LIVING FROM THE HEART

 Heart Chakra by Kim Dreyer

Copyright © Kim Dreyer 2011.  All rights reserved.

So much of what I read and hear these days has to do with living from your heart center, not your head - love not fear.  Below are my thoughts and feelings about this.  I have found it quite difficult to put them in the right words, because for me so much of it is more a feeling than a thought.  But here goes....

It is time for us to move from a life based on fear to a life based on love.  This is something that has been written and talked about for ages.  And it seems, more and more the message is coming through stronger and stronger, that we need to do it sooner rather than later.  We cannot carry on living on this planet the way we do.

Our minds drive and control our fear.  But it is in our hearts where we need to be, where love is.  It is generally agreed that  when we live from our minds and allow our thoughts to control our lives, we fall into a pattern of fear based experiences.  Along with fear comes all the other negative emotions - anger, hate, jealousy and many more that most of us struggle with daily.  These negative emotions also bring with them stress, dis-ease and suffering.

If we lived from our heart center, these negative emotions and the miriad of dis-eases they cause would disappear.  But it is not easy to change from thinking with the head to feeling with the heart.  Especially if others around us are still living a life based on fear.  After all, we have all been brainwashed into this way of life from the day we are born, so it is what we know and what we are used to.

We are taught to live from a position of fear from our parents and as we grow up we get this same message from our educational systems, our religious institutions, from government and large corporations, even in the advertising we see on TV!  Eventually this fear effects our thinking to the extent that we can no longer see things logically, nor think clearly for ourselves.  And all these negative emotions control every aspect of our lives.  From our relationships to our careers, our happiness and our health.

But the big question is, how, after a lifetime of living from our heads and fear, do we change and live from our heart centers.  There is no easy, quick-fix.  It takes a lot of hard work and dedication as well as many hours of soul-searching.  But the most important thing is you must WANT TO!  And not 'want to' because you think it is the right thing to do, but really 'WANT TO', a feeling from deep down within you.

Most of us probably wouldn't even know when we are in our heart centers.   So we need to teach ourselves to 'think' through our hearts.  When a thought comes into our heads, we need to move it down to our heart and FEEL it.  If this thought feels right once it is in your heart, then that thought should resonate with love, if you are being true to your heart. If it does not, the thought is still being controlled by your head/mind.   You could also think back to a situation when you felt  that warm glow in the center of your chest.  When your mind wasn't thinking about anything, but your heart opened up to a feeling of joy, love, contentment.  Perhaps it was when you saw a loved one you hadn't seen for a long time; or someone did something for you when you were sick or sad that made you feel loved and cared for; or the joy you get when your pet showers you with a loving welcome when you return home from a days work; or the peace and contentment we get sitting in nature.  We all DO have these 'heart feelings' tucked away somewhere.  We just need to reach within and bring their energy, the feeling, back to the present and experience it.

I believe that if we can use our hearts to go back to a time when we felt this way, when we felt an unconditional love and then allowed that warm feeling in our hearts to grow and then learnt to keep it there for as long as we can, we are a step closer to living in our hearts.  All we then need to do is to 'go there' every day and soon we will be able to bring that feeling back in the blink of an eye.  The trick then would be to keep that feeling for as long as possible and at the same time go about our daily lives with that feeling of love held in our heart.  Even if we feel we do not have these feelings or find it difficult to bring them out, we can teach ourselves to feel unconditional love from deep within our hearts - it just takes will and practice.  Soon it would become such a natural thing to do that one would be able to stay in the heart and eventually live a life based on love and not on fear.