Surrender is not an abdication of will or power, but a deepened intimacy with living. Relationship is the means of surrender, for in relationship- whether to people, places, or things- there are no ends that justify the means. The heart center is by nature inclusive, while the pursuit of one’s private design excludes. Our work habits have become such that we no longer have much time for anyone or anything outside our daily milieu. Ultimately we have to decide if we are going to live for love or for our impoverished and fearfully conditioned concepts. Compassion does not mean martyrdom; it does not require us to be available for everyone else until you have nothing left. As the youthful Krishnamurti said, ‘The first step is the last step.’ It is the living, the offering of our energies to the machinery of the world, that is the challenge, and this is why the heart center is a place of courage and action. Without the courageous actions to live what we know is true in our hearts, we remain on the outside. The heart center is activated through a direct approach to situations, when the God in me meets the God in you……Rick Jarow
we wonder what is true for ourselves at times…..aesthetics and knowledge and values and dreams become mired in too many thoughts, not enough heart space…..what does is mean to clear? to come home? like drinking from a fresh mountain stream…..can we find that kind of clarity? that kind of clean?
Can you tell me a moment that was big for you, an instant that you saw things differently from then on? Not a sensational moment- but a quiet moment when your whole awareness shifted? It’s important to trust these moments and let them inform our lives. Often we have an opening- clear and quiet- and then we negate it. ‘Oh, that’s silly. Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t live that way.’ Why not? These moments are a flash, an insight when we see through the confusion of our constant thinking to something clear. How wonderful. Why wouldn’t we listen instead of abiding by our discursive, wandering thoughts- I should go to the store, I should buy a car, I ought to check out the new movies, I need a new bathing suit, I look fat, I have no friends, etc, etc.- and follow these thoughts as though they were holy truth? On the other hand, we love to mythologize heightened moments, telling over and over the story of what happened. Then we make them outside ourselves and do not take responsibility for what has been given to us. Don’t do that. We can be courageous enough intelligent enough capable enough to take these insights on and let them inform our lives. Make a list of those moments. What did you do with each one? Which ones did you ignore? Can you make good on them now?…..Natalie Goldberg
finding our hearts in the rubble
We are transformed, not by adopting attitudes toward ourselves but by bringing into center all the elements of our sensations and our thinking and our emotions and our will: all the realities of our bodies and our souls. All the dark void in us of our undiscovered selves, all the small light of our discovered being. All the drive of our hungers, and our fairest and blackest dreams. All, all the elements come into center, into union with all other elements. And in such a state they become quite different in function than when they are separated and segregated and discriminated between or against. When we act out of an inner unity, when all of our selves is present in what we do, then we can be said to be ‘on center.’ Our wholeness as persons is expressed in using all of our selves in any given act. In this way the self integrates its capacities into a personal potency, as a being who serves life from his center at every instant. In this way knowledge can become a quality of consciousness and illumine our behavior spontaneously and truthfully…..M.C. Richards
