Your Biggest Life
“You want to live your biggest life? You are living your biggest life by listening deep and sourcing everything from the ocean of love. Nothing is worth the cost of beginning to feel yourself divorced from this ocean and her qualities.”
This is what my heart told me the other day. I have begun a morning practice of making tea and sitting on my meditation pillow immediately upon arising, and then engaging in any one of a number of practices designed to bring me into my heart. Once I feel I have securely established a connection with my heart, sometimes I silently ask a question, as if dropping a single stone into a deep well. If I’m lucky, I listen deep, and I’m truly “underneath” my ego, I’ll hear a clear answer. This practice has replaced (at least for now) the daily oracle card practice I once treasured so much. It became clear to me after a profoundly lost year (a “wilderness year,” one might say) that I needed to practice letting go of the habit of looking to anything external for my “answers.”
The idea that “all the answers you need are within you,” has basically become a spiritual cliche, and is considered by scholars of mysticism to be a major tenet of most esoteric and mystical systems (the good, the bad and the ugly). But there is a reason why cliches become cliches. There is a reason why classics become classics. “All that bullshit is true,” was the piercing enunciation of the dying old man in the . . . well, the classic film, Magnolia. There is nothing like death to bring us face to face with all that old bullshit that is actually true, which is why it is reiterated over and over again in different ways in different cultures and traditions across time and space, and even in popular culture and the media.
Let me explain more about this “ocean of love” so that you can understand the strange words of my heart a bit better. I have come to think of the heart as a garden with soil that is tilled by sorrow and warmed by the sunlight of life, love and joy. In the garden there are seeds of incredible tenderness, and they can be watered. We water them by engaging in any practice or activity that brings us thoroughly into our hearts, into our love, into the last time we were broken open with affection. Often I’ll know I’m touching the deepest seeds of tenderness when tears come. It’s almost unbearable, but in a beautiful way. When those seeds start to grow, I imagine them having deep, deep roots that stretch all the way down to where our hearts drop out into infinity, God, the glittering darkness, the Great Mystery, whatever you want to call it. I think of it as a sea of Great Love. When our projects, words and actions have these deep roots in the heart, we are allowing that Great Love to use us as its instrument in the world. Then our projects, words and actions become the flowers of heaven.
There are perils on this journey of centering deeply into the heart, however. Often, once we make a commitment to do it, an equally compelling force attempts to pull us back into our strongest not-heart-rooted ways. That’s why we need accountability, mentors and ongoing practices to bring us back. To remind us over and over again of our true nature, of who we really are and what truly brings us aliveness, joy and original expression. All of that comes from trust in our clear, unfettered center and allowing life force to flow through our central channel like pure river water.
If you’re interested in the various forms of mentorship, accountability and practice you might enlist to help you stay true to the unbearably beautiful treasure of your heart and true essence, hop over to my Contact page to schedule a free 60-minute consultation ❤️