Developing the Connection to Your Heart

The most important thing you can do to develop a connection with your Heart is to be true to it. The more you follow your Heart, the more you will catch its communications, and the stronger these communications will become. They can become so strong that you feel you can’t not follow them. They become what leads you and guides you through your day, one moment at a time. nnThoughts jump back and forth in time, but the Heart delivers its message in the now, in between the thoughts about the past, present, and future. The mind doesn’t experience the present—it thinks about it, evaluates it, and analyzes it, but it doesn’t experience it. Only the real you experiences the now, and to be in the now, you have to notice the now, not be thinking about it. nnNoticing is very different from thinking, analyzing, and evaluating. Noticing just accepts what is, without judging it or telling a story about it. Noticing is acceptance because inherent in noticing is just letting something be. If you do anything else, you will be back in your mind and out of the now. Noticing means that you don’t try to change what is and you don’t react to it; you just allow it. Noticing is what this Awareness that you are does: It notices, accepts, and allows. nnThis noticing is similar to what people call the Witness, but what is it that is noticing the Witness? Who you are is beyond the Witness and includes the Witness because who you are is all-inclusive. The idea of a Witness makes Awareness into a thing or a being, and Awareness isn’t separate from what it’s noticing. Cultivating the Witness is a step in the right direction, however, in learning to detach from the mind and align with your true self. But ultimately, you come to see that you are both the Witness and the witnessed.nnAs the Creator of it all, you created what you witness for your own pleasure and experience. The Creator that you are couldn’t experience what it created if it didn’t also create a means for experiencing itself. Humans and all other creations are a means by which the Creator experiences its creations and has experiences through them. You are both a sensory mechanism for the Creator and a vehicle for experience. And because all manifestation comes from one Source, you are also that. You are the Source and the expressions of the Source as it lives and breathes and moves in this physical world. nnThis world is by no means all there is—there are infinite worlds and possibilities for experience. This world is unique among all the worlds ever created. Just as you are unique and not duplicated anywhere in the universe, your world is unique and not duplicated. You, as consciousness, spend some time on this world, but you evolve on many, many other worlds. You don’t remember these experiences when you are enmeshed in a world, but between worlds you do. You are far vaster than you realize, but that is part of the game—you forget who you are. You forget you are Consciousness, Awareness, Peace, Love, and the creator of it all. You forget so that you can have experience. Someday you will remember.nnThe mind will never remember because it can never know or understand the vastness of who you are. The Heart remembers, though, and holds this remembrance until you are ready to realize this. The Heart drops hints here and there about who you are—brief moments of oneness, deep love, and pure acceptance of life as it is. The Heart is what makes this life bearable and in fact lovable, no matter what is showing up. The ego, on the other hand, is never happy with life as it is. When you feel this way, you know you have identified with it instead of the Heart’s deeper truth. nnThis truth is always available to you and can be felt anytime you choose to just accept life as it is, with all its unpredictability, imperfections, pain, horrors, and disappointments. The key to loving life is accepting it. Life will never be exactly this way again, and you love that—you love this moment as it is because that is all there is to love, because it can’t be different than the way it is, and because it will never be repeated. That’s why the Heart loves, not because it loves pain and suffering, but because it’s willing to allow pain and suffering to be there when that’s what is showing up. nnThe Heart also loves what comes out of the pain and suffering because these experiences soften and open your heart and turn you toward love, at least eventually. Your pain or someone else’s humbles the ego and brings you in touch with the Heart’s compassion and gentleness toward life. You see that you are not all-powerful, as the ego would have you believe. You see that something else is at work in life, mysteriously transforming you through your challenges and pain. This transformation is the gift of all your pain, and at some point, you will see that it was well worth it. You are all moving toward love and away from the ego, and pain and suffering motivate you to see the truth about life and who you are. They wake you up and bring you Home.nnSeeing this is critical in developing a connection with your Heart. As long as you are angry at life or hateful of others, you will stay stuck in ego-consciousness. Forgiveness of yourself and others is key in being able to open up to the grace that is present in every experience. No matter how difficult an experience is, it’s always possible to love. In fact, the only other choice is to be stuck in hatred, anger, and pain. Forgiveness is the bridge that allows you to move from one state of consciousness (ego-consciousness) to another, one that knows only love, compassion, and acceptance. It may seem impossible at times to find your way to love, but you do because you must. The other choice gets you nowhere and hurts too much. You choose love eventually because you would rather feel that than the pain, but you choose the pain for as long as you wish to experience that. nnCultivating any attribute of the Heart will help you develop a connection with it. The Heart loves, accepts, allows, forgives, gives, and understands. Every time you do any of these, you drop into the Heart. You choose to love, accept, forgive, give, and understand, and then you find the peace, love, and contentment of the Heart. Once you are resting in the Heart, it will guide you and inspire you. There is great happiness in resting in the Heart. The sense of having to strive and try to be someone special or to make your life turn out a certain way dissolves, and you are left with peace, contentment, and a love for life. The Heart is a place of rest and contentment and a great relief from the restlessness and unhappiness of the ego.nnSomething else you can do to develop a stronger connection with your Heart is to affirm your desire for this and ask for assistance from the nonphysical helpers guiding your evolution. There is great power in asking for such assistance because your helpers can only help you as much as you allow them to. Often, there are unconscious beliefs that prevent you from opening up fully to their help. By stating your desire for help with this, you strengthen your connection with them, and they will work to facilitate your connection with the Heart. They have ways of doing this that you are not aware of, which require your conscious agreement and cooperation. The more you show that you want to be aligned with the Heart, through intention, prayer, and actions, the more help you will receive with this.nnOne of the ways this intention is strengthened is by following it up with meditation or setting aside time daily to just listen to what is arising. If you really want to be more connected to the Heart, you have to take time to listen to what it might have to say to you. You never know when something might arise from the Heart, so making time each day ensures that you don’t miss something important to the unfolding of your life. Since the Heart doesn’t reveal its intentions and plan beforehand, you have to make yourself available at every step along the way to receive its inspiration and guidance. Taking this time affirms your desire to have the Heart guide you rather than the ego. Making this effort is a more powerful affirmation of your intent than just stating your intent, and it makes room for the guidance that you need to be happy and fulfilled to appear.nnSomething else that can be very helpful in developing this connection with the Heart is simply to see how false the egoic mind is. Not only observing your thoughts but questioning them is a powerful practice, which will help you detach from the mind and break the programming that causes you to believe your thoughts. Observation alone is not enough because you are programmed to believe your thoughts. If you just observe them while still believing them, you will gain some distance from them, but you won’t free yourself from them. If you still believe even some of your thoughts are worthwhile, you will still be looking to them for guidance. However, once you begin to see how untrue your thoughts are, they lose their interest and power to attract you. Once you see they aren’t useful in guiding your life, you are free to look for guidance elsewhere—from the Heart.nnIn many respects, this is the most necessary step before you can become established in living from the Heart. You have to break the tendency to look to the mind for answers to how to live your life before you notice that something else is available to guide your life. You are programmed to believe that the mind has the answers to life; meanwhile, the Heart has been inspiring and moving through you and unfolding your life as best it can within this setup. Once you see that the mind isn’t necessary—and in fact detrimental—to living your life, you can move your allegiance to the Heart. Until this happens, you won’t be allowing the Heart to guide you as fully as it can because you won’t trust it. You naturally trust the mind more than the Heart because that’s how you are programmed. To break this programming, you have to see that the mind isn’t trustworthy and that something else is.