THE HEART OF LOVE

Never have I thought that one day I would lose touch with my heart.

Ever since I started my spiritual journey of self-discovery and self-realization, building a strong bond with my heart has been my utmost priority. You may ask, “What does connect with your heart mean?” I had the same question when I first started. My personal explanation would be our instinct or gut feeling. When I’m deeply connected with my heart, I feel safe and oftentimes I can make decisions with clarity and confidence. We are all born with not only 5 senses but also an extra sense. The 6^th sense is the gut feeling/instinct which some feel is too good to be true or too scary to be used.

From Mind To Heart

Being a wedding and event planner for more than 20 years had equipped me with the skill to anticipate potential problems or hiccups and come out with creative solutions. As I reflect back on my past profession, I realized that I had developed a natural attitude of using my mind to think, function and execute. Why? You see, as a wedding planner, I had also witnessed hundreds of couples expressing their deepest love and exchanging vows with each other. Almost every time I found myself asking this question in my mind in a rather condescending tone: How long can this love or vow last?

In my self-discovery journey, I started to change and slowly, things around me changed for the better too. I learned to recognize certain looping emotions which had not only prevented me from feeling love but also had me doubting love. Since then, I have had a better understanding about my character, behavior, thought patterns and much more. I had also began to feel the love that had been shut in my heart for years.

Just when I thought life was clicking into gear, unexpected and unpleasant news and events happened around me in quick succession in the recent few months. These developments created drastic changes in my life, threw me off-equilibrium and had me questioning everything about life all over again.

Disconnection

I felt lost. I was lost. Lots more fear surfaced. All my intuition, passion, motivation and even my life vitality seemed to just go “poof”. Losing the feeling of love and the connection with my heart frightened me. It scared me to my core. I could feel a shiver coming out from deep within.

I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit and do nothing. As a problem solver, I told myself there must be a solution for this; there must be something that can fix this situation and find my way back into my heart. There and then I decided to go on a water fast.

In my past experience, the water fast impacted my growth positively. I remember feeling lighter, brighter and even clearer after a 7-day water fast. Let’s do that again, I told myself. Let’s get the connection back — the connection with the love I used to feel within.

What Went Wrong

But this time it wasn’t the same. I struggled to even get through my first day of the fast. So I pushed myself further. I instructed my entire body and mind to pull this off together. On the second day, I felt really weak and suffered a bad headache. I felt drained emotionally. It was worse than when I wasn’t fasting. Yet, being a stubborn one who goes strictly by the book, I forced myself through even harder.

That’s when my body snapped. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything at all. I just wanted to lie in bed and give up everything – all my roles, responsibilities, dreams and purpose. I felt so suffocated.

From my perspective, swimming against the current makes me stronger. For me, this was me loving me. But why wasn’t it working this time?

After a discussion with my peers, I realized that I had been pushing my body and myself against my true wishes. I could have exercised a little more love and be gentle with myself but I did not. Instead, I chained myself down even more by wanting to get back to how I was before I became “lost”. What if I’m not supposed to go back to how I used to be but rather, be different from before?

Then I saw this beautiful quote from the Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh: “You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”

Love Is Free

Though loving myself, I felt suffocated, I didn’t feel free at all. Suddenly, it hit me and everything became clear. I realized I was overlooking the part about listening quietly and patiently to my body.

All the while, I was living my life with force. I was loving myself “forcefully” because I felt the need to do a lot of things, I felt the need to fix myself in many ways – physically, mentally, and from the aspect of my personality. I had never once trusted myself to be who I am. I had never trusted my heart when she whispers lovingly to me that “I am more than enough. I’m beautiful, I’m magnificent.”

Then I decided that it’s time to let loose and let go of all my wants, even the want to love myself, and just sit still quietly to listen to my heart. And that was when the magic happened. I felt my heartbeat once again. I felt the divine love flow through me again. It flowed through everything that was happening to me. Through a conversation with a friend, through a quote that popped up on my newsfeed, or through a gentle breeze from Mother Nature brushing against my face. I felt loved.

I know I am again a changed person. All along, I thought I knew what self-love was, and what the heart of love was. I have to admit that I missed the blind spots due to my self-proclaimed smarts.

What brought me back to my heart was taking a pause to drop everything and allowing myself to not do anything. I found myself a great spot in Nature (it’s best to be in Nature for these moments), where I sat very still and quiet, closed my eyes in meditation and just LISTENED to all the conversations that my heart wished to share with me. All that was needed then was to just allow the magic to happen. And it did.

My heart of Love beats once again,
Pounding stronger and louder,
With grace and ease,
Knowing all is well,
All it is.

“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh