The Mentorship Program
Background Reading
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Embracing the Heart Connection:
Experiencing Intuitive Unity*
Henry
Reed
“That which cometh from the heart will go to the heart.” Jeremiah Burroughs, In Hosea
Mary decided to apply the Intuitive Heart Discovery Process to the
situation. She followed the ritual, and when it came time to take the step
of making the heart connection with the focus of her exploration, she
followed her heart right into Celeste’s
heart. She began to experience Celeste’s
fear of her new job. She could see how Celeste brought good intentions
with her, but felt overwhelmed by the her responsibilities. Mary realized
how Celeste was trying to cope by assuming a take-charge attitude.
As Mary withdrew from the experience, she noticed that her anger
toward her boss was gone. In its place was compassion for Celeste and even
a sense of kinship. She smiled to herself and thought, in surprise, “I
know how she feels!”
The next time Mary was called into Celeste’s
office, Mary astonished herself when she blurted out, “Celeste,
I was just remembering when I first became a Den Mother for my son’s
Cub Scout program, and I always felt this pressure to make a bunch of
cookies that they would really like. Do you know what it feels like to
have to bake really good cookies?”
Celeste, too, was surprised by the question. Then she sighed in
apparent relief and replied, “Yes,
I do. I feel tremendous pressure right now to get cooking. Can you help
me?”
From then on, Mary and Celeste worked as colleagues.
Heart Awareness is a
Mood Enhancer
“A
merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
Proverbs 17:22
I’m
sure you’ve
had the experience of days when nothing seemed to go right, when
everything seemed to be wrong or jinxed. I certainly have. Everything
feels out of kilter, and then I may get a piece of bad news or something
isn’t
working the way it’s
supposed to, or I can’t
get my writing to go, or there’s
something I need and I can’t
find it. When I find myself in one of those days, I feel really low and
depressed.
Then there are those other days, when things just seem to move
along and everything works out. I meet with just the right people. I get
good news. I seem to lead a charmed life. I’m
sure you’ve
had these experiences yourself. Such days of flow and harmony when you can’t
seem to take a wrong step are really special.
What I have discovered over the course of my life is that I can
break the negative mindset, the feeling of being out of step, and move it
towards one of being more in harmony. All I have to do is focus on the
here and now. Usually, just by looking around my environment, and by
taking notice of what’s
happening in that moment, I can change my outlook. If I can take the here
and now into my heart, and find a reason to feel gratitude for what I’m
experiencing at that moment, my mood gets even better. The way things go
improves as well.
Sometimes I do it by finding something around me that’s
pleasing to look at. Sometimes I do it by coming upon some small
realization, like finding something I can be grateful about. Sometimes the
change comes simply from my noticing how I am free to be aware of whatever
I choose at that moment, which I find entertaining and amusing. However I
come by this reorientation into the pleasure of the moment, I begin to
feel better, and things start to go better. I’ve
found a way to enter the harmony of the moment, and I’m
in the flow again.
Given this discovery, I find that it’s
hard to stay in the dark mindset for too long. I know I can change if I’m
willing. It has become one of my personal challenges to learn how to stay
more in the moment over longer periods of time. I’m
learning to shift gears and break the spell of discord.
This ability to be in the moment, in the now, is an important
factor in the experience of flow. We know that being in flow is a
rewarding experience. As we used to say, being in flow is being “where
it’s
at!”
Earlier, you learned that by consciously experiencing the flow of your
breath, you could change your frame of mind. You could gain a sense of
wonder at the mystery of where the breath comes from, of the life force,
of the inner and the outer, and start to feel connected with a larger
picture. Perhaps you also discovered that those feelings have a domino
effect, building and growing. The positive benefits of those feelings
expand. The sense of being part of a larger whole, of being in harmony
with that whole opens up onto the source of our intuition, our unity with
all life. When we are identified with the whole, we can know about the
world around us without knowing how or why we know. Everything we need to
know can be found within us.
