Entering the Fire with Heart
A nondual embodiment wisdom teacher, I share these heartfelt thoughts in response to societal and global challenges, including systemic racial injustice, economic inequities, climate change, threats of nuclear war, and current wars and threats of terrorism and autocracy in the US and around the globe:
- We who grieve the great injustices on Earth are called not to just to change our views – but to transform at the deepest levels of our being.
- We are challenged to awake to the plurality of reality.
- Only a metanoia – a radical change of heart, mind, and spirit – will enable us to live in right relationship with ourselves, others, and this Earth.
Outlined below are five spiraling stages of radical self-transformation and key practices to support cognitive, perceptual, and somatic healing. Highlighted are insights.
Stage One: Preparing your heart, body, and mind for radical self-transformation
- Find allies and wise, compassionate guides to support you in cultivating the capacity to be personally “touched” by the impact of our current societal and global challenges on others and on this Earth – e.g., systemic racial injustice, economic inequities, climate change, and our global pandemic.
- Cultivate “sacred heart space” – an internal attitude of spacious tenderness – so that you can actually experience whatever you’re experiencing – including challenging sensations, difficult emotions, forbidden thoughts..
- Practice effective breathing and skillful self-soothing strategies to relax your belly, reassure your heart, quiet your nervous system, and calm your mind.
- Learn subtle, nondual body-centered meditations to support your heart, body, and mind in growing toward wholeness – and in “seeing through” distorted perceptions and unconscious beliefs, disentangling from habituated thoughts, emotional reactivity, and painful sensations, and releasing limiting somatic, mental, emotional, perceptual, and energetic patterns..
- Recognize that what’s going on is larger than you. It’s as if the schisms in our psyches that separate us from ourselves reflect schisms that divide us from others and from this Earth..
Stage Two: Entering into the fires of sacred heart transformation
- Recognize that you can actually shift your perceptions and “see” your own distorted and limited perspectives. One thought experiment is to allow your experiences of everyone you perceive as “other” visibilize the frames through which you’re perceiving. Pay attention to your reactions. Recognize that your reactions can actually help you see distorted and limited views of yourself, others, and reality.
- Recognize that as you glimpse a multiplicity of perspectives, you may get caught in colliding or collapsing worldviews.
- Learn to take the subjective experience of the other as seriously as your own. Discover the myths and underlying assumptions of your own understandings so that distorted perceptions and limited views may be transformed.
- “Don’t think” – because “thinking” freezes Being. You can’t “think” your way out of this process. Nor can you “see” your way out of this process. That’s why we need “sacred heart space” – for deep healing.
- Become aware of the tension and discomfort in your body – clearly sensing your body’s sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
- Intentionally shift from “being aware of” to “inhabiting your body” so that you directly sense your own existence and the other’s existence. Recognize the felt-sense of your existence, your Self, your Being, your Beingness. You know. And you know that you know. You have value. You have self-worth. You belong. You are loved. Your Presence matters! Recognize the felt-sense of the “other’s” existence, Self, Being, Beingness. The “other” has value. The “other” has self-worth. The “other” belongs. The “other” is loved. Presence matters.
- Sense into the tension and discomfort in your heart, body, and mind – rather than prematurely seeking relief through an incomplete transcendence or collapsing into a resolution that precludes the deepest p