Live the Adventure of Your Life … It’s Waiting for You.
Live the adventure of your life.
I love how that feels. But then in what ways is this the reality for many of us?
What’s missing? How do we do it?
We’ve remarkable potential. It is beyond description.
So what captures our ongoing preoccupation with the concerns and problems of our day, year and life?
How do we navigate through the fog of confusion, complexity and lingering doubt?
How can we fully show up and live the adventure of our lives? Wholeheartedly!
FOR SEVERAL DECADES, these questions have absorbed and guided my life and service.
In brief, this began for me during my undergraduate years. I was a scholarship athlete for football and wrestling. The university environment was inspiring and enriching.
But I felt isolated, lost and preoccupied with confusion and doubt. I didn’t know why I was really there or what I wanted to do with my life.
I’m a good guy. Smart. Have potential. So why did I feel so miserable?
Where were the models and mentors to guide me? I felt betrayed by our culture.
I kept reaching out for support.
This led to becoming a licensed psychotherapist, first in the medical-model and then complimented it with the newly emerging transpersonal-model.
I’ve had life-changing mentors along the way, including working on a clinical team for 2 years with David Hawkins, PhD, MD.
“Hawk” was a respected pioneer in consciousness as he helped advance and align our understanding of the traditional and transpersonal perspectives of consciousness.
What then helped me integrate these experiences has been 2 decades of living near, and working closely with, the Indigenous people of the USA and Brazil.
By living close to nature, I experienced ways to sense my heart-consciousness, while living it during my day to day. Until then, it was simply a nice idea.
I began to realize how, when opening to my heart-consciousness, I experienced a quiet and stillness. The felt-sense of its subtle resonance was vitalizing.
I was learning to reconnect with my heart, while also experiencing the flow of my thinking, feeling and activity.
It was like pulling back the curtains of a mind-fog that had restricted the clarity and scope of my awareness.
It was awesome
ONGOING RESEARCH AND LIFE EXPERIENCE led to further discoveries.
Our heart-consciousness functions as our PRIMARY INTELLIGENCE. It organizes and guides our human-consciousness.
The qualities of our heart-consciousness include: an alert awareness, resonate stillness, soft vibrancy, and unity perspective promoting empathy, relatedness and cooperation.
The qualities of our human-consciousness include: our thinking (discerns, analyzes, makes decisions, and polarity perspective that operates by contrast and comparison), emotion (happens in response to our thinking and is experienced via feeling through our body, through which we are able to sense information, including what we like or not), and physical (the only area with tangible capabilities, responds to mental directives for physical movement, the vehicle through which intuition is experienced, cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought about it, and is able to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and feel emotion).
Note: fixed thinking, emotional upset and physical out of balance can block or pull us from the qualities of the heart.
“The heart and intuitive mind are a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten about the gift.” Albert Einstein
OUR CURRENT LIFE-CONTEXT
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply-ride the surfboard of our life? Just glow in the sun.
But then changes in the cycles and currents of our life requires understanding the dynamics of our heart-consciousness AND our human-consciousness. Further, how can we effectively integrate them both during the challenges of our day to day?
This is fundamental to our aliveness and functioning.
Yet it isn’t a focus of our formal education, as we have long lived away from nature.
Our opportunity for this learning is through the school-of-life-experience, aka, hard-knocks.
Ouch!
Through all of this we are preoccupied with navigating through the pace and scope of today’s mounting challenges.
It feels relentless because it is.
So what happens?
STUMBLING BLOCK
Through it all, our heart-consciousness gets pushed into the background as our human-consciousness gets front and center.
We become preoccupied in think-think-think, and reactive emotion, about the concerns and problems of our day, year and life.
In effect, our struggles with confusion and exhaustion fortify a wall around our heart.
Awareness of our heart-consciousness is not even on our radar.
We end up with a coat of heaviness restricting our heart's aliveness and guidance to fully live our life.
Yet, there is a way through it.
Your HEART-MAP It’s waiting for you.
Decide and Commit
Return to the Seat of Your Heart
Live It during Your Day to Day
We are now tasked with resolving the human predicament of remembering the consciousness of our heart and recreating ways to realign our human-consciousness with it.
