The Awakened Heart

The Awakened Heart: Meditations on Finding Harmony in a Changing World

The Awakened Heart touches the core of what it means to bring one’s life into harmony and to discover one’s true voice amidst the contradictions and challenges of daily life. Addressing the human quest for inner peace and the urge to live life at its highest levels of meaning and purpose, this book nurtures a sense of balance from which real solutions can flow.

The Awakened Heart speaks of the many kinds of human hunger and the need to feed our spirit. The more than sixty inspiring and accessible meditations provide rich spiritual insight into such concerns as:

• Acceptance and Love
• Choosing What to Believe
• Adversity
• Patience
• Transforming Fear
• Saying No
• Pity and Compassion
• Sex and Love
• Mastery and Surrender
• Confronting the World’s Pain

Like a truly fine wine, The Awakened Heart is a book to savor, to read and reread. It is a book that aligns us with our highest spiritual values.

Excerpts:

When we open to ourselves, our lives,and our Earth as sacred, something changes. when we allow the spirit of the Earth to touch us,when we live in contact with the trees, the clouds, the moon, and the soil, when we know that the animals and plants and rocks are our neighbors,then something precious begins to awaken. The forests become cathedrals,and the birds singing in the trees become choirs. We experience all forms of life as part of a great fellowship, and we begin to realize what a tremendous privilege and joy it is to be able to live harmoniously with the whole fabric of Creation.

Anger is an intense and primal expression of the life force, a burning flame that cannot be ignored. It is the psyche’s alarm system, demanding that attention be given to a limit or boundary of ours that is being invaded, to an injury or pain that is being denied, or to an area of our being that has become unhealthy. The function of anger is similar to the function of a fever. It helps to burn out unwanted, inharmonious elements. Its purpose is to restore balance and well-being.

If the symptoms of a fever are suppressed and ignored, then the illness will remain unchecked. So it is with anger. It is useful to listen for the message it brings and then to use it for growth and wellness.

We need to remember that the anger we feel toward someone else is not an accurate evaluation or judgment of who that person actually is. It is merely our own feelings communicating with us, telling us more about ourselves than about the other person. It is the beginning of greater clarity and discrimination, so that we can live our passion with integrity, develop our inner power, and become capable of acting assertively, rather than aggressively, on behalf of what we cherish.

There should really be two different words-one for ”anger-with-the heart-closed” and one for “anger with-the-heart-open.”

Most anger in our society is “anger-with-the heart-closed.” Many of us are in the habit of automatically using our anger vindictively to protect ourselves or to impose our will upon others. We may believe ourselves totally justified in demeaning others’ self-esteem. We may believe that we do this for “their own good.” We may even believe that the will we are trying to impose is God’s will. From such unconsciousness have come generations of abuse. From such self-righteousness have come millennia of “holy” wars.

“Anger-with-the-heart-closed” is destructive. But there are times when our anger can be a gift to the other person, when it is not simply our own ego twisting in a knot, and trying to use the other person to undo the strain. Though we may feel great heat and urgency, there need be nothing mean in the way we express ourselves. For when there is no desire to wound or punish or blame, we become able to speak with great clarity and power. We may roar like a lion, but it is a healing roar. We may be challenging, but we are infinitely fair. We may be outraged, but we are respectful. This is “anger-with-the-heart-open” and it has a beauty, a passion, and a clarity that is unmistakable.

by John Robbins and Ann Mortifee