Spiritual growth is about fixing the heart and returning it to a state of well being. It should be clear by now that the problem is not outside in the world; the problem is your inability to handle your heart's full expression of the world. Page 141
As if Michaels Singer didn't already do a great job explaining the need for heart healing in living untethered, he explain it even better in the podcast from, The Temple of the Universe, as linked below. In it he explains how the heart got broken in the first place. We broke our own hearts!!
Yes samskaras have certainly caused a lot of problems inside us but what really did a number on us is our unwholesome use of the mind. We tend to use the mind as a place to run to in order to escape the mess we left behind in our hearts. We ask the mind to look around at the world and to come back and tell us what we need to grab or fix, what we need to push away "out there," just so we don't have to deal with what is "in here".
There is definitely "pain" in our hearts...there is unpleasantness and many normal challenging emotions we have judged as "bad, wrong, shouldn't be!" We don't want to deal with that, do we? So we go to the mind and we ask it to distract us and numb us from the experience of heart; to dazzle us and divert our attention to its amazing analysing and conceptualizing ability; and to do the impossible duty of changing "what is" into something that works for us. The mind simply tries to do what we ask it to and does its best to create a comfortable and safe zone for us to hang out. Despite how busy and crazy it can get up there, the mind's creation is familiar and it keeps us from heart pain....well to a certain degree.
But the heart is still broken and hurting, neglected and abused, calling out for our attention whenever life circumstance triggers it or bumps into it. A broken heart cannot release what it is meant to release...love, joy, peace , inspiration etc. We don't get that stuff from outside...it is inside us, where it always was ...in the heart. It is blocked from flowing up and out because of the samskaras and all the brokenness that is in the way. It is the heart, not the world that needs to be healed. We can not even begin to heal the heart, however, if the mind is in the way and the mind is in the way for most of us.
Michael Singer explains that the way out of suffering is all about going to where that suffering is...the heart. You really don't have to jump to get there, you just have to stop going to the mind. We automatically go to the heart when we refuse to go to the mind any longer. When we refuse to look "out there" for both the cause and solution to all our problems, when we realize how responsible we, and we alone, are for the mess in our hearts and become willing to go to the roots, we will find ourselves sitting with the heart and all its pain. We have to be willing to face, not run, from that pain in order to get to the amazing stuff behind it. That willingness to go to the heart, to make it the object of consciousness, rather than the mind, is key.
Few of us, however, are willing to leave the mind and begin this painful journey into the heart. We have run from heart pain for so long, hiding out in all our thinking and doing, that the thought of simply being in with that pain is overwhelming for many of us. We would rather keep running in the hundreds of unwholesome ways that we do. We would rather keep depending on the mind to take us away like a box of Calgon. But the mind can't heal us...it is too broken. We are asking a broken, neurotic mind to tell us how not to be neurotic or broken. It doesn't work. It just causes more pain. And where does that new pain go? Back to the heart making it sicker than it already is.
The only way out of suffering is through the heart. In the same token, the only way to experience true love, peace, joy and bliss is through the heart, as well. It is not through the mind and not through the world out there, that we will be freed. It is only through the heart.
Turn round and face what is in your heart. If you are willing to do that, Michael Singer says, you are a rare flower on this planet. Instead of doing what all the other flowers are doing becasue it is "normal", you will be standing alone and doing the only thing that can truly bring you everlasting peace. You will be healing your heart.
My sankalpa, as I mentioned before, is always: "My heart is opening; my heart is releasing; my heart is healing and my heart is expanding."
As this becomes my priority in life, I may be an odd and weird looking flower amongst the many but I am determined to experience what is on the other side of this heart pain. I am going to stop resisting and just sit with my heart in the same way I sat with my children when they were sick, rocking them patiently and lovingly against my chest until they were well once again. I didn't heal them persay, I just was attentively present, as I allowed it all to pass, embracing all of it until it did. That, I believe, is how we heal the heart. We simply become willing and attentive to its needs.
All is well.
Every experience makes you a greater person if you don't resist it.Page 141
Michael A. Singer (2022) living untethered. New Harbinger/ Sounds True
Micahe A. Singer/ The Temple of the Universe. ( January 8, 2023) When May I Live In the Love of My Heart. https://tou.org/talk-archive/
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