Wholeheartedness - a journey into living from the heart

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Thomas Carlyle

Farm Country Autumn

There is a lot of talk these days about living from the heart, speaking from the heart and following one's heart. Self-help gurus have written volumes on the subject and the internet is chock full of blogs on similar subjects. Oprah has had whole series on opening the heart so as to live a happier life. I just couldn't resist jumping into the topic with both feet for a lot of reasons. (So I'm going to be spending the next few posts on the subject in one way or another). For me, the idea of living from the heart is like coming home to these rolling hills and autumn colors.

In the first place, something I learned in grad school that is closely related to this idea has stayed with me a long time...in fact, I can still quotes sections of my thesis having to do with just how the heart plays into the concept of living well and living right and I'll share that first today. But beyond that, I'm a big fan of social researcher Brené Brown and have heard her speak a number of times about the importance of wholeheartedness in having a happy life regardless of circumstances. And then I belong to a group of women who get together at least once a month to talk about alternative spirituality - living our lives not so much in accordance with traditional religious practices but guided by what seems to us to be something bigger, broader and more inclusive than that. Such conversations have led inevitably to talk about the role our heart plays versus the role of the mind. 

I don't think my group is unique - I think that millions of people around the world are seeking what in Eastern thought is called "enlightenment" - awakening to the idea that we are all so much more than just brains and minds sitting on top of a physical body designed to just carry it around. People are studying about energy centers, chakras, learning to "breathe into the heart," to get their minds out of the way or to silence it in order to hear what the heart has to say and feel the difference between heart energy and mind energy. 

As I said, this whole subject has been of great interest to me for most of my adult life and remains an active focus of my own spiritual practice. I find that the more I learn of this, the more I truly understand what my traditional religious upbringing should have taught me, what authentic religious practice ought to look like and feel like. It started with a simple statement in a theology book that I was using as a reference for a section of my thesis in grad school. The section was called "knowledge of God" and referred to a passage in Hosea 4:6 that reads, "My people perish (or are destroyed) for lack of knowledge..." Reading further, I discovered that in the Hebrew faith, one can only know something, but especially can only know God, from the heart. The heart is the center of knowing. That's it...one "knows" only from the heart - not from the mind. If you only comprehend something with your mind, you actually don't know it at all. 

Remembering this lesson many years later, when I took up the pen to write poetry again, and embarking on a relationship that many people cautioned me against, I wrote this poem, entitled "Heart Knowing."

Heart Knowing

          The heart has a language of its own.

Though I must silence my mind to hear it,

it thinks better than my head and remembers too;

this perfect center of my self-knowing,

is an ever faithful guardian of my truth.

The heart listens, hears a voice in the silence,

attending its ear to a word no other hears.

Attending its sight to a vision no other sees,

at the farthest edge of my hermetic solitude,

the darkest shadows of the moonless nights,

my trusting heart is lighted from within

with the incandescent flame of love.

My heart knows what my logical mind

cannot begin to even contemplate,

recognizes the sublime where my eyes

see too often a world both stark and cold

or the desolate dry expanse of the desert.

Only the graceful heart can truly know

another shining soul with loving intimacy.

It was my heart that knew you first,

a love my head could not have known,

and my heart that felt your inner beauty

pass through my very being like sunrise

through stained glass windows facing dawn.

My heart it was that named you Beloved,

Anam Cara, soul companion of my life,

my heart that takes its comfort, its very purpose

from the hopeful dreams of exquisite longing

for your heart, your body opening to mine.

This heart I offer you, my love, this mystical portal

through which we might together enter heaven’s gate;

is my simple gift of joyful, true “heart knowing”

after a graced and lifelong apprenticeship of love.

According to Jennifer Hoffman, author of the blog "Enlightening Life," The potential of your life exists within the knowing of your heart and soul. Yet you use your mind to determine what is possible and its limitations prevent the highest potential from being available to you." 