One of my own earliest experiences with this wonderful mystery came
while singing the “Hallelujah
Chorus”
in church. In the midst of that singing, chills ran up and down my spine,
tears came to my eyes, and I felt a profound sense of release. I felt the
release of my concerns and a positive energy in my soul, as if the Heavens
had opened to me and everything was as it should be. I felt that I was a
valuable person with something to do in life. I felt reborn and
regenerated, as if I was getting a fresh start in life. It was like a gift
coming to me, and I felt some wonderful light coming down out of the sky.
In singing that lovely music, I was able to move into harmony, into flow
with the music and with the other singers. I released and opened up to
something bigger than myself.
Something very similar takes place as people learn about and
explore the Intuitive Heart Discovery Process. First, the focus on the
breath, especially on accepting the flow of that breath, accepting it as a
gift, naturally brings a feeling of peace, and then of gratitude. People
often find themselves getting images or sensations of being rocked by the
breath, as if somehow life is taking care of them, and their mood begins
to shift, from tension to relaxation and trust. Becoming attuned to the
flow of the breath places them in harmony with the movement of their chest
and their breathing. With the coming of feelings of gratitude the sense of
harmony expands beyond the body. Feelings of appreciation extend to all
that is here and now, for the experience of life itself. It is this
encounter with unconditional love that creates such a profound shift in
how we experience ourselves. We become more “heart-centered.”
This popular metaphor means that we experience the world from a feeling
place of love and acceptance. It also means a shift in the center of
gravity, in terms of consciousness, from the head, where we experience our
thoughts, down into the chest, where the heart is and where we experience
love.
People notice the difference and enjoy this shift of attention into
the heart area. What they tell me is that they notice a warmth, a glow, a
softening of emotions, a love feeling. I have heard it described as being
like the sun shining, radiating warmth, or like a rose opening, expanding
and giving of itself. Others have imagined a window or door opening to the
outside. What all the images have in common is warmth, radiating and
expanding, and peaceful happiness.
If a person stays with this experience, to see how it may grow or
develop, they tell me that the shift expands throughout their bodies and
awareness. They feel like channels for the life force, feel it flowing
through them, and somehow, through the intensifying of the feeling of
love, the force gets brighter and brighter.
William Blake, the mystic poet, once said that gratitude is Heaven
itself. This secret is a very simple way to feel good, even if just for a
few moments. You might enjoy testing this idea to see if Blake was
correct. If he was right, you can follow your Intuitive Heart into a very
special place.
Heart Awareness
Raises Consciousness
“He
who harbors in his heart love of truth will live and not die.”
Buddha: His Life and Teachings
Are
we talking about anything more than an improvement in mood? Well, for one
thing, there is a definite physical effect to this shift. At the Institute
of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, a non-profit organization
devoted to exploring the ramifications of heart awareness, researchers
have conducted studies on the heart’s
electrophysiology as it is affected by attitudes and emotions.
Their studies show that when a person focuses on the heart while
experiencing appreciation and gratitude, the heart responds in kind. Its
rhythm becomes more regular. An EKG taken during this time shows less
noise and more regularity in the heart’s
electrical patterns. What’s
more, the brain follows along. The test subject’s
brain waves become more in synch and show evidence of being tuned to the
heart.
The institute’s
discovery also is significant for our understanding of intuition
experiences and of how to have a more intentional relationship with our
intuition
When we want to use our intuition, we need to quiet the mind. It’s
hard enough to quiet the mind under ordinary circumstances. Trying to
force the mind to be quiet when we are upset is impossible. But, while the
brain can’t
quiet itself, the heart can do the job.
The Institute of HeartMath’s
discovery also helps us to appreciate the effects of feeling connected and
in harmony with the whole. Our awareness of the breath and feelings of
being in harmony with its flow helps us to experience the breath as a
gift, which in turn helps us to experience gratitude for the breath, which
in turn helps us to experience love in our hearts, which in turn shifts us
into a higher level of order, of harmony.
Love is an experience of harmony, in which we accept things as they
are, appreciate them as they are, and feel our connections with the people
and world around us. Certainly, it’s
just common sense that if all people were more loving in this way, we
would live in a more harmonious world.