1. Decide and Commit.
Keep it simple!
The intensity of our pace and demands can feel like a barn-fire. In effect, there’s no time to think about how to change and when. This keeps us stuck in whatever occupies our 24/7.
Simply decide and commit to creating the space and time to do this. Regardless!!!
What motivates you to do this?
What doesn’t change if you don’t?
Create a circle-of-support as a sounding board AND accountability.
Do it!!
2. Return to the Seat of Your Heart
Your heart-consciousness is always there inside you. Your focused attention might be elsewhere, but it's always there and accessible to you.
Much of our time is moving at a non-stop pace, while juggling several balls in the air.
So slowing down and creating space for returning to the seat of your heart-consciousness can seem impossible. But it is something you need to figure out.
Keep in front of you: what's the benefit … and … risk, if you don’t create this space for yourself.
Here’s a practice.
When possible, be in a quiet place.
Creating a background of structure can be helpful, such as, listening to music, moving around ’slowly’, being in nature, stretching, and anything that helps you feel calm and ease.
Begin with a few easy breaths, actually feeling it flow through your body. It can be helpful to count your breaths which guides your attention. For ex., 1 (in-breath & out-breath), 2, 3, 4. Repeats.
Allow your attention and breathing to be spacious rather than focused.
As you experience an increasing calm, imagine easing into the awareness of your heart. Simply imagine it. Release expectations.
Be child-like, open, alert and curious.
Ease your awareness from the thinking space of your brain to the felt-sense of your heart.
Spent a few moments feeling your heart’s resonance. It's very subtle.
With practice, you can develop the ability to ease into the felt-sense of your heart. As you start, after a few seconds your attention may likely get distracted and bounce back to your thinking. So keep returning to the felt-sense of your heart again and again.
Note: My my second book, Unwavering Heart: 5 Steps to Becoming Your Destiny, 2017, describes and illustrates these practices for returning to the seat of your heart.
3. Live It during Your Day to Day
Set the tone for your day by scheduling and protecting times when you will step out of the noise into more calm and quiet.
Start your day with mindfulness for a few minutes.
Continue by having times when you are mindful, such as before meals.
End your day with a few more minutes of mindfulness to clear your day in preparation for quality sleep.
Keeping your heart open, or reopening, when it is trying to close.
Consistent practice, such as mindfulness, enables your direct experience of it. Also, it creates a foundation that can be accessible throughout the course of your day.
Become familiar with the felt-sense of being open.
Fortify yourself with a high level of self care; spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. When one area gets upset, it upends the others.
Develop the ability to notice when you are just beginning to close. Have simple strategies for getting calm, clear and open.
Also have a series of strategies for regaining stability and balance when stuck in a struggling mindset.
It’s an ongoing practice requiring your discipline and awareness.
At times It can be easy to get down on yourself. Remember, this is work of a lifetime. Just keep working with it. Regardless!!
Simply focus as best you can along the continuum of easing more and more into your heart-consciousness. Dancing back and forth between your heart and being stuck in think - think and emotions, you can progress one moment and day at a time.
As you continue to apply these practices, the qualities and potential of your heart-consciousness reveals itself. You can feel flows of lightness and ease, along with sensing a subtle intuition about something. You will simply know it.
However there can be a tendency to discount this experience by overthinking it.
There’s a learning curve for discerning between the subtle, felt-sense of your heart-consciousness and the exclusive, laser focus of your critical thinking (human-consciousness).
Your heart is the core of who you are. Develop an awareness of, and relationship with it.
Acknowledge it. Love it. Communicate with it.
Asking questions helps focus your awareness and inspire response from it.
By practicing this over time, you become more familiar with the experience and language of your heart.
Embrace your Heart-Map.
Live the Adventure of Your Life … It’s Waiting for You.
Applying your isights.
What about all-of-this has touched your heart?
What have you decided, and will do, in response?
What are the motivations, structures and supports that will help you progress each-of-the-steps along your way?
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Author via amazon.com
Unwavering Heart: 5 Keys to Living with Fierce Authenticity, 2014
Unwavering Heart: 5 Keys to Becoming your Destiny, 2017
otan@otanpatrickford.com 1.973.229.7174 https://www.otanpatrickford.com