How To Open Your Heart

An excerpt from my yet published book, "The Way: An Ancient Map for Modern Men," currently only available in the Brothers of Wisdom Community.

Once your foundation of truth is stable and you have done the work of reclaiming your honor, you can really begin to fall in love with life. The doorway to love is surrender.

The practice of honoring the emotions and energies stored inside of your body will open you. As you expand, what you experience changes. Resentment gives way to grief; grief gives way to love. Toughness gives way to softness. Excess rationalization turns to peace. Sarcasm and cynicism give way to anger, anger gives way to rage, and rage gives way to pure energy. All emotions that are stored or trapped within you, given to you by life, are actually pure energy. They have simply taken temporary shapes. Due to your resistance, they have not been given the opportunity to expand into something sweeter, such as devotion, yearning, love, or ecstasy.

These emotions that are stuck within your body are simply that way because they haven’t received proper care. Maybe you possess within you a great love for your family and a desire to protect them. However, in a previous instance, that has since become a repeating pattern, you were unable to protect them and therefore unable to give them the care and devotion that is innate to your being. This may have created great guilt, grief, and even self – punishment within you. This caused you to forget about your deeper beauty and forced you to identify with the failure, creating an inauthentic surface personality. If this story were true, you would need to honor what you had experienced by being with it deeply. What does it mean to be with something deeply? It means to see something as it really is, not as you take it to be. Once something is witnessed for the truth of what it is, it will naturally unfold from a place of pain to a presence of love. This is the essence of opening your heart.

Stored emotions and energy are no different than the truth of the sages and the wisdom of the ages. They do not belong to you. They are impersonal. They are causal responses to the forces of the universe and as such they have no business remaining within you for any longer than it takes for you to experience them fully. If you are still experiencing something that is no longer happening, you are in resistance. What happens when you block a water pipe or throw boulders in a stream? The flow of water becomes blocked and the water that would otherwise reach its destination is backed up. Water that is backed up creates stagnation, begins to smell, and negatively impacts the health of the entire ecosystem. Can you imagine what your emotional and energetic blockages are doing to your own health, attitude, and personality, let alone your relationships?

Working from the level of truth to the point of honoring what is, you find that you are not what you thought you were. In fact, as it turns out, your “self” as you know it is a construct of past experiences that have been unresolved and not yet felt, honored, released, loved, and integrated back into the wholeness of your being. You find that as you continue to let go of the wounding and its symptoms, that you are something different altogether. You may not even know who you are anymore. You begin to feel the grace and nectar that is fundamental to every emotion and every experience. What was once resistance and challenge eventually becomes exquisitely delicious love. You learn that your personal identity is limited. The recognition of truth and the practice of honor are gifts from life to expand you into something much greater. Whereas before your entire life was about getting what you wanted and avoiding what you didn’t want, your life at this point is about surrendering everything that you hold inside of you. It’s surrendering everything that keeps you from feeling what you really want to feel: wholeness, completion, perfection, unity, harmony, love, joy, bliss, peace, power, clarity, and laughter.

You finally know what it means to live with an open heart.