I was having a conversation with a colleague this past week about what it is to live from the Heart. And, by ‘conversation’, I kinda mean I may have been on a soapbox and they may have been just looking at me sideways. Well, kinda sideways.
What I learned from that soapbox is this; there’s no real way to explain how to live from your Heart.
It’s a practice that’s infinite. To contextualize living from the Heart would be like writing a manual for every single scenario you could ever encounter in life. Who could even write all of that? And, gosh, who would even read all of it?
Living from your Heart is all feeling. Example (we’ve all done this one); you need to address some open-ended matter in your life. You’ve played out the scenario a dozen times in your head before you’ve gone in and you figured you’ve got your side down pat. You’ve rehearsed it, you’ve written it down, maybe you even tried to Google it? You are “prepared”. But then, as soon as you’re actually in the situation, all goes to shit. Not ‘shit’ in necessarily a bad way, just in the way that nothing really went as you thought you’d planned out.
Why? Because nine times out of nine, when we try to plan things of the Heart, we do it with our head. And, when you don’t use the right tools for the right job, you’re probably not going to build what you’d intended. It’d be like training for a marathon by reading books about running. It just doesn’t work that way. You want to be a runner? Run! Feel the pavement under your feet, feel the strain in your muscles and feel the air in your chest.
Living from the Heart is no different; you have to feel it. And, in truth, it takes a lot of practice. Step one is to just introduce the thought of it into your Heart. From there on out, it’s school. Without doubt, you’re going to get it wrong along the way. How you’ll know? You’ll feel shitty about whatever it is; you’ll feel shitty about yourself – like, you’ll know you could have done better. Guilt can be a great barometer, but only if you promise yourself not to hang onto it. Screw up, acknowledge it, forgive yourself and move on to the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. “When you “lose”, don’t lose the lesson”, as the shampoo-less Dalai Lama would guide.
The other challenge is the fear. There’s a lot of fear that goes with this philosophy of life. You will be an odd duck doing this kind of thing. People won’t necessarily call you weird, but they may think it. Not that it mattered, but I learned that someone I knew called this website “stupid”. And hey, maybe it is? For that person, it was stupid and that’s ok. For a brief moment, I thought they were stupid. I think I’m decently past the fear; for the most part. There are, for shoer, times when I retreat into my shell because of it or times where I try to use my head for a task that clearly needs my Heart. But to say I’ve got this all figured out would be the biggest lie I could tell myself. I don’t have it figured out. But, I’m trying.
And, that’s really what you do; you try. I don’t think anyone can tell anyone else how to do this. You just have to give it a go. And then give it another go. And then another. Until it becomes second nature to keep doing it no matter how many times you stumble or feel scared or get made fun of or don’t fit in. When you start to get that feeling that you’re fitting in with yourself, that you’re fitting in with who you really are, you know you’re on the right path.
You’re a good person. No one was put here to not be a good person. So, quit being a big chicken and strut your stuff. J
Be Love.
