The Promise of Heartfulness

Introduction – The invitation

Journal entry – March 1997

I have this vague gnawing in my gut. Intuitively I know that the gnawing must be the key to reclaiming my life, but I have a part of me that is terribly frightened to listen to it, or even acknowledge its presence. Maybe it is afraid of the unknown, comfortable in every day existence, or wondering why my life, as it is, is not enough. Or perhaps it is just too paralyzed to entertain a different way of being.

I have this other part that is so entrenched in its reactive ways of being and seeing the world, it is doing everything it can to make me believe its version of reality, and act accordingly. It is got me convinced that all my skewed perceptions are true, and the best I can do is just react to the outside world and all it throws at me. And it seems to be throwing a lot.

Maybe the gnawing is yearning. I know there is something more, and I long for it to be reflected in my outside world. I long for heartful connection to others, and for engagement with life itself; and I long for the feeling of expansiveness and flourishing that go along with it. I long to live in a larger way, where there is energy flow from my vital Inner Being to my external existence, and I want to engage with life in a different way. I want to engage with life to its fullest potential.

Mostly, deep down, there is a profound stirring in my heart waiting to be released, and waiting for a guide to help me do so.

We may have an occasional glimpse of it. We may know there is a deeper way to be connected to life, and we recognize it when we feel it. We know those times when the life force within us is thriving; we feel it in our internal world and we live it in our external existence. We feel it in our hearts, our souls, our brains and, indeed, every cell in our body. Our body reflects it back and it becomes the reality we live. It is truly an embodied phenomenon. It is filled with passion and purpose, calmness and clarity; being grounded in this life force is what gives us the experience of being fully alive. As we fully embody this life force within us, our external world adapts accordingly and there seems to be a flow of harmony from the life at our core to the life we live. We feel connected and engaged with both our Inner Being and our outer world.

And yet.

And yet most of us only get an occasional whisper of this existence. If we do at all. This divine flow from our inner heart to our outer world seems absent from our daily lives, or just experienced happenstance. We know there is another way to be, but we just cannot quite grasp it.

Many of us live our lives consumed with stress, chaos and anxiety, blame, shame and judgment. We live in constant reaction to the circumstances our external life provides, as if we have no choice in the matter. We may be our own worst enemy. Our perceptions and reactivities color the lens of our existence, and we behave and further react accordingly. We seem to be victims of our own reactions and emotional programming, and in a large sense we are. We might even try to force our outer life into attunement, when our inner life is still in chaos, and wonder why we are not happy. We long for the understanding and guidance to intentionally cultivate the life force deep within us, so it can flourish to its fullest potential.

This book offers a path to do just that.

It offers the promise of heartfulness.

In it, you will see that heartful awareness and engagement offers us a profoundly different way of being in the world. It offers us the opportunity to engage with life in a way that automatically reduces the stress and emotional chaos that so often consumes us, and allows a sense of expansiveness in connection with life itself to flourish. It offers the opportunity to truly embody a different way of being. When we look at human experience through the science of embodiment, we can see that the cultivation of heartfulness foundationally changes who we are, and who we are becoming.

We can see what blocks us from experiencing the life force deep within us, and how to calm, clear and heal those blocks. We can see that the intentional cultivation of, and true embodiment of heartful ways of being can potentially affect every cell in our body, and short-term changes become long-term operating patterns. This way of functioning in the world makes us more capable of connection to our own life force or Inner Being, as well as to others and our outside world. The way we see and behave in the world begins to transform in direct correlation to our own inner transformation, and we see tangible and specific ways to cultivate it in our everyday existence. In short, we can see, and intentionally embody, all that heartfulness has to offer.

The cultivation of heartfulness completely transforms our inner and outer lives to states of calm, clarity, connection, expansiveness, full inner potential, and a larger way of living. Heartfulness, embodied, profoundly changes who we are and how we function in the world. It gives us greater access to our Inner Being, or whatever life force lies deep within you, and greater, and more meaningful connections to others, and our outside world. It allows us a more expansive, larger way of being in the world. It changes the experience of being alive.

Using the science of our humanness, as reflected in the adaptive processes of our human body, we see that it is inner experience that profoundly determines who we are becoming at any given point in time. We see that life is indeed an embodied phenomenon, and, in fact, at this very moment we are the sum total of all of our life experience. We see how our past programming and perceptions were developed, and how and why we see the world in the way that we do. We see how we can begin to `re-program' ways of being that are no longer serving us, and how easy and `doable' it all is.

This science shows us that deep in our psyche there are embedded two very strong drives, or systems. One is a fear response drive that is hyper-reactive to any perception of threat, and is responsible for feelings of emotional chaos, stress and anxiety. The second is a calmer, much more stable drive; its desire is to bond and connect. Heartfulness stems from, and further cultivates this second drive.

These two drives are responsible for how we see the world at any given moment in time. Both were necessary for our species to survive, however physiologically it is impossible to be rooted in both drives at once. Both are continually being developed and perpetuated by our inner experience, and the one that we pay attention to is the one that dominates, and more strongly develops. At any given point in time we perceive our existence through the lens of the dominant drive. Through the `spiral of becoming' this perception becomes our inner experience,...