The institute’s
research is an external, mechanical verification of something that we can
experience within ourselves. It is something from which we can profit by
understanding it intuitively. When we say that love is a higher state of
consciousness, most of us recognize the truth of that. But what do we
actually mean by it? Let’s
allow our intuition to teach us.
Love is a Higher
State of Consciousness
“Create
in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
Psalms 51:10
I’ve
enjoyed asking people I meet in my work to explain what is meant by “higher
consciousness.”
It’s
fun to watch them grapple with something they take for granted. Often,
they describe it as a wiser state of consciousness. Why then, I ask, don’t
we just call it wiser? What’s
the wisdom in calling it higher? The response I often get is that it’s
centered not in the lower emotions but in the higher emotions, that love
is a higher emotion than, for example, greed. That’s
certainly true. One of our difficulties in learning to trust intuition is
getting past our concern that we are hearing our own hopes and fears and
not a larger truth. It is the lower emotions that often lead us into those
hopes and fears, while the higher emotion of love is identified with a
broader, more noble truth. And that’s
very important. But, I ask again, why do we call it higher?
The answer is that, once again, we are speaking in metaphor, the
language of the heart. We say “higher”
because that word draws on our memories and experiences of the effect that
height has on our perception. When we go to the top of a tall building or
mountain, when we fly in an airplane, or any time that we physically are
at a higher elevation, we can look down and see things from a new
perspective. We see better how things fit together. When we are down on
the ground in our little house, our awareness is of our yard and where it
touches the yard of our next-door neighbor; ours is a very personal and
narrow point of view. But at an elevation, we see how our house and our
neighbors’
houses and our whole street fit into a larger neighborhood, into a city,
into an even larger geography. We get a more holistic point of view. So
higher actually is a very good word-picture to describe the more
encompassing consciousness that takes in more information, that has
greater intelligence and a more integrated awareness of how things fit
together.
Reaching Out With
Our Hearts To Understand This
Metaphor of Intuitive Intimacy
“My
favored temple is an humble heart.”
P. J. Bailey, Festus: Colonnade and Lawn
Now
what does love have to do with intuition? To show you how much of a
relationship there is between the heart and the kind of thinking that
deserves a label such as “higher”
to describe a quality of consciousness, let’s
look again at what we mean when we talk about reaching out with the heart.
When Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug competed through the pain of an
injured ankle to help her team win a gold medal in 1996, people agreed
that their hearts “went
out to her.”
What does that mean? I’ve
asked many people to explain that expression to me. The most common answer
I get is that the cared about her. Then why not simple say you
cared? What’s
the wisdom in saying your heart went out to her? In response to my
probing, people talk about feeling that they understood and identified
with Strug’s
experience. They say they had empathy for her, could feel the way she must
have felt. They were involved in and connected with what she was
experiencing. It was a riveting experience, and their feelings and Kerry’s
were united.
A similar phrase that we often hear, particularly when people are
married, is of two hearts being joined. People don’t
actually cut open their chests and stick their hearts together, of course,
so what are we talking about? What we mean is that the two people have a
feeling, through love, of being connected emotionally. They have a special
bond (Here we have another metaphor, a word-picture expressing a
special connection), which is to say they share a special understanding
with each other. They are in sympathy, in harmony (Still another
word-picture. Are they really singing?). In other words, they feel close.
That word “close”
is one more word-picture. It’s
hard to get away from these metaphors to describe the experience of two
people sharing one act of feeling.
What we are doing with each of these common phrases about the
heart, once again, is using metaphor. We talk about something that is hard
to verbalize by describing it in more familiar terms and images that help
us see it more clearly and vividly. A metaphor envisions the unfamiliar in
more familiar terms. When we talk about the heart going out to someone, or
when we talk about two people feeling close, we are using a metaphor of
movement across space, or an experience of three-dimensional space, to
describe in more familiar terms the process of our feelings becoming
unified with someone else’s
feelings. The metaphor visualizes our experience of how our awareness
shifts in space from where we are to where that other person is. We do
move across that space in terms of consciousness to identify with another
person.
It’s
important that you appreciate metaphors, because you use them naturally,
and they represent your intuitive understanding of things. These
particular metaphors also say something about our growing understanding of
intuition. When we say our heart goes out to another person, we are saying
that we know how they must feel because we have placed ourselves within
them. We have become intuitive about them and their feelings. We have
become intuitive about them because we have identified ourselves with
them. We intuitively understand that intuition is created by the joining
of hearts, by empathy.
When people say their hearts are joined, they mean that they have a
connection that enables them to understand each other more
intuitively, more intimately. The metaphor visualizes the experience of
one person’s
feelings becoming what the other person feels. They become close.
And what do we mean when we say two people are close? This metaphor
visualizes the two people as if they are standing on the same spot, which
describes what it’s
like when two people are participating in a shared experience. They can
look at each other and say, “Yes,
we are together in this experience. We’re
sharing it. We can feel each other’s
presence as being a part of this experience. We feel close.”
Two people who experience closeness with each other have intuitive feeling
for each other’s
experience.
The metaphors that we use to describe intimacy reveal that we have
an intuitive understanding that empathy, emotional unity, identification,
and closeness enhance the flow of intuition between people.
It’s
understandable, then, that philosophers and people who are highly
intuitive talk about intuition as coming from this type of intimacy with
what is to be known. To be intuitive about something, we make ourselves
one with it, become close to it and connected to it.
Imagined Unity
Creates Intuitive Empathy
“Ye
whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have
faith in God and nature.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiawatha
Albert
Einstein used his imagination to help his understanding. He talked about
developing his theory of relativity by imagining that he was riding on a
beam of light. He used his imagination to become one with this lightbeam
in order to understand what its experience must be. His imagined empathy
brought him profound intuition about light and space. It proved to be more
than “just”
imagination.
Actors, too, speak of becoming one with their characters, enabling
them to bring forth great expression about those characters. They bring
expression from within themselves even when their own lives are very
different from those of the characters whom they portray. When actress
Barbara Hershey was interviewed about her work in “Portrait
of a Lady,”
in which she played a character very unlike her previous roles (and very
unlike her own personality), she said, “I
really think everyone is inside us. If we’re
willing to look deep enough, hard enough, we can find anybody in there.
That’s
how you learn about yourself, about humanity. That’s
the thrill of acting.”
It’s
also a great description of how to become intuitive about other people.
Another area in life where you can find plenty of examples of the
intuitive connection of empathy that imagination brings is in sports. Take
a close look at bowlers, for example. Watch as they roll the bowling balls
down the lanes. It’s
as if they don’t
let go of the balls even when the balls leaves their hands. Watch how they
follow the balls progress with their whole bodies, shifting their bodies
as if they can shift the balls, trying to steer the balls all the way down
to the pins. You can see that they are not thinking about what they are
doing but that, in their imagination, they have become one with the balls.
They not only are experiencing the balls moving down the lanes, but they
are using their imaginative connection with the balls to try to steer
them.
Spectators at sports events have this same identification with the
players. Watching an outfielder go back and reach up for a high-flying
ball, the fans crook their heads back and move their arms. Watching
gymnasts perform, or divers jump, the spectators move their bodies.
The word for empathy, comes from the Greek empatheia and the German
Einfuhlung, meaning feeling into. It originally was used to describe how
specatators form empathic bonds with what they contemplate, often
expressed by imitative movements.
In sports, people recreate within themselves what they experience
from an identification, or momentary unity, with the object of their
perception. It helps explain why spectator sports are so popular. People
derive a vicarious satisfaction from watching, as if they themselves were
on the playing field.
To take yet another example, watch people in a movie theater as
their identification with characters and a situation brings them to tears.
How many times have most of us experienced that kind of identification?
Watching movies or other dramatic presentations draws us in. Our
imagination allows us to enter into the story and participate in the
events. We greatly expand the range of our experience through seeing such
dramas.
