Robyn did end up going out with him, and they embarked on a relationship. He fell in love with her and asked her to marry him, but afraid she’d get hurt, she refused. It was too risky to open up that deeply to him. He tried to change her mind over a period of two years, but to no avail. She wouldn’t get past her closed heart. Eventually he gave up and left her for another woman. The last time I saw her, she was angrier and more hurt than ever and said that she’d known he couldn’t be trusted.
I felt sad for her. Her closed heart had driven away an opportunity to experience love. I didn’t see Robyn after that, and I wonder about her sometimes. I wish that I could say I knew she would be all right. I do pray that something might reopen her heart one day. Without an open heart, there’s no way life can really improve. With one, it always improves.
Basically, the open heart is that of the Divine Child—the heart of your Spirit—and it trusts that the Universe loves you and will provide for you, care for you, protect you, and nurture you as you grow. This heart relaxes and enjoys life.
The open heart is a portal to Heaven and the gateway for your Spirit to enter your body. It’s the most powerful center you have. So to love yourself and live your Spirit, always keep your heart open to the Universe’s gifts. Expect good things from life even when its challenges are overwhelming. God has a plan, and positive things are always in store for you, but remember that you can only receive them if your heart is open.
I once read: “Things work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.” So, until the end, keep your heart open and expect good things.
Have a Clear Heart
Beyond having an open heart, another essential aspect of self-love is to have a clear heart. If the open heart is that of your Divine inner child, consider the clear heart to be that of your Divine inner adult.
To have a clear heart means to step away from the confusion and fog of drama and self-pity and look at life without bias. A clear heart allows you to engage in life with objectivity and reason. When your heart is clear, you don’t take life personally. When it’s not, it’s very difficult to love yourself, because you’re too busy being victimized and abused by those around you . . . and suffering for it.
A client named Ted, utterly distraught, came to see me for a reading. His wife of ten years had recently undergone gastric-bypass surgery and lost 125 pounds. But rather than this being a good thing, she immediately started acting out her food addiction in other ways, taking up drinking and doing drugs in place of overeating. She went from being a stable—albeit obese—wife and mother to his two children to being a five-nights-a-week party animal who could barely find her way home at night because she was so wasted.
Ted felt beyond furious and betrayed. “I supported her surgery, I took care of the kids while she recovered, and I’ve been a great husband. How could she do this to us? To her kids? To me?”
His life was suddenly in shambles, and his suffering was palpable—but his heart wasn’t clear, taking her behavior personally and internalizing it as a rejection of him or interpreting it as a failure on his part to be a good husband. After all, if he were good enough, she’d love him enough not to self-indulge, right? Wrong.
What Ted—with his cloudy, confused heart—utterly failed to understand even before his wife’s gastric bypass was that she was a highly addicted, out-of-control woman whose behavior had nothing to do with him. Unless he could see that, his personalizing of her addictions only made it worse. He couldn’t love himself, let alone his wife or children, until his heart cleared. Quite simply, her struggles weren’t about him, and therefore he couldn’t fix them—or her.
Fortunately, their struggles drew him into counseling, where slowly his heart began to clear. Then one day he said to me, “For the longest time, I resisted getting my heart cleared up about my wife’s problems. I took some sort of sick pleasure in believing it had to do with me. What was that about?”
I know what that’s about. I’ve done it myself—when I blamed myself for an ex-boyfriend’s infidelity, for example, even though he had clearly demonstrated a pattern of cheating on past girlfriends. I’ve done it when I thought that I could make my husband happy by unsolicited suggestions that he change the direction of his career, only to get impatient and frustrated with him for not appreciating my “good” ideas. I’ve even done it when I was overzealous in assisting my oldest daughter in finding the right college, cramping her style and then feeling unappreciated when she resisted my help.
You can’t get to a clear heart through the ego, because this part of you gets in the way and blocks the Spirit from taking you to higher ground. You must decide that you’re not going to be a victim of anyone’s behavior in order to access a clear heart. Once you do, your heart automatically begins to clear.
You begin to understand that your boss acts like a bully because he’s insecure, not because you’re doing a bad job. You recognize that your child is angry and defensive because he’s neglecting his responsibilities and not because you’re a bad parent. You see that your neighbor is curt and rude because she isn’t feeling well and doesn’t have adequate insurance, not because she resents you.
Having a clear heart is an enormously self-loving choice because it frees you from absorbing everyone else’s misery and lets you enjoy your peace.
To have a clear heart is simple:
Take nothing personally. Whatever someone does or doesn’t do isn’t about you.
Don’t be a victim. Remember that you can’t control others, but you can choose how you respond to them.
Once Ted’s heart cleared up, he chose to divorce his wife, seek counseling for himself, and assume full-time custody of the children. It was clearly the only road to the love of self, of his children, and, ironically, of his wife. When he stopped reacting and saw for the first time how profoundly she suffered from addictions, he found detachment from—and compassion for—her. They boxed out a fairly messy divorce, but even that he didn’t take personally. Now that he’s on the other side of his fiasco, he can also see how his own insecurities drew him to someone with addictions.
