How Do I Live From My Heart?
My coach challenged me, “what are you in the business of?” It couldn’t be the 30 second speech, or a diplomatic, textbook, or perfectly crafted, professional answer. It had to come straight from the heart, sending waves of energy through both of us when I said it.
I let it sit. For a few weeks actually. Completely ignored it. Then it arrived like flashes of insight do when you run for pen and paper from wherever you are. “I am in the business of liberating the human spirit into quantum creations.” It’s what I’m here for.
At 5,000 times the magnetic field of the brain, living from the heart is hardly cliché or a “soft” idea. The heart’s extensive neuronal system is sophisticated enough to be called a “heart brain,” a brain of its own with the ability to decide and perceive independent of the central nervous system.
When I came from my head, the answers to what I’m in the business of were as flat as a poorly timed punch line—anti-climactic, cerebral and dull. Literally, I tried different answers on my colleagues and I got blank stares. Scratch that one. From my heart, the answer had visceral impact and meaning, like the surprise of your favorite person walking into the room.
The complex, self-organized system of the heart maintains a continuous two-way dialogue with the brain and the rest of the body. When you put your focus on developing the coherence you have here, you are training your brain according to your heart. And here, you amplify your ability to change your reality, shift the fulcrum point of your life, and experience quantum creations.
To liberate the human spirit is to free it from previous conditioning, emotional memory and identities we carry to create the energetic space for new realities; then to rapidly form new neural networks for living in that reality, bringing it into physical existence.
“How do I live from my heart?” someone asked? “I’ve chased the money, the accomplishment, the relationships, and I know what is important to me now. I’ve worked hard to change my relationship with my dad (or fill in the difficult relationship).
Yet I’ve still been living in a protected state that cuts me off from the fulfillment, the connection, the passion for life that I deeply desire, and the impact I know I can have. How do I live from my heart, from the core of who I am? How can I wake up that passion, to feel connected with others and myself, and love my life?
Living from the heart is more than a positive state of mind. It is a deep integrity of being; a state of coherence you develop between your body and mind by unlearning identities you took on unconsciously.
When the head leads your life, you are making decisions based on what you see, what you “know,” the physical world, pros and cons, logic, what you might lose or gain, and the addictions you live by—the protected states you’ve memorized, people, substances, emotions and ways of thinking.
95% of the mind is analytical, logic, reasoning, subconscious, habit, and ego. Its job is to protect, to remind you of “what happened when.” It is not designed to help you create change, to create new realities, to create a business or relationships aligned with your soul.
Here heart withers; and we wonder what happened to our passion? It exists behind the off-switch of our unconscious feelings. Deciding to live from the heart is the courage to turn the feeling back on and intentionally engage and lead your life—from the heart not the head.
When the heart leads, you are tapping into a magnetic field 5,000 times larger and 60 times the amplitude of the brain. You are tapping into a “heart brain” capable of perception beyond what the brain “knows” or has memorized. From the heart, you are making the unseen primary regardless of how the physical world may appear. You are moving from a focus on solving problems to actually creating a new reality and infinite possibility.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
Your Needs & Wants are Vital to Your Potential
The soul of all existence is to grow and thrive.
If our definition of what we need is hanging out at neutral, or even at a basic functioning or survival level, while our creative impulse or hunger for life is to thrive, we’ll experience a constant conflict with ourselves.
If we start the question of what we need on whether it is necessary in our lives, we will come to one level of answer, that will most likely be a lateral improvement. If we start with a vision of what we want to create, experience and be in our lives, and look at need in that framework, we will come to a very different answer.
From there our needs are driven by an internal impulse toward our potential. It helps us to see the world as not so much divided between the material and unseen, but from a vibrational perspective the way our soul sees it.
Every invention required someone to want or need a different, more effective way of getting something done, and experiencing life. The discovery of new worlds, whether a next door neighbor or across oceans, required the desire for exploration, something outside what is necessary to function.
We are inherently creative. What happens when that is shut down in the name of not being necessary? Individual taste aside, we could live without the music of Bach or Bonnie Raitt, but would we want to? In their purest form, wants and needs come from an internal impulse to create, to be ourselves, to belong, and to contribute with meaning.
Our deepest needs and desires must be fulfilled to become fully ourselves. A glass half full cannot overflow into other glasses. So our relationship to and our responsibility with our needs and desires is essential to the experience of our soul potential—potential drawn from who you are and who you become.