This process of using the imagination to take the “other”
into ourselves, where we recreate an empathic identification with the “other”
and, thus, know it more intimately, is exactly the spirit of the Intuitive
Heart Discovery Process. As we come to appreciate why people place such
value on watching sport, we can appreciate more why the story-telling
aspect of the Intuitive Heart is so powerful. It is the same when people
watch movies or read novels. Their response to such stories, created
through their imaginative identification, becomes part of their own
experience, their own learning. When they listen to our intuitive stories,
made from our memories, they are affected in the same way. It is more
powerful than giving advice because they make the stories their own.
What stories do we wish to share? Let them be from the heart!
Making the Heart
Connection
“What
outward form and feature are He guesseth but
in part; But that within is good and fair
He seeth with the heart.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When
we can identify with another person through the higher consciousness of
love, we have a basis for the highest, best, most profound understanding
of that person. As you continue to explore the Intuitive Heart Discovery
Process, you will be able to see and experience this fact for yourself.
At this point in your Intuitive Heart training, you have learned to
follow your breath and to receive its gift, the gift of life. You have
moved from that step to focusing on your heart, experiencing gratitude for
this gift, letting that gratitude blossom into a feeling of love.
Feelings of love in the heart area have a natural tendency to expand,
which is a metaphor to picture the change in the experience of the body
image that shows an increase in sensitivity to one’s
surroundings.
Now, I think you will find that it’s
a very natural progression to let that feeling of love expand and to “reach
out”
with your heart, to explore, to greet and to welcome. Just as you can
imagine giving someone a handshake in greeting, so too can you easily make
a heart connection with whomever or about whatever you wish to be
intuitive. In terms of our training exercise, the Intuitive Heart
Discovery Process, you reach out with your heart to the person whose
question or concern you are going to address. You also will find that, in
reaching out with your heart, in making the heart connection, you have
established a foundation for understanding that person.
Let me tell you how people have described the experience of this
heart connection. In my teaching, for example, I ask people simply to
focus on their breathing, to move into a place of gratitude, aware of the
expanding feeling of love, and then to imagine that they can include in
that awareness the physical presence of the person with whom they will be
working. When I ask how that feels, some people say they can feel a line
going between their heart and that of their partner. Some feel as if the
partner’s
heart is beating in their own chest. Some talk about the sensation of one
of their bodies melding into the other and of being able to feel the
sensations of the partner’s
body.
In my own experience, I often have this sensation in the facial
area. Even though my eyes are closed, I feel as if I’m
having my partner’s
facial expressions. I think I know how it feels for my partner to hold the
jaw or lips in a particular way. Through the inner feeling of the facial
expression, I get an impression of my partner’s
mood. All these sensations and images show the connection, the
indentification, the union that takes place as we reach out with our heart
and connect with another.
Another example of the effect that such connection can have on us
is an experience I once had in art class. We were going to draw a rose.
First, however, our instructor told us to stand in front of the rose and
then to arrange our body to stand like the rose, to become like the rose,
to allow a part of us to open up the way the rose blossoms, to have our
arms connected to our body the way the leaves were connected to the
branches of the rose. Then, the instructor said, we would draw. As we
followed the directions, the people in the class were astonished at what
happened. Several talked about how they could almost smell the rose as
they drew it. Others felt a new understanding of the rose, even of its
thorns, which they no longer saw as an aggressive posture by the rose but
one of pride. The drawings that we did that day were much more expressive
than our previous drawings of flowers and much more roselike in ways that
were hard to put into words. But somehow, we knew, we had entered into the
essence of that rose.
Edgar Cayce was a very intuitive man. By going deeply into himself,
he was able to come up not only with facts, but also with ideas, medical
solutions, and advice that were so accurate and efficacious, many consider
him to have been the world’s
greatest psychic. He once said that our intuitive abilities have a special
link with nature, which can teach us a great deal. To activate this link,
he advised, a person should look at a rose, try to become like the rose,
and see if, during that experience, the person didn’t
receive some special instruction from the rose, as if the rose were
talking to them. It was the same prescription our intuitive art teacher
gave our class. You can have this kind of intuitive experience as well,
the experience of becoming one with another person or thing, through your
Intuitive Heart connection.