A clear heart is a creative one. When yours is clear, you can see subtle connections and hidden relationships. You begin to understand what’s really going on with people and can therefore make better choices about how you want to respond. You remove the chaos and drama that victimhood brings. With a clear heart, you take back your power to choose and create.
To clear your heart is simple. Just change the question from Why is this happening to me? to Why is this happening? What’s the relationship between cause and effect, choice and outcome? or even better, What can I learn from this?
Study, rather than react . . . unplug from drama and breathe through your challenges with objectivity. This isn’t to imply that you can’t feel anything. Feelings are good and inform you about your choices. When you feel bad, there’s something to learn. For example, if you feel depressed, you learn that you might need to take better care of your health or that you’re ignoring your needs. If you feel angry, you learn that you’re not respecting your boundaries and need to examine where you’re letting others push you around. If you feel irritable or impatient, you learn that something that’s going on is ungrounded and unclear or, perhaps, not truthful.
The benefits of a clear heart are many—it’s the heart that reduces stress, improves vitality, and restores energy. The clearer your heart, the less draining life is. It’s also the heart that empowers you and restores creativity. If your heart is clouded and confused, you can’t find your way to a solution. You just spin around in “suffering” circles. Although self-dramatizing is seductive to your ego, it’s actually a waste of time.
Nothing positive or good comes out of a clouded, confused heart; and nothing fogs it and interrupts your ability to self-love more quickly and thoroughly than fear. The minute you feel afraid, the heart clouds up and confusion sets in.
What I’ve discovered, however, is that we don’t have to over
come fear to have a clear heart. We simply need to recognize it when it shows up and acknowledge its presence. The great revelation for me is that it isn’t fear itself so much as the effort of hiding or denying it that’s so self-abusive and destructive.
Being afraid is normal, especially when facing the unknown. For example, I remember the evening before I was to present a daylong workshop in Sydney, Australia. All day I had felt tense and anxious. I slept during the afternoon yet still found myself restless and slightly irritable. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me why I was feeling so out of sorts: I was afraid.
Once I acknowledged this, a whole constellation of fears unraveled. I was afraid . . .
. . . that I wouldn’t connect with the audience.
. . . that I wouldn’t be effective.
. . . that my guidance wouldn’t work well.
. . . that the audience wouldn’t respond to my music selection.
I was just afraid in general. The more I acknowledged my fears, the more they began to subside and the more clarity returned to my heart.
Once it did, my heart said: Yes, any one of those things may happen. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And so what if it does? It wouldn’t be the end of the world.
And that was true. It could possibly be uncomfortable, even unpleasant. Yet it wouldn’t be anything more than a temporary slight to my ego if the worst indeed came to pass.
That thought made me laugh. So many of our fears really are nothing more than threats to our already-insecure egos. If we remember that we are Spirit, however, we get free of the ego’s freak-outs. The more we simply acknowledge our fears with love and a dash of humor, the more they subside and “defog” the heart.
Now, there’s a big difference between feeling vague, generic fear and actually being in danger. Most of the time when we experience fear, there’s no threat to anything other than our fragile egos. But even when we are in danger, it’s far better to acknowledge fear’s presence so that our hearts will clear up and our guidance will come through to help get us out of it.
I recall once as a student in France, I accepted a ride home from a man I met at a party because it was late, the trains were no longer running, it was cold outside, and I had no money for a taxi. Stupid, I know, but I was young.
The minute I got in the car with him, I felt afraid, so I acknowledged this to myself. Once I did, my Spirit said, You should be scared. This man has bad intentions.
As soon as my guidance revealed that, I turned to the man and said, “Oh my goodness, I have to get out of the car now or I’m going to be sick all over the place.”
The man was shocked, and suddenly I saw fear in his eyes. Noticing his expensive car and suit, I knew why.
When I started to get out, the fear subsided and relief took its place. I even laughed a little as I walked home, freezing but safe.
Whenever you feel afraid, acknowledge it, either out loud or to yourself. Be as specific as possible about what you fear. Say that you don’t know why if you don’t. Notice how the more you articulate your fear, the clearer your heart becomes. Once it’s unclouded, ask your Spirit, Is this a real or imagined threat? Listen to the answer. If it’s real, ask the clear heart to guide you quickly to safety; if it’s imagined, ask it to step aside. The more often and more quickly you confront fear, the sooner your heart will be clear and remain so. And a clear heart is a self-loving one, because only it can see and guide you creatively to a solution.
What fogs and disturbs a clear heart are strong emotions of any sort. Whether intense anger, strong infatuation, overwhelming grief, or unbelievable ecstasy, powerful waves of emotion temporarily distort the clarity of the heart and interrupt our ability to love ourselves or others.
This isn’t to suggest that we must attempt to block or distance ourselves from our emotions. Not at all. In fact, blocked emotions close and clog the heart and shut it down altogether. No, it’s important to feel all of our emotions fully and completely and to recognize them for the messengers they are, informing us about the experiences of our lives. It’s just that we need to recognize that our emotions are like the weather: They come and—ideally, if unblocked—they go. We learn from them but shouldn’t act on them. It’s best to wait until their intensity passes, then choose our actions.