Our needs and wants are directly related to the vastness we perceive internally and externally. By learning to relate to goodness as infinite, we learn to dwell there and create more of it. It builds self-trust with our needs and wants and that they will not lead to a fest of narcissism, but the expansion of ourselves and the good we contribute to the world through who we are and what we do.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.
Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com . |
Love Yourself into Your Next Evolution
The problem with concepts like self-love is they become interwoven into our common vernacular before their meaning is fully absorbed. Something so vital as loving yourself has become almost cliché-ish. We can talk a good game of self-love before we have realized it in our lives. Yet is central to everything else we become. The conversation is ripe for an evolution of where we go with it next.
Loving yourself is moving into a new era…
Grown up from its psychological and personal development beginnings in the mid twentieth century. We’re demanding a deeper meaning, a deeper “why,” a deeper self-care, even if we haven’t acknowledged it to ourselves. We want to know more about what loving ourselves will really do for our lives, our businesses, our relationships, our impact; to evolve it beyond its simplistic roots, the adrenaline rush of determined personal development, or the other-world-ness of the meditation corner.
Even the online thesaurus still references self-love with egotism, narcissism, arrogance, and over developed pride. There is a vortex of sorts still dissolving with false associations to loving the self, as if we cannot trust ourselves with it. Dare we cross the line into more?!
The good news is states of true arrogance or narcissism are merely another form of self-loathing, or feelings of inadequacy, not self-adoration. We hold them to protect ourselves from being seen, trying to hold up a self we think the world is looking for.
There’s more good news. The fruits of true self-love generate states of peace, depth, prosperity, vision, stability, generosity, joy, courage, bliss, and creativity. Is there really a limit to such qualities, or such a thing as too much?
Logically, we talk about loving yourself “first” in order to love others and cultivate more love in the world. I imagine a staircase with two choices, up or down, and a third non-choice of static ambivalence. But does love really grow in only a linear, polar opposite direction for self or anything else—either on or off?
I imagine deep self-love is sparked in a spiral movement gathering momentum, tools, and focus along the way and drawing into the spiral of our lives according to how we relate to ourselves. Here the deep value of self-love reveals itself spilling over into what we bring to the lives of others.
“What is it we are questing for?”,
asks Joseph Campbell in Pathways to Bliss.
The Responsibility that’s Really at the Heart of Your Destiny
The soul knows that solving problems only in the world of form is a waste of energy, that working with vibration and frequency can shortcut evolution and make transformation magical and nearly instantaneous…the soul holds the paradox that nothing needs to change and there are things that are important to do.
~ Penney Peirce
Navigating the nuances of what responsibility really means runs at the heart of your destiny, of my destiny. If you are a person who wants to evolve, to break through into new perspectives of life that elevate your joy, momentum, relationships, and meaning, inevitably you will face a new relationship to responsibility.
It’s probably not the change you expect. Even “good” perspectives of responsibility can be stifling, keeping us at arms length from each other, unwittingly paralyzed in perspectives that atrophy our creativity, will, relationships and our passion. Responsibility may tell us to “get things done,” while our soul is knocking on the door of a new direction. We wonder why “it” is not working and the soul wonders why “you” are not listening.
Like many of the paradoxes of transformation, though inherently good, responsibility can leave us suffering just as rigid and paralyzed in a situation as the most negative and limiting perspective.
A friend remarked from her own experience, “feeling responsible for someone else’s creation cuts their own divinity out of the picture.” If she could only take responsibility for her (older) son’s creation then she could make it better and keep them both from suffering, right? But the problem couldn’t be solved from there. Her realization is a poignant reminder of what it takes to navigate the balance of rugged compassion.
To unfold destiny, old structures of responsibility eventually meet with a creative destruction. Destruction that actually builds in a direction you may not have expected. A project you think you should finish; a business system you think you should be able to make work; a relationship that should be able to heal; a body that should be healthy; may all have different purpose from the soul’s perspective. To solve them requires a new relationship to yourself that takes you further into your potential, your destiny.
To consider your relationship to responsibility, ask yourself if the responsibility you are currently standing in catalyzes movement, expansion, and beauty—within yourself, others or the world around you. Does it maintain status quo or open you up? Does it respect the divinity in another person and increase your ability to relate? Is it supporting your life or stifling it? Is it focused on fixing or creating? Does it utilize chaos for evolving forward or keep you spinning?
Living life from the soul takes you out of the world of black and white, challenging your perspectives, and into the world behind what you see. It is subtle. It will streamline your life and it doesn’t mind taking you through chaos to do it.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.
Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com . |
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