As I ask the people I am training to describe the feeling of this
heart connection in more detail, they speak of feeling as if they had
known their partner for a long time, not in any specific sense of knowing
facts about them, but a sense of closeness. “As
if,”
said one participant, “they
have their own music, and I was joined with that, and it was very
pleasant.”
Some talk about how, when they initially were given a partner, they
didn’t
feel particularly positive about that person.
“But
when I closed my eyes and made the heart connection,”
one woman said, “all
of a sudden, I was exposed to a whole new world, and I experienced this
person very differently. And they were beautiful.”
“It’s
not just a feeling of being close,”
a third person explained, “but
of being close to them in a way that has a certain quality, a certain
sound, or aroma, or atmosphere to it.”
You can see the difficulty we have, sometimes, in articulating
exactly what we experience when we make this heart connection, yet most of
the people in my classes always nod in agreement with such descriptions,
understanding exactly what each of the speakers means when trying to
describe the heart connection.
Which isn’t
to say that each person has exactly the same experience. In a group
setting, I instruct the participants to make heart connections with more
than one partner. What they notice is that each connection feels
different, that each is as unique as the person sitting across from them.
These connection experiences are not just some generalized experience of
halos or hearts and flowers or Christmasy kinds of sweet stuff. Yet, even
though each feels different, there is a common denominator in each
experience: you. You can feel yourself in each one, and you can see,
through the differences, the common essence that connects all these
experiences.
The heart connection is real, and it has real effects. When I ask
people whether they felt something real was happening as their heart
connected with the other person, almost everyone agrees it felt real. How
do they know it was real, I ask, since they were just sitting with their
eyes closed, not touching in any ordinary physical way. It would be easy
to say it was their imagination. Yet, almost to a person, they insist that
the connection was real, that they could feel it, and that they “just
know it.”
What is happening here, of course, is that this heart connection is
an intuitive experience, something that we know outside our usual ways of
knowing. It’s
worth practicing the heart connection just to experience this moment of
intuitive awareness, which you will find you trust and value. Too often,
we work at having intuitions while forgetting that it comes through a
particular mode of experience with which many of us have little practice.
In order to recognize and trust intuition, we need to spend time
experiencing and appreciating this mode. And I find that it’s
in the practice of making heart connections that most of the people with
whom I work can have that awareness, that experience of “Yes,
I can see how I’m
being intuitive and that the heart connection I feel with this person is
real.”
The sense of intuitive connection with another person is more than “just”
imagination. When I ask people to help me explain to others how real it
is, they often refer to the insights they’ve
experienced into the other person during the heart connection. After a
minute or so of quietly contemplating this heart connection, people have
surprising insights about their partner, just as Mary did about her boss,
Celeste. I remember one man, for example, who said that he sensed his
partner, a young woman, had a “heavy
heart,”
and that it reminded him of how he felt when his wife died. As it turned
out, the woman had just ended a long-term relationship and also had lost
her mother to death the previous month.
We can imagine a heart connection, but it becomes more than “just”
imagination. Try it for yourself and see.
Learn to Trust Your
Heart
“My
heart is as true as steel.”
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream
For
now, you need to take some time to practice making the heart connection
and experiencing how it feels for you and with different people and
things. Each time you practice this, begin with your focus on the breath,
letting the gratitude for the breath come, and letting that gratitude
expand into love. When you have enjoyed that experience for a moment, then
use it to reach out to another person. You don’t
need their permission to do this, because I don’t
think we need permission to feel love towards another. If the person is
someone you feel comfortable asking for permission, you can have a more
shared experience that can provide you with valuable feedback. In either
case, notice what you experience as your gratitude, love and heart
awareness expand to include that person. Notice your attitude toward that
person and whether it changes. Notice what you sense from them. Do it with
several people to see how your perceptions are different and what they
have in common.
You also can practice this connection with non-human objects.
Flowers and trees are wonderful subjects. See how your experience of their
nature changes when you make a heart connection with them.
What all of your practice will do is to help you see that the heart
has a unique way of perceiving, that the heart connection is a natural
form of identification and empathy, and that through this empathic
response, you do have the ability for intuitive perception, for that inner
connection. When you move to the final step in the Intuitive Heart
training Ñ
getting feedback Ñ
it will emphasize not only your ability to have intuitive perceptions but
also the reality of the connections that your Intuitive Heart is making.