I cannot help but agree that the mind can be an obstacle to the kind of knowing we need if we are to live "wholeheartedly." I won't say that listening to my heart, knowing something in my heart, led immediately to happily ever after or that such knowing can't and won't ultimately "break" your heart (but that is a subject for another post). But I will say, quoting diplomat and poet Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, "A good heart is better than all the heads in the world."

Farm Country Autumn

Gifts from the Sea

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its nets of wonder forever.

Jacques Cousteau

Between Sea and Shore 

(I know I've posted this image before but it fits the post best!)

http://lianne-schneider.artistwebsites.com/featured/between-sea-and-shore-lianne-schneider.html

Some days, my longing for the sea is palpable. Today is one of them...a gray, rainy day, the first of several this week...and I can think of nothing I'd rather be doing than walking along the beach at Cape Cod or Cape May, or Rehobeth, La Jolla, even Galveston before the summer crowds descend. The ocean in all its many moods and guises has always been a metaphor for my life's journey and there are times only those hours alone on a quiet beach can help me to decipher the lessons along the way. Some years ago I picked up a stone on the shore at Race Point, one of those diamond days - so perfect you could never forget it, shared as it was with my dearest friend. I've kept the stone for all these years and carry it with me to remind me of all the sea has to tell me.

  

THE WORRY STONE

I carry it in my pocket,

roll it around there letting

it shift from palm to fingers,

trace its contours with my thumb

and remember the day I

picked it up at the beach,

that brilliantly sunny

afternoon at Race Point…

how it caught my eye

amidst all the other pebbles

because it was not yet

perfectly smooth, though

quite well-polished, different

in hue and composition

from an ordinary stone,

a worn conglomerate

of sparkling quartz and

dull gray limestone,

one  black clast of obsidian

distorting the smoothness.

My thumb catches the fragment,

worries it, like one worries

a broken tooth with the tongue,

feeling the irregularity there,

probing it with questions -

what long journey has this stone

made to find itself on this shore?

How was it shaped by that voyage,

battered, abraded and pounded,

its rough edges worn down,

by long ages of pressure,

the travel across distant seas

cementing together all

the disparate metals and minerals,

compressed now into one

remarkable and unique stone.

I carry it with me in my pocket

and worry it with my thumb

to remind me of my own

uniqueness, melded from all

the separate pieces of self,

light and dark, rough edges

scoured by the unrelenting rhythm

of life’s ocean into a new whole

that is finally becoming me. 

Perhaps I'll get back to the sea this summer - but even if I don't, it's always in my heart, always reminding me that some things are eternal, that there is an ebb and flow to life that one must learn to accept. But like the tide...what seems gone will return...and find me waiting. 

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/sea.html#284FQUeFS7VdxVWD.99

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/sea.html#284FQUeFS7VdxVWD.99

I'm a Phoenix - are you??

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

Ferdinand Foch

Resurrection

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/Art/Digital-PaintingPhotoArt/i-wgSkwMx/A

We've probably all seen those insidious commercials on TV for the University of Phoenix, which offers online degree programs with a number of physical campuses around the country. The spokespersons all proudly proclaim the reason for their present success - "I am a Phoenix." And more power to them - I applaud anyone with the determination and the self-discipline to undertake a degree program alone, without the camaraderie of classroom time, group study sessions and interaction with other students. But I wonder if they realize how much more powerful the story of the Phoenix really is...and whether you have thought about your own Phoenix experiences as I have. 

The Phoenix, of course, is a mythical bird,  and the myth itself is generally thought to have its origins in ancient Greece. There are, however, analogs to the Greek myth in many cultures - the Persian anka, the Hindu garuda, the Russian firebird, the Chinese fenghuang among others. There are even suggestions that a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, appropriately in the book of Job, refers to the Phoenix as well. 

"And I said, I will perish with my nest, and I will multiply days as the phoenix (chol)" - Job 29:18. In Jewish folklore, chol refers to a supernatural bird, often glossed as, or identified with the Greek Phoenix.

