Stabilizing an Open Heart

When your heart opens, you know how it feels. The very vibration of your body seems to shift in significant ways. Your breath changes. Your attention quickens. Your mind stops racing and turns toward whatever you sense is the catalyst of a sensation rare and wonderful and beautiful.

Many believe that falling in love is how our heart opens. Yet our idea of “love” is often interpreted through the lens of our ego (our third chakra), rather than through the open aperture of our heart center. Love from the ego’s view is romantic, personalized with need and grasping. Love from a stabilized open heart is free, compassionate, and needs nothing else to feel complete.

Sometimes our heart opens through what seems like grace. It just happens. Like when you watch a sunset that reveals itself in a way you’ve never experienced. Or you look deeply into the eyes of a child and remember with your whole self the innocence and wonder of looking through brand new eyes. Or you sit in utter stillness, no thought, only now, and know you are present without need or projection. When your heart opens there’s a homecoming. You know yourself.

There is a difference between feeling the emotion of the heart opening (a feeling we often label as love), rather than cultivating the energetic vibration of a stabilized open heart—the non-personalized energy of profound compassion. It is possible to amplify and stabilize this energy as a gift to yourself and every individual you meet, independent of circumstance. It’s possible to anchor true, unconditioned compassion into a world confused by an over-romanticized idea of love and being open-hearted.

Beyond being a physical pump, your heart is a powerful energetic receptor and communicator, in continuous dialogue with your brain. Research undertaken by the Institute for Heart Math has shown that the heart generates an electromagnetic field 60 times greater in amplitude than that of the brain. It can be detected and measured beyond a person’s body, entraining others nearby to the same vibration. In other words, your heart field has a powerful influence on everything around you.

The field of energy around your heart is knowable. It has a shape. It has a feeling, a specificity you can come to know as well as you know your own hands. Because the heart perceives all of creation as electrical impulses of information, your heart is capable of perceiving the underlying truth of reality, ungoverned by interpretation of the ego or your thoughts. A stabilized heart field is capable of uplifting humanity, regardless of the difficulty and chaos we might face. We can learn to be awake, aware and stable in our heart field, even when we feel like our heart is breaking.

At Nine Gates Mystery School students train diligently to strengthen their embodied awareness of the human energy system and the unique vibration of each chakra. They develop skills to remain stable in the face of situations that could cause the heart to close, learning that outside events or outcomes do not have to affect their emotional or energetic state. Students come to realize that the true nature of the heart is equanimity. The heart does not grab onto anything or push it away; the personality does. The heart teaches them that holding onto or rejecting is the cause of suffering. The heart gladly embraces impermanence as the very nature of our existence. It longs to be that free.

In fact, the propulsive force of the heart field is impermanence itself—contraction giving way to expansion each moment. In this place we evolve from the cling of personality at the third chakra, to expansive surrender into greater Love and Compassion. One way to consciously stabilize the vibrational field of the heart is through a practice of Impermanence. This practice offers you the opportunity to dissolve emotional and mental constructs that create resistance and constriction, allowing you to meet whatever shows up with your entire presence … with your heart wide open.

(Click HERE for a Impermanence practice recorded by Deborah for Mystery School students.)

Love I pray that you break my heart so wide open
that the whole world falls in.
--Danya Rivers

Stabilizing an open heart requires presence and attention to your reactive impulses. It requires cultivation of our ability to offer compassion without condition or attachment to outcome. With these skills, we can make a conscious choice to respond from a heart-centered place. Rather than guarding our hearts as something fragile, we long for our hearts to be broken wide open to greater Awareness; ultimately becoming a strong and compassionate source for creating purposeful lives, serving the needs of others, aiding in the end of suffering for all beings.

Strong, awake, open and stable, our hearts were made for these times—when Love, beyond our romantic notions, can become a reunifying force of kindness. Redeveloping the capacity for heart-centered cognition leads to reclaiming personal perception of the living and sacred intelligence within the world. This reclamation of our ability to feel and think with a pure heart, eventually strips away the accumulated scar tissue leaving the heart flexible, capable of touching the true nature of Reality.

As taught in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries, until the heart becomes as light as a feather it is near impossible to be an effective instrument of beneficence on this Earth. Let’s train our hearts to be such instruments.