STATES OF THE HEART

FULL HEART

A full heart is a beautiful thing. We all know a full heart, but our hearts have short memories. Passion is something we often remember, but a full heart is defined by love not passion. Love is a thing of presence. It brings into the moment in the most beautiful of ways. Passion is means to achieve, to find a vehicle for energy, hopefully, a wise expression of energy. When our hearts are truly full it seems to erase any notion of sadness or misery we may have felt in the past. Such feelings are million miles away. And so too, if we fall into some deep despair, the notion of a full heart can seem a million miles away, something that exists in another reality which is not ours. When our hearts our full we must remind our selves what our hearts already know. Life is a journey. Buckle up. Never give up on your heart, but how full our hearts are in a given moment is often a thing of timing and grace. Wisdom helps us to maintain full hearts longer. Humility and gratitude is what we must bring to a full heart. We ask life, show me how to use my heart wisely, and then we use this state to burn into our memory, there is such a thing as love and it is worth any price. Yet love changes and adapts to times and circumstances. If we fail to listen to our hearts telling us to adapt, even re invent how to care for and nourish our hearts, our fire, they will collapse in some way until we figure out the wisdom we need to reawaken our hearts.



COLLAPSED HEART

A collapsed heart is not a broken heart. It is more like an exhausted heart. A bit like a deflated tire. It is not as much in a state of pain or despair as it just seems out of energy. Maybe our hearts even feel like flipping the finger to life a bit. Really? This is exhausting! A collapsed heart can become a broken heart if we keep pushing. In terms of fire we could say a fire that is barely burning can certainly be snuffed out much easier. We do not have to re awaken our hearts into some impressive inferno here. We need to step back breathe and tend the little flames we have left. That is all we need. Little flames is still a fire. A tired fire is not yet a pile of embers nor reason to fall into suffering, unless we panic or associate this state with some misgivings of the past.



BROKEN HEART

This is the one we all know. It is etched into our memory. Some grow up with broken hearts, living in abusive seemingly loveless families. Their hearts do not know anything but brokenness. It is amazing what can break a heart. It is not always something we see coming, or something big and nasty. It can be something small seemingly harmless that finds its way into our heart. Broken hearts can bounce back quickly or they can stay stuck in loops of misery. Sometimes misery that is hard to quantify. The pain of a broken heart, as most of us know, can be overwhelming, bring us to our knees and wonder how is this even possible we can feel so hurt. There is even an image many of us have seen which I associate with Hispanic culture for some reason of barbed wire wrapped around a heart as if everything we breathe it just makes our heart eel pain. What can we say? Welcome to the physics of life. Our hearts are the home of our greatest potential hoy and reward in life, and so, as life would have, they must also house our greatest pain. Our relationship to suffering defines everything in life, in terms of our evolution. At some point in life we have to decide if we are willing to accept pain, or if we are tireless seekers of healing. What is broken must be healed. Healing has many states and life tells us which we get. All of these can affect and heal our hearts. Miraculous spontaneous healing (Yes, I wish this was all healing too), slow challenging healing, painful healing in which things must reach a crescendo of pain before they can heal, but that healing can come quickly. We know our path. A broken heart, as we age, does not want to heal until it is ready. It wants to needs to assimilate its lessons, find its courage and perhaps completely redefine love as a thing it can store and protect.

Brokenness is a prerequisite for becoming wise and strong. You have no idea what your heart can overcome in time, or the capacity for the soul to navigate its way out of hopelessness and despair. The whole point of these places in our heart is that we often have lost faith. It is not always about faith or even trust. Some times it is just a hidden will power we can’t even feel. In my darkest hour and most broken state I simply got up and carried on. For almost two years I was living in a sate of despair 7 days a week that I did not know existed. It was beyond a broken heart. A broken heart would have been a vacation. It was that bad. I carried for no other reason than to see if some thing, some day might heal me. And as strange as it sounds, I just got one morning and it was all gone. Nothing I did. Something in me was waiting and have nothing to say of how to achieve this because I literally did nothing and life just decided, enough is enough for this guy and put my heart back together.



