Heart Medicine

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

“From the moment of your beginning, through all days

Of mood and dream,

The music of your heart has never stopped.

Sending its rhythm along vein and bone,

It has held you alive and present.

Even when you visited deep into the realm of silence,

Your heart’s music never ceased.

Only death’s silence will stop it.”

(John O’Donohue)

The other week I was given a gift from a spiritual teacher I hold in high regard. She offered me some kosmic medicine (kosmic being a Greek word meaning ‘a sense of harmonious order of the celestial spheres’, close but not the same as cosmic – a scientific term for outer space) and I took it.  Her kosmic medicine was the suggestion to take painful thoughts and feelings down into my heart space.  The heart, she told me, has greater digestive capacity to assimilate this hard stuff than the mind.  In other words, get out of your head and into your heart.   I tried it and it works.  Here is how I see it….

We are, in these chaotic, confusing, cosmically challenging times awash with information, misinformation, fearful projections, distressing data and generally bad news.   It comes at us from all directions.  We hear the stories and our minds make up our own personalized versions of hell and hardship coming down the line towards us.  The future feels anything but safe. Peace of mind has vanished. Everything is so cerebral and messed up.  And in this we have all been innocent targets for the imprinting the psychopaths have imposed for centuries. We have been conditioned to fear life and to fear death. What else is there? No wonder it has worked out so well for them.

We are in desperate need of some sort of remedy.  Enter, the heart.

The hidden teachings of ancient wisdom traditions tell those who would seek the truth of our embodied existence that the human heart is the seat of the Overself.  It is the habitat of the world-mind within the body; the meeting place, so to speak, of the individual self with the divine (world-mind, source) and is thus a physical center of tremendous importance.  The teachings tell us the heart is the focal point where the Overself (higher self, divine self) affects the personality and the karmic forces become active – therefore breaking into space-time existence.  Physical experience becomes possible only when consciousness and the brain capture and magnify these thought-forms transmitted from the heart. The brain and sensory system convert the received vibrations into an image of which the individual becomes conscious.  Tragically, through thousands of years of trauma inflicted on our ancestors and now ourselves, by the blood-lust of the controllers, we have been programmed to live in fear. Through the control mechanisms of religion and money (= power) and more recently, scientism, we have internalized a deep fear and distrust of life. And an equally penetrating fear of death.  Our true nature and history have been kept from us, by design and in the process we lost our trust in and kinship with nature and her principles. Humankind was easier to control in fear and ignorance. Who perpetuated this catastrophe on us and why is another story.  There came a time in our ancient history where individual ego evolved out of the tribal matrix - as a survival mechanism.  We began to compete with each other for limited resources as physical survival became a struggle (in a shift of ages). The ego-mind came to fore as we fell into an acute sense of separateness (the fall of Biblical myth?) not only from our true home but now too from our tribal groups.  Our age had begun. The purity and benign thought-forms coming from the heart in accord with nature, came to be tainted and dictated by the ego-mind’s fear programming.  Our so-called civilization lead the way in this. Indigenous people, those living close to our mother Earth and aware of her natural principles and their own origins, are not so burdened.

So yes, we need help. The kosmic medicine is remedial in its power to alter the trajectory of our ego-mind, fear-based programming.  The technique is to drop painful feelings, thoughts, emotions down from the head or mind space into the heart. It is an ancient (and largely unknown) practice that has an immediate physiological effect and is not complicated or difficult.  Say you have had some disturbing information concerning a loved one. Their health and well-being could be impacted and you are deeply troubled by this information. You are aware of scary images somehow being conjured up in your mental field of possible future outcomes. You feel a heavy vice-like sensation in your heart space. In fact you can tell your entire vibratory frequency has been lowered and it doesn’t feel very good.  You wish you never had the information; that you didn’t know all you do about the situation.  But you do. And we can’t unknow what we know.    Then you remember the medicine….. You consciously see the person you are worried about, perhaps even see their name in letters. You then sink the images and feeling of the person ‘down’ into the area of your heart.  You can feel a subtle movement here, from your head area to your heart area.  Once they arrive in your heart simply breathe – in and out of your heart space.  Stay with the images and simple awareness of the person you are concerned about – but with nothing else attached. No thoughts. No stories of possible futures or emotions of fear or anger or frustration. Nothing. Just let the mind be quiet, stay with the breath and hold your focus at the heart.  A point comes when the feeling you’ve brought down of the person fades out and you are left with only the breath, coming and going from your heart.

