Heart-centered living

 A man drove on the highway when a message appeared on the radio, “attention, attention, on the A 9 a driver is headed in the wrong direction. Please reduce your speed and watch out for incoming traffic!” The man looked up and screamed in frustration, “what do you mean one, there are dozens, dozens of them!”

How do we know what we see and feel is what is real and not a figment of our conditioned mind? A friend said the other day that she is beyond politics and I said to her, “You don’t have an equanimous mind, you are indifferent. That’s different!” Who gave me the authority to say that? Was I perhaps headed in the wrong direction?

I cannot tell you how enlightened folks perceive the world but I can tell you a thing or two about mind games. I experience them daily. The mind needs control and is happy to override feelings in order to get it. Our mind’s notion of enlightenment is that we will never experience suffering again. What a lovely concept that is!

A measure of spiritual advancement is our ability to face what is with an open heart. We experience the trigger life confronts us with, take the full force of the impact, and let it run through our system without putting up any resistance. After the initial hit there are some ripple effects, but the amplitude of the hit is fading. Our conditioned mind doesn’t jump on it!

I have experienced a change over the last year. I discovered the feat of heart-centered living. It is as if there is an entirely different energy system emanating from the heart region. We can literally feel how the system jumps from mind to heart-centered living. The heart doesn’t protect us from pain but it burns conditioned reaction functions like a furnace.

We feel life’s ups and downs—the good, bad and ugly—perhaps stronger than anyone but our conditioned reaction functions are unable to build on the initial hit to the system. Conditioning burns in the presence of universal love and we stay with life as it is, and not as we want it to be or fear it to be. Give heart-centered living a shot. Life is different when the heart rules.