Open Your Heart

Florida Scott-Maxwell:
"Life does not accomodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition."

How do you find a sense of comfort when the ground beneath you seems to be disappearing? Why do we attempt to find meaning and safety in life when things go terribly wrong (our perception)? To accept life as a swirling container of beauty within destruction while maintaining a sense of hope and happiness - that is a sobering reality.

I once read an article about pain and suffering and how we humans like to hide from it, run from it, and avoid it at all costs. I looked at my own life, and saw how I protected myself and refused vulnerability. The article laid it out in no uncertain terms: You will be hurt, you will be disappointed, people will let you down, things won't work out, bad things will happen for no reason. Wow. It was too much, yet something within knew it was true. I began to live my life with this understanding and more importantly, from a place of acceptance. I would attempt to be a willing participant with an open heart the best I could, while knowing pain could be just around the corner.

In our society, closed hearts are abundant. You may even recognize the pattern physically in yourself. Shoulders rounded forward, pain in -between the shoulder blades, tight chest muscles and shallow breaths that don't really ever move past the diaphragm. Emotionally, there may be lack of self love or inability to receive/give love, anxiety, grief, panic and an all over absence of coherence.

Yogi Julian Walker states, " Difficult things happen in life, and sometimes it has no meaning, sometimes it is nobody's fault.  This is terrifying and humbling...my suggestion is to sit with it as part of your practice. Be moved by it. Feel what it brings up for you. Love the people around you more deeply in the knowledge that none of us are immune to the power of nature. Find meaning in your life on a daily basis in the knowledge that this is all we have."

We have been through very difficult and confusing times recently. It is not easy to accept these realities and deal with them 'real'istically. However, when you choose to welcome life as an uncertain existence - a crazy, heartbreaking, heart opening, joyful, terrifying, sad, beautiful blip in time; your heart might open just a bit. You may find yourself an anchor in the choppy seas of daily life. And you may be able to just BE with it and actually find comfort in the chaos.