This simple practice brings immediate relief.  The contraction of the heart that usually accompanies deep concern and fear – for self or someone else – is softened.  The beautiful thing about centering your awareness in the heart, rather than the mind, is that you automatically enter into the Now. The breath is a simple yet powerful entrainment with the present moment.  Stay in the heart and you will stay in the moment.  There is no future to worry about here. There is only this breath and that breath.  There is no past and therefore no regret here either.  Should a thought-form of past or future try to sneak into your attention quietly and simply let it go and re-focus on the area of your heart and the breath coming and going.  Unwanted thoughts will quickly dissolve when you cut off your attention.

This medicine works well when assailed with the pain of grief over the death of a loved one – perhaps triggered by a song, random memory or anything at all.  In the midst of the strong emotions, remember the practice……. see the person, see images, memory snippets of your experiences together, see and feel the totality of this person as you knew him or her - but without going into any great detail. Then, sink them all down together into your heart space. Focus on your breath, coming and going from your heart as you hold your loved one there.  Very soon the painful contraction of grief will morph into something new.  There may be a realisation that your loved one is even closer to you know, that you can call them up, visit them there, in your heart space any time.  There is a peace that comes to replace painful emotions. Furrow-browed agonised regrets and thoughts of ‘what went wrong’ and ‘what I could have done differently’ dissolve.  The crippling sadness of compassion and the pure grief for your loved ones’ dying and death softens and fades.   It can be an empowering feeling to know the painful emotions that leave us in tatters find, finally, relief in the neutralizing power of the heart.  We haven’t suddenly become compassionless and hard-hearted.  On the contrary, our love and compassion have been directed back to where they originated and where they belong, in our hearts, allowing our awareness to expand above and beyond the ‘stories’ we’ve told ourselves as we’ve tried to make sense of it all.  We realize there is no sense to be made in this life of such things.  We give our hearts to someone, we love them for a time, they love us, and then life dashes it all on the rocks of third-dimensional transience. It can be no other way. For whatever reason our love, the love we thought would last forever morphs somewhere along the way into something less, something we wouldn’t have chosen. Or it is extinguished altogether – by separation or death.

Only it isn’t. Love, even love gone badly wrong, is never really extinguished. It doesn’t just disappear. Its traces are left in our hearts.   If we practice and take the kosmic medicine with openness and without expectation we find that even the saddest story of love gone wrong or love lost can be transmuted.  Free of judgement of self and other, of regret and sadness and all the stories our mind tells us (thanks to the imprinting and our ignorance of our true nature) we can take our former beloved into our heart and keep him or her safe there – with all the experiences we had together, all the memories, happy and sad, good and bad. All of it, just there, being breathed.  Remember, the heart has far greater digestive capacity than the mind to assimilate all of the atrociously painful stuff we’ve been through. 

And we do need to assimilate it.  If we don’t the hand and heart-wringing continues, draining our life-force, exhausting our adrenals, eating us up with regret, guilt and other assorted low vibratory emotions. Further, if we deny and repress the reality of our painful experiences they quarantine in the cells of our bodies – blocking the free flowing energy of the life force, with the inevitable consequence in time of physical illness.   In this critical period we find ourselves living in, there is much in the outer world to depress and shrink our natural joy and peace of mind – we simply must address our personal emotional quality of life if we are to have any chance of coming through this. We need to take responsibility for our own health and well-being.  We need to focus on ourselves.  We cannot help others if we are weakened and sick ourselves and there are going to be a lot of people needing our help.  Remember too the ancient wisdom, that the heart (and the thought-forms it sends forth) is where physical existence originates.  Whilst we cannot take personal responsibility for the state of the world, we are, if we are alive, contributing to the overall frequency of our mother planet. If we are able to neutralize our fearful, anxious, regretful thoughts and emotions in the cauldron of the heart, the transfigured thought-forms will create more peaceful, positive lives in our 3D reality system.  In truth, we don’t have the luxury of time. So what’s to lose?  That said, I hope you will decide to try the kosmic medicine offered here.  See it as an adventure!   And do let me know how it goes.  Go well fellow truth seekers, may peace be the journey.