Entering Your Own Heart
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.
—Rumi
In the midst of winter I finally realized there was in me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
During my own journey to my heart, I learned to visualize meetings with my spirit self. I did this for about four years. I would meet my spirit self on the beach and ask her a question I had on my mind. On one visit, when I was close to receiving my psychotherapy license, I asked her,
“How can I heal others?” This was the answer I received:
Don’t think… just love.
To move from your heart, you must first be willing to be in it, which means that you must be willing to be with what’s in your heart, you must be willing to feel your pain. If you want to touch the hearts of others, you must be willing to touch your own heart. Once you’ve moved through your own heart—with its sadness, its fear and confusion, its terror, its fury, its bewilderment, its despair—then no one, not even the most insane, will scare you away. It’s not the other person’s insanity that scares us; it’s our own insanity that we are afraid to touch.
To heal the other, to truly touch and heal their hearts, you must first have made peace within your own heart. Then fear will have no foothold within you. Then there will be no meaning to the words sane or insane, angry or peaceful, happy or sad. Then the only question becomes, “Can you extend your heart?”
This is the beginning and the end of all that is meaningful. When you