is the key to their freedom or “progress.”  Even when you carefully choose whom you will allow to see your transparency, boundaries and all, you will make mistakes. This is where personal strength, personal power, developed because of your Spiritual Practice and Discipline comes into play. You can shut down, hide, “present “ to the public as a way to hide and protect yourself, however you cannot just shut down a part of yourself. When you shut down, it affects your Chi, your Kundalini, your intuition, and your Connection to Higher Self as well as Source and Spirit.

If you have a strong core developed via your Spiritual Practice, you can risk transparency, open-ness, in fact you can risk truly loving someone. It means you have enough faith in yourself and Spirit to risk having a connection to others knowing you will survive and in fact grow and learn every time you get hurt. And you will get hurt because human love, love on Earth, is never perfect, and it is never unconditional (for more than a few minutes). Spiritual love is perfect, is unconditional. With a strong core, a deep relationship with your Self, Higher Self, and therefore with Spirit (they are all related and come as a package deal) you can weather other people’s emotional spin outs as well as your own. It is your Spiritual Practice that develops and stabilizes your ability feel the protection of Spirit and to feel your Connection to Spirit even under duress. When you feel your Connection your reactive need to lash out and punish someone because they hurt you is no longer a priority. Keeping your Connection is your priority. This does not mean you will give up boundaries, or protecting yourself from people whom your intuition tells you, or their actions towards you at the time present a risk to you.  It means that when you do feel safe or are intuitively guided to take the risk of letting someone in, that you take that risk know you will survive whatever happens and not beat yourself up for taking the risk.

Coming from a deep place of strength, the inner strength of a Spiritual Core,  you also have the room to allow people back into your life who have either mistakenly attacked or harmed you, or even those who have maliciously with purpose come after you. This again does not mean you let harmful people close to you or allow them to harm you again. You can let a rattlesnake stay on your property, but still respect the fact it is a rattlesnake and will always be a rattlesnake even if you make a pet of it. Respect reality while following Guidance. This means that you do not have to hate the rattlesnake or kill it; you can live with it and allow miracles to develop. It also means that when you have acted as a rattlesnake to someone because you were triggered or felt threatened, that with a strong Spiritual Core, you will be able to follow Guidance and move forward and allow a new heart opening to occur.

Ego, pride, lack of Spiritual Practice and Discipline means you have to defend yourself because you are not in a deep relationship with Higher Self or Spirit and cannot feel the protection of Spirit or “hear” the messages of Guidance. Coming from the lower self and lower body triggers you will have to make the other person bad and wrong rather than focusing on what you learned, and working to stay open rather than becoming and staying defensive.  None of this is easy, if it were, everyone would be doing it. Drinking, drugs, “being right,” making others wrong, assigning blame, walking away rather than engage and try to work through it (when appropriate), these are all easy choices. Focusing on your Path, having the courage to stay connected or to reconnect (when Guided), refusing to hide who you really are, allowing yourself to work through the mistakes you made rather than leave the situation (unless Guided to do so) are the options for those who choose to be a Spiritual Warrior. You cannot be a Spiritual Warrior without a Practice and the Discipline to keep your Practice current. It is your Practice that gives you the strength to remain open, risk transparency, being authentic, and to continue to take the risk of allowing people to love you, all of you, shortcomings and all. Wishing, affirmations, crystals, and pyramids (etc) are not substitute for a Practice. Dare to risk love, Earth plane style, to model authenticity, to muddle through relationships while staying energetically open, to solve conflicts and wounds with others you care about or believe in and to risk seeing what miracles may develop rather than just leave. However, without a Practice, you will never be clear if it is your ego, your wounded childhood, your pride “guiding” you or if your Guidance is coming from a Higher Place. You will not know if it is your wounded self telling you  to stay in a dangerous situation or if it is your wounded self telling you to leave  and shut down because you are not strong enough to stay open, feeling the Protection of Spirit. To live from a Higher Place is challenging enough even with a Practice. Without a Practice, impossible.

Journey On



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trauma Bonding in Friendships

Image
Trauma bonding in friendships Signs of Trauma Bonding When you continue to be fixated on people who hurt you and who are no longer in your life. When you crave contact with someone who has hurt you and who you know will cause you more pain. When you continue to revolve around people who you know are taking advantage of you or exploiting you. When you are committed to remaining loyal to someone who has betrayed you, even though their actions indicate few signs of change. When you are desperate to be understood, validated, or needed by those who have indicated they do not care about you. When you go to great lengths to continue to help, care-take, or consider people who have been destructive to you. There is a constant pattern of nonperformance. Your friend or partner continues to make promises only to break them consistently. There might be a boatload of apologies however there is no change in their act
Read more

Wong Loh (Huang-Lao): The Teacher

Image
Dr. Marie is an Initiated Student who has been with Wong Loh Sin See since 1986 . While she has studied many other modalities (shamanism, pagan, remote healing systems, nature spirits, crystals, life between lives regressions, animal communication, psychic talents, oracle cards and more) she considers Wong Loh her primary Teacher and with great respect and gratitude incorporates his philosophies and methods of meditation into all of her teachings and work with Students as well as Healings. You will see in these writings this "warning": No one else can claim to be assisting the Teacher as his representative. The Teacher himself is the only one who can make this acknowledgement. Both Wong Loh and Leong Tan have publicly acknowledged (in workshops and retreats) Dr. Marie's teachings and students in her area were instructed to continue their development by studying with her if they desired to eventually initiate with Wong Loh . The material presented here is the o
Read more

The Wounded Vulnerable Narcissist

Image
The Wounded Vulnerable Narcissist Many people are very self-critical and most, while acknowledging   they might indeed feel this way “sometimes”,   seem to be reluctant to do any work on these feelings or behaviors, other than “being positive” about themselves. And usually this means that “being positive” is the generic feel good kind of “thing” rather than being specific and realistic. Generic feel good statements (given either through self –talk or as complements from friends and new age teachers) are really not useful other than a quick hit of feel good emotions and perhaps as a distraction from some current uncomfortable emotions or challenges. For some reason, people seem to feel that if they actually go into their feelings, rather than continuing to bury them and attempting to live on top of what will become a self-perpetuating swamp land, that they are now being “negative” or perhaps will in fact “manifest” negativity (all the new age nonsense jargon).   People speaking in
Read more