Opening your heart?
What is the purpose of opening our hearts? There is nothing that feels so good and yet is so difficult as to keep yourself in a state of open heartedness, being completely aware to what is happening without letting the heart close to protect yourself from the pain and discomfort that life brings us. It requires deliberate practice but what sustains our effort is faith in the promise that it will lead us to a more tranquillity state. First we have to overcome our deep reflective reaction to discomfort which causes the heart to slams down it's defences and calls for the Calvary of thinking and the mind to charge down the threat that the heart has perceived but our heart are stronger than we can imagine, and if we choose we never to close it again.
Our heart feels vulnerable and delicate, though really it just sensitive in the best possible way, it sees the world with absolute clarity and responses to the world with elegance, compassion and skilfulness, it is our gateway to love and responsibility, it makes us care and in a cruel reality that can be dangerous for the innocent. The heart will only tolerate right action and we can feel judged by it when we are less than we could be and we lack a way to have direct communication with it. It is only by opening our hearts that we can listen to it so that we can be at peace and fully integrated with who we really are, that we can own our judgement and understand how to be in alignment with it, it allows us to feel kindness and love towards ourselves as growing being of consciousness which is the necessary condition to allow us to truly share that love with others.
If you are unsure as to whether your heart is open, take a moment to notice it, there will be a tightness or lightness, the heart is purely binary, it only has two states open or closed, just as a clam has a hard shell and is soft inside, a heart has it's own protective covering that reacts instinctively. The mind and body protects the heart by tensing and hardening, and they will do so until the heart opens again, we can feel it in our muscles, but it also manifests in our feelings of defensiveness, anger, worry, and the matching thoughts in our minds, our angry thoughts are also tension, tightly held energy that can produce action, the mind is just another muscle in that regard. To loosen our grip we have to relax all the muscles especially the mind which is the conductor for the rest of the orchestra of the body with it's muscles and feelings, as an exercise it is worth deliberately tensing and relaxing, our whole body and mind, so that we can get use to recognising the sensations and taking the action that we need to take to relax again when it acts out of protective instinct.
As we all have a powerful instinct to tense when something unexpected happens or we are experiencing discomfort, we have to learn to relax the heart in it presence as it is not instinctive behaviour. There is no survival advantage in relaxing, it might make us happy but nature does not value that, it is not important to our survival therefore nature is indifferent on the subject, we have to choose it, both opening our heart and happiness. We can in fact hold that tension for years, so much so that it becomes habitual, we become use to just carrying this tension all the time, we are always in the freeze, fight or flight mode that we start to think that the world only contains threats and dangers, we see them everywhere as we always have the feeling that a threat is present, this loop can never end until we relax again and that requires us to be aware that the choice is in our hands.
There are many indirect ways to open your heart and we are draw to them, flow activities such as painting or knitting distract us from ourselves for our default state to re-emerge until our defensives close again, as do life threatening hobbies like rock climbing which initial make us tenser followed by opening up from relief and gratitude for being alive. Drink and drugs can allow us a temporary respite from tension, but that path holds it's own dangers which leads to a harmful loop where we can only relax by using them, it becomes a conditioned response and it is incredibly hard to break once you learn it which is the root of addiction. However it shows how important it is to relax that we are prepare to do such harm to ourselves in order to feel our heart open even on a temporary basis. To break any cycle it is necessary to give ourselves an alternative and deliberate route to open heartedness, and it is by bringing our attention and awareness to our heart that we are able to open it at will.
Which sounds easy, as long as you remember to and that is of course the hard part, like any habit it needs a trigger and sadly being tense in not enough of a trigger, especially as becoming tense is itself the habitual action of being triggered by danger, it just too ingrained to be changed. That is where being open hearted actually is most powerful it can stop you being triggered into tensing up in the first place, just as being tense all the time is a habit, you can build a new habit of being permanently open hearted, you just have to keep choosing it before you are tense, and this requires a commitment to this path and the daily (or minute by minute) setting of the intention to be open hearted.
By all means get a taste for it first, have relaxing rituals that you can return to whenever you realise that you are tense, a hot bath, lighting a candle and being grateful for your blessing, these are good activities to include in your life, they are set pieces to deliberately touch base with open heartedness. Gratitude in all it's forms is good for an open heart, as it is felt in the heart, we think about what we are grateful for but it is in the heart that we feel it, and doing hard things is a wonderful access point for gratitude, after a long walk you really feel grateful for a good seat down and making that connection is really good for you.
However these are all ways to relax after you are tense rather than dealing with the problem before it manifests, that requires the definite intention not to tense in the first place before life triggers your reaction of tensing up. You might be thinking do I not want to tense up if I am in danger, but that would be to confuse our natural reaction with the best action, ask any sportsperson about peak performance and you will find out that to get into the flow or the “zone” you need to get out of your head and have presence with the moment, tension is a performance killer. When we open our heart, we are connected to the present, there is no room for past regret or future worries, we are simply doing what we are doing, that is the simplicity of performance that elite athletic chase and is not life just a performance on the greatest stage there is.
You might say I just want to be happy and live a simple life, nothing more, but do not be deceived into thinking that this is easy or even should be easy, it has been the ambition of humankind for hundreds of millions of years, life is hard always has been. There are still a billion people living on a dollar a day, there is war, famine, disease, unfairness of every kind, your simple ambition is beyond the reach of so many people, and just because you have the material advantage that other do not, that only gets you to the starting line, be grateful for that but do not give yourself a hard time for failing to get what you want. Everything takes work, there is no natural talent there is only discipline and practise, happiness is possible on your own terms, you just have to give up on things being easy, there is a ladder of growth that we all have to climb, past your own current limitations, discomfort, you do not get to be stress free just comfortable with stress and problems.
That is the arc of the story we are living, we get to be competent problem solvers, we do not get to solve all the problems in our lives let alone the world, there is always another one that pops up in place of the last one you had. That is the power of being open hearted, you do not fail when do not solve a problem or have to face a new one, you success when you stay in a state of open heartedness, you win before you even start to solve it, warriors are not brave because they win but because they are willing to stand up and fight for what is right. Our fight for happiness never ends either, and we all lose in the end, that is the nature of reality, we only get to fight by the numbers and fall back until we are backed onto the final cliff edge, and being happy and joyful in that moment is only possible with a lifetime of practise which had been filled with happiness and joy in the face of overwhelming odds, so having the ambition to be happy is the greatest one that you can have, and when you look around your friends and family so few actually make it.
It is a simple action to open your heart and the rewards are immediate, you feel joy in it's opening and it gives you a presence that has a more depth through greater awareness, as within that opening is vastly more information which gives us more options than when our heart are closed and we are just interest in our own reaction and protection. This is why the good times are more vivid and time itself stretches out into a feeling that is joyful presence, it is as close to tranquillity as we can get without the aid of meditation and the skill of stable attention that induces as a side effect a state of peace from which to witness the world. Opening your heart is a glimpse of this greater state but no less special for it brevity, with every opening it gives us another breadcrumb to follow towards the state of paradise that a permanent opening of the heart would give us, but every breadcrumb is worth eating when you are starving, we all feel that hunger for something better, and with every opening of our heart we get to taste that joy, every single one is a victory and promise of that good place we all wish to reach, so open your heart and listen to what was always there, and please return as often as you like as the heart is always ready to open for you.