CONFLICTED HEART

Who doesn’t know this one either? We talk about wisdom and the heart and earning our wisdom. Truthfully our heart always knows the way. This is more of battle between our heart and our mind, but it settles in our heart. Conflict comes as result of not knowing, not having a complete enough story to follow the wisdom of our heart. Our hearts are misled by our pasts, our cultures, our surroundings, not to mention our own blindness and ill fated desires or expectations. Where do we put our precious fire? We must walk through the conflict that enters our heart. The secret is to trust in the outcome. And it is to stop chasing things, even if we are just chasing them in our minds. If our goal is to gain wisdom out of anything and everything we experience, we will prevail. Joy or pain, wisdom or ignorance, we will get the memo we need to strengthen and nourish our heart, if we pay attention. Life must put our hearts through conflict. Show me a world without conflict and I will show you a fantasy world.

We need to remember, our hearts our wise, it is our minds that struggle. Who does not come out of making ill fated decision from a conflicted heart without saying, I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it. Again we have a choice. Wisdom can be the result of any conflict, but we need to calm our hearts and trust in the process. This is where excitement can nourish a love of conflict in our hearts. If we allow conflict to excite us and follow that energy of conflict, in my experience, that always leads to a destruction of love, a collapse of wisdom. If we fall in love with conflict, we risk underestimating the power of conflict to disrupt our hearts and even to harm others.

When we grow up in families that thrive on conflict we can have sort of seed of conflict planted in our hearts that we need to uproot. I gad such an upbringing. We feel compelled to solve the conflict we grew up in so we create that within our hearts as a sort of homage to our parents and our past. It is what it is. Where we come from has a shelf life. What life has given us to heal and overcome is what it is. If we can heal something that is all that matters. Yes, deep seated conflict in the heart is a real bugger. It is a cruel weed in the soul, but all weeds can be removed and replaced with flowers (don’t cry here), if we refuse to have it any other way.



CORRUPTED HEART

Hearts can be corrupted. What does that mean. It means we allow a reaction to the challenges of managing our hearts get the best of us, and so we do not cave into pain, we cave into selfishness, cruelty, perhaps deception or manipulation of others. We have all heard the term player in regards to dating. Someone that just gets off on playing with hearts regardless of honesty or true intentions. There are players at every level life. I wish it wasn’t true but there are those who forge themselves from corrupted hearts. Life is cruel unfair, destined to bring pain, so why bother do the work? Let’s light this mess on fire and who is left standing is left standing. Is this not a huge part of the world? Indeed it is the source of everything that sheds suffering through humanity and it is all fair game. Good luck telling a corrupted heart it is a corrupted heart. It does not care. If there is good news here, it is that many people come out of this state.

When we don’t know love, where else are we going to go if we want to engage our hearts in something? We are just joining all of the other players are we not? Some people can live with corrupted hearts and some cannot. It is that simple and we all know which one we are. A corrupted heart has nothing to do with an abusive childhood or any particular past. It may, but many fortunate people choose to allow their hearts to live in a corrupted state for no other reason than it just seems to suit them. We cannot fix what is corrupt in others. We can only come clean with our selves. And we must learn to recognize false fires, people throwing flames in our direction in hopes of luring us into their selfish infernos. How do we know? Nothing burns faster or brighter than something that doesn’t last and doesn’t have to. It should also be noted that regardless of who we are, there is something lurking within us that has the potential to be corrupted by the weight and challenge of life. Even with a good heart we can sometimes hear that voice tugging on us like a little demon checking our resilience. If we should ever cultivate wise and strong heart, we will hear that voice, sometimes more than we would like, checking on us, testing us. A heart that feels the gravity toward falling into a corrupt state is not a corrupt heart. That is a human heart. An honest heart that is s imply feeling the totality of life in its light and shadow. It is simply where we act from that defines us and our relationship to ur heart. When we know real love it is too precious to corrupt. We we understand how to nourish and protect that love, it is too rewarding.

We will never master life. Life is it's own master. We can only be good listeners.

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