The Heart Opening Through Pain
La Apertura del Corazón a Través del Dolor
A student shares a longstanding pain and confusion connected to a person they met years ago, and the teacher guides them toward understanding the opening of the heart, the difference between sitting with fear and acting through it, and the transpersonal dimensions of pain and love.
The Heart Opening Through Pain
A student shares a longstanding pain and confusion connected to a person they met years ago, and the teacher guides them toward understanding the opening of the heart, the difference between sitting with fear and acting through it, and the transpersonal dimensions of pain and love.
When I get to the end of trying everything, I give up and just meditate if nothing works.
Maybe you should try harder. Maybe your meditation practice is to try harder and sit less.
I don't want to do that, but I'm so confused at this point I don't know what I'm thinking.
Don't think. Just do. Take risks. Do what you feel is true to your heart and ignore your fears. Trust what you most deeply want, and bring your heart out into your life. Dare to risk it being hurt. Be willing to be in pain. You will be okay. The fear is just fear. It's a ghost. It's energy, it's vitality. Let it go through your heart. What does this bring up for you?
I sit with fear, feel the fear, and it feels like...
Acting with fear, not sitting with it
No. Act with the fear. Don't sit with it. I'm speaking to you right now; this is not an absolute truth about fear in all circumstances. Sometimes I sat with fear and my whole body was shaking. But for you, right now: act with the fear. Whenever there's fear, act. Don't sit. I think you're avoiding the action.
I am avoiding the action. But I don't know what I'm avoiding.
When you have a fear, what is the fear? What is it about? You have to be really honest with yourself. Don't hide from yourself. What are you avoiding when there's fear? What is it really about?
An example: the other day something was scary, and I sat with the fear.
What was the fear about?
It's about relationship.
Exactly. "Relationship" is a very general term, but there's going to be something specific: a relationship, a situation, a specific dynamic, an encounter, a conversation. It's not just "relationship." Sometimes it's appropriate to take a moment and sit with a fear, but it's also often very appropriate to move into action, to speak to whatever it is. Act with the fear and risk messing up. Risk doing the wrong thing. Try to do the best thing. But if we never face a challenge when fear comes up, we get stuck. Fear is the avoidance of pain. And so then you sit with the fear as if that is processing something, but in this context it's not helping you. Move into the wisdom of being able to be in pain while staying with a heart that is open. Stay in relationship. Stay in a loving, open, gentle presence in yourself with another, while there is pain, while there is fear, while maybe another is not acting in the best way.
The encounter that opened everything
It's actually a very short story. I met someone, and that is where non-duality opened up for me. Before meeting them, I was doing business like a normal person. I have no religious background. For some reason, meeting this person led to non-duality. It was a total change in my life. I hardly believe what non-duality is, but I just got into it and couldn't get out.
So there's somebody you met that led you into non-duality. Is that what you're saying?
Yes. After meeting them, I felt this nothingness that was experience. I felt like I was out of space, that sort of feeling. Like what a lot of people describe feeling when there's no one. That's what I felt after meeting them. So that's why I'm here.
Are you talking about a fear in a relationship?
Yes, it's related, because it's painful as well. I have no contact with them, and for some reason having no contact brings a lot of pain and fear.
This is another person. Is it a teacher, or...?
I was teaching them Chinese language lessons. That's how I met them. It's one person.
And that is painful for you. You want more contact?
Yes. But it's strange, because I don't actually know them that well. I only did some teaching lessons for them.
What we fear is what we desire most
What can happen is clear. You met somebody and there was some form of opening, some transmission. And this was before you met me, many years ago. I understand there was an opening. So when you were saying recently there was this fear and you sat with it, it's your relationship to this same person.
Yes. It seems that since then I've been living with this pain. I've tried many ways to work with it, and it's just still here.
Is this pain the longing to have more closeness or contact? Is it related to that?
I have no idea what it is. It's beyond understanding.
I'm trying to connect what you expressed: fear, sitting with fear, the relationship, the pain. What we fear is what we desire the most.
Yes.
What is it that you desire the most?
I don't know. I don't understand.
It doesn't matter if you understand. This is where I'm asking for inner integrity. You could simply say: "I met that person many years ago and I still have this very intense craving to be close to this person."
Right. I was thinking about what you mentioned regarding your relationship with your mentor, that you were in such pain after they were gone and then you realized it was all your projection.
When I spoke about that, I'm sure it wasn't said in quite that way, because that's not how I would speak about what happened. So it's interesting that your interpretation or memory shaped it that way. There was pain, which was grief, true grief of losing my teacher through death. I was also very close to him personally. So there was very real grief. There was also another pain I was speaking of, a deeper pain related to projection. And there was also the pain when I first met him: the craving and longing to be closer.
Yes. That's similar to what I feel.
