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I refer to my work as heart-centered because I connect to the symbol of the heart and love as containing much wisdom for healing.  When you can open your heart to your deepest Self, and find ways to accept and love parts of yourself that were not validated growing up, the power to transform old patterning is truly profound.  Vital energy becomes unblocked, free to move, and you find yourself blossoming into your full potential!  And with a clean and open heart, ready to give and receive love with others.

Getting Out of Your Head

Maybe you’re fairly psychologically-savvy, and have a good intellectual understanding of what your “issues” are.  So many of us fall into a semi-comfortable stagnation where we develop an excellent understanding of our pain and our self-limiting patterns yet find these issues don’t disappear just by understanding them. 


Being a “heady” person myself, I know about intellectualization defenses from personal experience.  There’s this false idea that we can find peace if only we finally figure ourselves out.  Which we think we can do by simply analyzing ourselves enough!  Sure. ☺
In my experience, both with my own process, and in the work with my clients, real change comes from an *embodied, emotional experience*, not merely an intellectual understanding.  We develop personalities through experiential relationship with the world.  Our old wounding happened through experiential learning.  Many of us had to adapt to a world or family system that did not value all the facets of our Self - therefore, precious aspects of our true nature were hidden away to be kept safe, or to keep ourselves safe if those aspects of ourselves clashed with our environment. 

Even positive potentials!  If your inherent sense of trust doesn't fit the paradigm of a family that fears and sees the world as dangerous, you can bet that as a young child, you could sense the slight emotional disharmony and disconnect from your primary love relationship that was triggered by your innate trusting nature . So then, to prevent loss of love, you disconnect *inside yourself* to that positive potential that didn't jive with your family's worldview.  We are beautifully complex beings that can survive with even great levels of internal disconnect for a long time.  However, often in adulthood or when facing a big growth opportunity that requires we get all of our resources back online, these disconnected potentials start to make themselves known in the form of a health crisis, bad moods, or unhealthy relationship patterns.  The imbalance starts to show eventually, unmanifest potential tends to find a way of getting your attention one way or another, even if that starts as negative attention.

I love this poem for describing the process of personal transformation:

 


I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. 
I am lost... I am helpless. 
It isn't my fault. 
It takes forever to find a way out. 

I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don't see it. 
I fall in again. 
I can't believe I am in the same place. 
But, it isn't my fault. 
It still takes me a long time to get out. 

I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I see it is there. 
I still fall in. It's a habit. 
My eyes are open. 
I know where I am. 
It is my fault. I get out immediately. 

I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I walk around it. 

I walk down another street.

-Portia Nelson

Reconnecting With Your Heart

Many spiritual philosophies see the heart as the seat of our inner wisdom, our deeper Self, the center of our Being.  


I think of the heart center as a place to feel into deep emotional truths and inner wisdom.  Our emotions necessarily precede our thoughts about our emotions; so the emotion, especially the unabstracted felt sense, is closer to our personal truth than our head’s interpretation of our felt sense.  It can be powerfully liberating to break through old programming and get in touch with what we really want for our lives.  I believe that we all know in our hearts what is best for us and what we most deeply desire.  Most of us, especially Westerners, have been trained to ignore that voice and do what other people want us to do or be what other people want us to be.

Dissolving Old Patterns and Stepping Into Your Brilliance

 

Our unconscious ideas about what’s possible for our lives were formed over the course of early experiences growing up.  

The existential paradox of growing into our potential is that positive change can be more terrifying (to the unconscious child within who internalized her / his early worldview) than the misery we know.  There’s the phrase, “leap, and the net will appear,” but our inner 6 year old has never seen that net and doesn’t buy that it actually exists.

We habituate ourselves to less than our potential because that’s what was safe growing up.  If, for example, our early childhood was spent with parents who were poor, and afraid of how to provide for their family, we pick up on that reality energetically, and may never feel comfortable deeply relaxing into a belief that there is enough for me now.  Same thing with a family system where there was a lot of repressed anger and hostility; perhaps you attuned to be hyper-vigilant in order to navigate that system to avoid the anger being directed at you.  Today you might be a skilled taskmaster, yet not be able to let go of the hyper-vigilance and anxiety in the 99% of your life when it isn’t necessary any more.

When we wake up to our lives, instead of sleepwalking through them - either through meditation, counseling, or just intensely lived experience - we generally start to tap into a bigger experience of ourselves, a sense that there is more to us than our day-to-day existence.  We may even find ourselves experiencing a spiritual essence within ourselves and throughout our world.  And when we experience our daily reality differently, more expansive, we start to question long-held assumptions about our personal reality.

We let go, make space for our essence to blossom, find it much easier to let ourselves follow our bliss, and life starts to turn around.

I believe you are not here by accident.  There is some purpose your soul is here to fulfill, and I trust that listening to your heart and following your bliss can lead you to creating a purpose-driven life that feels amazing.

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