You can learn to trust your heart and to follow it. Using heart
awareness Ñ
love Ñ
as a means of understanding is to follow a path of harmony. When you are
ready to live in a world of harmony, then you can follow your heart, for
it intuitively responds to that greater world. The heart has a higher
consciousness that is available to you through the experience of making
heart connections
As you learn to make these heart connections, you are surrendering
to love as a channel of understanding and inspiration. And just as we have
used metaphors (higher consciousness, reaching out with the heart, joining
hearts, a heart connection) to describe what happens, so, too, will the
wisdom that comes forth from your heart be expressed in the heart’s
language, the language of the imagination and memory, the figures of
speech and word pictures that are the language of metaphor.
This experience of the heart connection is as valuable a lesson
about how intuition works as that of the breath.
You may remember that, with the breath, what made it possible to
get out of your own way was to realize that your breath is inherently
trustworthy. You realized that, as you watched it and began to relax about
it, the breath continued to come on its own, just as it always has. You
learned to trust that, even when you aren’t
thinking about it, the breath will go on. It’s
the same with the heart connection. You worry and clutch at that moment
for the insight or awareness you’re
supposed to get. But two things help you to relax. One is the good feeling
of that moment of the other person’s
presence, the feeling of being connected, the love feeling. The other is
the experience of knowing that for that moment, love fills your heart, and
love is enough. This experience of the loving connection can fill your
awareness, so that there is no need for anything else. The satisfaction of
that moment, the blossoming of love, the flowering of the heart connection’s
energy, all pour forth and displace our fretting. It’s
as if you stand aside and let love take over.
No doubt you’ve
had other such moments in your life, moments when you were focusing on
some issue, tense and worried, and unable to release it. Then you may have
felt the nudging of love, beckoning and saying, here is the loving thing
to do. And if you were able to heed that voice, to release all your worry
and tension into love, to go where love would have you go, you probably
were filled with a wonderful sense of relief and peace.
This kind of experience is an exercise of the Intuitive Heart and
one that can support your training. Researchers at the Institute of
HeartMath confirmed its effectiveness, and the institute now teaches
people how to approach concerns and worrisome situations by releasing them
into love. When you focus on a problem that way, the love pushes aside
your concerns and brings in its wake new solutions, new approaches to the
situation. We’ll
talk more about this a little later.
Right now, let’s
go on with your training. You have learned to follow your breath, to
experience gratitude and love, and to expand those feelings into a
connection from your heart to your partner. Now you’re
going to learn to allow the guidance and the information to come.
Just as you did with following the breath, where you probably were
concerned at first with what you should think and do, you may be worried
now about what kind of memory you should get, what kind of guidance you
should receive, what sort of teaching lesson you should make. But as I
showed you with the breath, what you really need to do is to relax, stop
worrying about it, just enjoy the feeling of the love connection. In other
words, just get out of your own way. If you can relax into this experience
and enjoy it and be grateful for it, it will help take your mind off all
that worry and will enable your intuition, which is love and its higher
intelligence, to bring forward the inspiration you seek.
As I consider this and reach out to it from my own Intuitive Heart,
it reminds me of a time when I went out on a fishing boat with a group of
people. We all had paid money to go out on this boat to catch fish, so we
really wanted to catch some. But no one was catching anything. We tried
different kinds of bait and moved around to different spots on the water.
Nothing was happening. Finally, I began to be seduced by the beauty of the
day. It was sunny and warm, and the boat was rocking gently on the water.
I forgot to worry about catching fish and drifted off into this wonderful
state of reverie. And the next thing I remember was people shaking me and
saying, “Henry,
you’ve
got a bite!”
My memory shows me that it is much the same in intuition and its
heart connection. You can just let it happen. You can trust in it. You can
trust the breath, the love, and the heart, and the heart will make the
connection you seek.
*This
material is adapted from the book by Henry Reed, The Intuitive Heart,
available from Amazon.com
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