For example, I have a client named Sally who’s a passionate, creative woman with a brilliant Spirit and a volatile temper. On several occasions, she found herself losing her cool with her husband and, in the midst of the battle, telling him that she wanted a divorce. Once her rage passed and her heart was clear, she had no desire to end the marriage, and in fact most of her outbursts had little to do with her husband at all. Sadly, he didn’t know this, and after one declaration of divorce too many, he left her and did file for divorce. Her distorted heart failed to recognize how painful her outbursts were to her husband. He refused to stay with her—his own heart had shut down.
Had she simply waited long enough to let her waves of anger pass rather than acting on them, she might still be married. Her impulsive utterances were Sally’s undoing and hurt her more than anyone.
The same held true for another client, George, who lost his wife of 35 years and found himself overwhelmed by grief and loneliness. While in the midst of sorrow, he met a woman who had newly emigrated from Bulgaria. Impulsively, he asked her to marry him, and she agreed. He knew that his heart wasn’t clear and that it was a bad idea, but he acted anyway. The infatuation wore off in less than three months, and resentment took its place. Not surprisingly, after battling for three years, they divorced. Now he had that disaster to add to his still-unresolved grief.
Let your emotions rise and fall and learn from them, but don’t let them guide you in life. Whenever you find yourself caught in the turbulence of a strong emotion, let it flow and know that it will eventually calm down. You’re best able to make sound, self-loving choices when your emotions are quiet.
To help calm them, channel their expression in benign, healthy ways. Journaling is a wonderfully effective way to harness strong emotions and help you regain balance . . . so is walking, running, talking with a neutral friend, going to the gym, pummeling a punching bag, dancing, taking a long hot shower, screaming into a pillow, or shouting into the wind at the beach.
Express your emotions—just don’t act on them. Whether they’re good or bad, wait until they’re clear before you arrive at any decisions. This, of course, takes discipline, especially if you’re a passionate person. Yet if you think about it, some of the worst, most unloving choices you’ve ever made probably have come about while you were worked up. It’s in the throes of strong emotion that you’re most critical and judgmental of yourself and everyone around you.
When your heart is clear, you can feel your Spirit and automatically find great love and appreciation for yourself. But when it isn’t, you can’t touch or sense your Spirit because your ego is freaking out. Know that emotion passes. Be patient and let it do so, like rolling thunderclouds across the sky. When your heart is clear, it’s much easier to make healthy, self-loving choices that honor your Spirit.
Have a Wise Heart
To love yourself, you must find peace. And the way to peace is through the wise heart.
The wise heart is that of your ancient soul, engaging reason and connecting choices and behaviors with consequences and outcomes. It’s the universal heart—the aspect of self-love that moves away from the personal “I” and sees you as part of a greater whole, the human race. The wise heart encourages you to move beyond personal gain and begin to consider the impact of each of your choices on the whole of humanity. This is the heart of self-control on an ego level—the heart that opts not to drink and drive, that refrains from overspending through credit cards, and that chooses fresh food over fast food when planning meals. It’s the heart that uses energy-saving lightbulbs.
The wise heart is the one that cares about the consequences of your choices. This aspect of self-love is extremely underutilized in most people, e
specially in Western cultures. It’s far more popular and seductive to posture and swagger, acceding to the demands of the ego, than to be forward-thinking and wise.
The opposite of the wise heart is the foolish heart, which reacts rather than acts in life. This is the heart that surrenders all genuine personal spiritual power over to the whims and adrenaline of the moment, only to regret those same self-righteous choices and selfish behaviors later. It’s the heart of overreaction.
I learned (accidentally) to engage the wise heart when I was about ten years old. Walking home alone from school one day, I encountered a group of public-school kids who taunted and teased me for being the “Catholic girl in the stupid uniform.”
Embarrassed, afraid, and outnumbered, I didn’t know quite what to do. My fearful self wanted to cry. My instinctive self wanted to run. My courageous self wanted to fight back. Yet my higher self even then knew that none of these options would serve to protect me or get me out of the predicament I had fallen into. The only option left was to be quiet and do nothing—in other words, not to react.
I looked my tormenters right in the eye as they heckled me, but held a neutral expression. I revealed neither fear nor anger, much the way my older brother often looked at me when I taunted him. To my surprise, it worked: My neutrality and absence of reaction disarmed them. In a matter of less than five minutes, they became bored with their game and moved on. I stood immobile for a few more moments as the pack began to drift away, then I continued slowly on my route—or at least until I turned the corner and was out of their sight. Then I ran the rest of the way home as fast as I could.
The first person I encountered when I arrived home was the very same older brother I often attempted to torment. He listened dispassionately as I spilled the details of my frightening story, telling him how I refused to react or show my fear and how, to my surprise, the other kids eventually moved on.
The Answer Is Simple- Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit! Page 8