According to the myth, a phoenix is a fire spirit with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends). It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. But it is the Egyptian interpretation of the myth I find most applicable to our own personal quest for identity, awakening and joy. The Egyptians believed that this 500 year cycle represented the bird's ongoing quest to discover his true self and "knowing that a new way could be found only with the death of his worn-out habits, defenses and beliefs, the Phoenix built a pyre of cinnamon and myrrh, sat in the flames, and burned to death. Then he rose from the ashes as a new being - a fusion of who he had been before and who he had become" (Lesser, 2004, p. 55).

Elizabeth Lesser, in her book "Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow," contends that we each have to go through the "phoenix process." We are each incinerated in the painful fires of life and have the ability to rise again, to be renewed and reborn if we are only willing to throw the old self - the past, the fears, the angers, the failures - onto the fire. "Our lives," she says, "ask us to die and to be reborn every time we confront change." We can, as I mentioned in an earlier blog on brokenness, recreate ourselves as something new and more beautiful out of the shattered pieces that are all that seems to be left after a painful and difficult time in our lives - heartbreak, loss, grief, failure. Those are the ashes from which we are called to rise again. Then we, too, can proudly proclaim, "I am a Phoenix." 

Long before I read Ms. Lesser's book, the promise of my ability to bounce back from heartache, defeat, sadness and grief led me to write this poem and to create the artwork you see above.

THE MOMENTS IN BETWEEN

The miracles happen

in the moments in between –

between life and death,

between breathing in

and breathing out,

between beginning and end,

between one light burst,

one photon, and the next…

in that in between space

where there is nothing…

and there is everything -

where all potential,

all possibility exists.

In that waiting space,

in the now of resurrection

all is transformed.

In that moment in between

all illusion falls away.

Death, the great delusion,

dies a final time and

new and sacred truth is born.

I am pierced with my knowing

that all is one, that seeming

opposites make me whole.

In the crucible of awakening,

in the cremation of ego,

I discover what has been

inside me all along –

within my fear…joy,

within my loss…gain,

within my darkness…light,

within my grief…grace.

  

Rising from the ashes,

the smoke of my resurrection

stirs the trees, becomes a breeze

lifting into the Cosmos.

Then it is that I am your song, 

the song of the Universe –

a song of Love, pure Love,

an energy that creates,

a new music that inspires,

a melody in which I’m

a necessary harmonic note.

O Spirit of the spheres,

in this moment in between,

sing your song in me.

©Lianne Schneider July 2012

* Lesser, Elizabeth. (2004). Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. Villard Books (a division

           of Random House), New York, New York. 

Sea Story...a longing

"We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea,

whether it is to sail or to watch,

we are going back from whence we came." 

~John Kennedy~

 

Between Sea and Shore

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/between-sea-and-shore-lianne-schneider.html

 

I've never lived by the sea really - close a few times - able to get to a beach on a day's drive,
but the sea fascinates me. Its power, its moods, its vastness...are somehow an endless source of inspiration to me in both my writing and my art. I think of an ocean in a storm and I'm reminded of the storms that life can bring to us. I see a lighthouse and I know that there is somewhere -
in a friend's heart, a lover's touch a light to guide me through. I think of the journey each of us is on...our own personal quest for peace, for truth, for wholeness...the journey of self-discovery -and it takes me to the sea.  

 

BETWEEN SEA AND SHORE

A late summer afternoon at the Cape,
sweet sounds abound - a gentle lullaby
of sea grasses sighing in an onshore breeze,
the slight swell of an incoming wavelet
spilling happily over ageless small stones,
little pebbles tumbling one over the other,
their gentle clattering friction masked by
the resonance of the surge as it splashes
into this quiet cove onto this shingled beach.
Wading out, I let the wave embrace my feet,
hearing against my legs the slight swash
of an ebbing tide and listen in my silence for
the softest shushing of a withdrawing wave
whispering its secrets to the sand, softly
planting goodbye kisses, wet and sloppy,
on a curved shoreline of shimmering stones.
What peace it is to stand here and be witness
to this eternal love between sea and shore.  

                                    © Lianne Schneider 2013