The heart opening and the devotional process
Ultimately, if I can speak to it, what is happening is the heart opening. But the heart sometimes opens in a form where there is projection, where there is attachment to an individual. It can be a teacher; often it is. That needs to be acknowledged, because you can't battle with it and pretend it's not happening. That won't help. But ultimately, yes, it's the heart opening.
When you met this person and the illusion cracked, the heart opened as well, because the illusion is what protects and closes the heart. Now the heart is aching. But what the heart wants isn't the attention from another person. What the heart wants is for the love to go out. That's what happened to me. I remember one evening my heart just vibrated by itself, like a mobile phone vibrating.
This is the heart opening, and it can be powerful and scary and very confusing. It requires wisdom and tactfulness from yourself, and also from those you work with.
There is room for what I call the devotional process. The shift is for there to be not an interpretation that the pain is something missing, which is the first interpretation. The pain is in the heart, and the first reading is that something is missing, so we crave. We want. We can interpret it as needing attention, affection, caring from others, or a particular other.
The devotional process can shift that interpretation so that the pain is understood more truly for what it is. The energy is actually the desire to pour out the love that is here, outwardly expressed in this life toward what is here: others, our surroundings.
The practice of truth and the practice of devotion
There is the practice of truth, which is often what I focus on: the clearing of all illusions, so that then we can speak of the heart. So that then we can speak of love, and enter the process I describe when I talk about fear and pain. The pain is ultimately the heart. The protection, the false need to protect the heart, and then the offering of the heart to the world, the bleeding heart. That's where we have left the self-involvement with thought and are entering this life with our life force, offering our hearts with the vulnerability required. A devotional process can be very helpful here.
I had the luck that I was able to do that with my teacher. I had total devotion to him, and in his presence I just adored him. In the East it's very common to express devotion to a deity, but it can also be expressed to life itself: to the birds, to the plants, to beautiful art, to music. It is about the outward movement of that which is being kept within and protected.
In Indian traditions there are singing practices, ragas, devotional chanting, that can be very helpful. Whatever resonates for you. But it really is about getting in touch with the heart. This is what I think will shift you into a next phase where you're less caught in the push and pull with mind.
There's a pain in the heart, and there's the mind, and the illusion has been seen, and you're trying to clarify, but you still haven't really entered the process of the heart opening more fully. It's scary and painful, but trust that this is the way through. It is literally a downward movement: from the mind into the heart, into the reality of the world, and then out. Out of mind, into body, through the breath, into the heart, and then down and out. Then it can all be seen as what it always was, which is one, or not two. But you cannot go around the heart. You cannot bypass it. It's not going to work.
I try to listen. I try to sing into the body, but it doesn't work.
Things are changing, because we're now talking about this, and it's the first time. That's a big change. You've come to a point where this is coming up, and it's come up here, and you brought it up enough that we got to this. That's very significant. Remember when we started talking, it was a very technical non-dual conversation.
I tried to tell my mom about this. She shut me down.
Of course. Your mom's not going to understand. I would be surprised if she did.
I haven't told anyone else apart from you and one or two other people. They don't understand.
There is nothing wrong with you
No, because you're dealing with things that are very non-normal. It's so far from normal.
To the point where I don't know what's wrong with me.
Don't worry about that. We've all been there. There is nothing wrong with you. You are a healthy cell on a planet full of many unhealthy cells. You've managed to stay healthy, and so you're the odd one out. You're a rare case of a cell that has managed to stay, to some degree, sane. It's that innocence. It feels like a really deep fragility and vulnerability, a struggle to cope. But it is actually the deepest strength. It appears like a paradox. My own experience was that I felt so overwhelmed by everything, so incapable of dealing with life, so dysfunctional, so unable to understand anything around me, well into adulthood. And then I came to see that it was just a really deep strength, which was not of my own making. It's just what was given. I'm saying this so that at least you can see that it's in you too.
Pain that doesn't belong to you
Yes. I feel like this pain doesn't belong to me. It's not even tangible. It just comes up, and it's so strange.
I relate completely. There were also very deep pains that I felt before I met my teacher that were not personal. They weren't something that happened to me. It was just pain. It was transpersonal, collective. I don't want to name it precisely, but I know it wasn't mine.
What if you are touching dimensions of your being that are not limited to the body-mind, that are collective, that belong to the world, to people on the other side of this planet in the physical sense, and that it's a calling?
I realized I had a choice. I could contract and collapse and suffer in the face of that pain, which was worse than the pain itself. It got to a point where contracting was worse than the pain itself. And so I just went into the pain. I discovered freedom. I discovered that the pain was love. I discovered that it was releasing the burdens and pains of others. Through here, through me, through this, there was, to some degree, the alleviation of pain in others.
But it began through my own pain, my own fear, once that was no longer something to avoid. Once I could be with it, the more collective energies became my natural playground, my natural environment, the waves that I surf. Sometimes they become very personal again depending on the context. I know this touches on the more esoteric, but it is a very valid perspective of the relative reality. It's helpful to understand that there is more to this reality than our philosophy has explained.