Awakening Our Radiant Hearts
Discovering Your Mystical Body – Part 3
“The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire”
In the heart of our mystical body resides a radiant flame of love. This is the divine fire of the heart of God in your heart. The loving essence of your truest, deepest heart.
Can you feel it? Have you felt it before? Do you know your deep heart?
Most of us probably experience our hearts as the emotional center of our body. In the mystical body, our experience of each of our four centers includes but also goes deeper than our everyday awareness from each of these centers. Nowhere is this more apparent to us than our heart center, which has long represented the seat of human emotion and feelings.
The mystical heart is a source of passion that burns with a powerful intensity but also is anchored in something more than our often fickle and fleeting emotions. It is not so centered on our individual stirrings, which are often rooted in our own needs and desires. It is not separate from our emotions, but shines through our everyday heart to illuminate and refine from deeper within. This is the divine flame living into and through our heart.
Awakening to our mystical heart is to enliven this flame within. To stoke the radiant fire of the divine heart within our heart so that it blazes forth with love. That it burns with bliss and emanates through us as luminous presence and glowing resonance with others.
Mystical States of the Heart
As an ardent religious Christian in my youth with some early childhood trauma, I would regularly pray a prayer based on a prophesy of Ezekiel, “take from me my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh.”
My own wounding and coping mechanism of shutting down my emotions as a young child kept me from being able to experience a healthy heart, and as I didn’t know how to find healing at the time, I simply wanted a spiritual quick-fix.
Emotional wounding can cause us to build fortresses around our hearts, which seal us off from the pain—but also from love and other helpful emotions. Just as with any of our centers, if we have trauma and healing work to be done, that can be a barrier of entry to the deeper states of our mystical body. It doesn’t have to be though, it just might change how we go deeper, bypassing our pain body for access to a deeper healing source (to then return and reintegrate).
As we go through the states in the heart and in all the centers, it’s important to understand that these states are not hierarchical. All are necessary in the complete, integrated human experience. The goal is not to reach a pinnacle and just try to keep getting back there. It can be just as helpful to dwell in a heart of gentle, glowing care as to be in the lofty state of universal communion. Indeed, we will probably live most of our lives in the former rather than the latter—and perhaps that is what is more natural and beneficial for us and the world.
In moving from ordinary consciousness, we begin with an entry state that serves as the beginning step into mystical body awareness. For the heart, many will come to this through our emotions. We can “activate” our heart by bringing our attention to any sensation or energy in our heart that may be present already as feelings. Or we can “stir up” feelings by connecting to external sources of emotion, such as someone we love deeply. This can help begin the process of becoming more aware of our heart energy, of the kindling within. As we intentionally welcome and allow the free flow of awareness in our heart space, we gradually deepen in our heartfulness.
Any of these processes can lead us into the awakened state of spiritual knowing from our heart, most characterized by radiant love. The felt-sense of this love is deeper than our emotional experience of love—or rather, it takes our previous experience and capacity of love and connects it to a deeper source, making it more resilient, less conditional, and deeply interconnected.
While some have dramatic sudden experiences of awakening that make this mystical heart immediately available, most of us will find that over time and with practice, the “barrier of entry” will lessen. We will pass through this entry state more easily as our awakened heart becomes more readily apparent and accessible—that is one of the fruits of practice.
What is perhaps most dynamic in awakening to our mystical heart is entering the relational field with openness and trust. As the heart is the relational center, it most naturally comes alive through resonant connection. Just as fire burns stronger with more logs, so too our hearts when joined in an intentional field such as a WeSpace group. More on that below.
In the awakened heart, we have the source of the deep surge of love that can propel us to open up, to come out from our fortresses and barriers and engage in the flow of loving connection. We can offer freely the flame of compassion and come more into a loving presence that manifests in how we treat others. Living from this awakened heart of love is to dwell in the divine-human realm of Christ consciousness—the mystical presence of embodied love incarnated in us.
We can also enter into the unified state of the heart through the deep core of our heart and the heart of God within. This is the place of universal communion, of embracing all in the eternal flame of the sacred fire that has burned throughout all time and will always endure, that will never be consumed or extinguished.
“The mystery which is present in my heart is the mystery which is also present in every human heart. In the place where God abides no one is separated from his [sic] brothers and sisters. At the very centre of his heart, where God is and where God alone is, he finds mysteriously present the whole human family and all creation.”
The Mythic Structure of Consciousness
For each of the four centers, we’ll briefly be looking at its corresponding structure of consciousness as described by Jean Gebser. This will help us to understand more fully how we can inhabit these body centers as seats of awareness, knowing and sensing from each.
The heart center corresponds to the mythic structure of consciousness, which is to say our relational way of knowing and living. Here “mythic” refers primarily to the dynamic of story, or going out from the familiar and encountering the world as something to experience, to learn from, to wrestle with, to relate and engage with. From the unity of all things in the magic structure of consciousness, our awareness opened up to the world as other. An object set apart. The experience of polarities.
(How we understand myth as a source of wisdom and knowing is a discussion for another place, as we have a different focus here—just know that we are not talking about applying mythic-literalism as a way of coming to ultimate truth).
“It is via the polarity that mythical man [sic], as he becomes aware of dream in myth, comes to an awareness of consciousness; standing in the circle, he courses through the cycle of dream and wakefulness, a cycle of awakening.”
Reintegrating this structure of consciousness into our everyday awareness is to re-welcome and learn to trust again our heart as a dynamic source of wisdom and perception. We speak often of “following our hearts,” but in healthy expression this is not just what my heart wants, but feeling the direction and connection of others as well, of the community. This is what we might call comprehending—which literally means to hold or grasp together. Etymologically, to comprehend can even refer to a sort of “catching fire,” when the flame seizes another in close enough proximity.
In this way polarities become complementary. Because we can hold the human family in our hearts (and the cosmic family), we can embrace and integrate difference as the seed of life. The necessary diversity that creates the new, the fertilization from creative tension and synergetic variety.
In and of itself this structure is incomplete and insufficient, but when held in its place and integrated into the other structures, it becomes a liberating inclusion of healthy distinction and beneficial duality.
The “We” of the Heart
We experience this healthy dualism very naturally in our human experience of intimacy. Similarities are often attractive, but no one wants to be with an exact clone of themselves. It is through the beauty and delight of uniqueness that we find ourselves reveling in the joy of intimacy. It can be fun to dance alone at times, but a partner really brings the dance alive.
This is also why it can be so healing to hear the stories of others. It is a primary way that we can find ourselves connecting and resonating in our heart space through another.
This day and age, where so many are isolated and plagued by loneliness and separation, we face a pervasive substitute for heart intimacy and connection—the displacement of our own active heart participation in our lives into a vicarious substitution through observing and watching stories. Getting caught up in the affairs of others, of books, of movies and tv series. There’s nothing wrong with taking in these stories—they can be healing and motivating—so long as we don’t give away our own lives while just continuing to passively observe and watch others.
The invitation so necessary today is to come into our own stories, to come out of our shells and enter into the dynamic field of relational connection and possibility. To find our own myth not just through the individual adventure and hero’s journey (where “I” am always the main character), but through the larger story that is more than just about “me.”
Much of our culture has largely rejected metanarratives, but we all long to be part of a larger story than just our individual life’s journey. What is the more inspiring, greater story that we might discover together?
In the mystical heart, we enter deeper than the emotional feeling of connection through stories, into the open and interconnected field that is much more alive and dynamic. We can participate in the interplay of the WeSpace—receiving, resonating, and responding in conjunction with one another in real time. This is the difference between listening to a beautiful piece of music and being part of the orchestra.
We love a good piece of music just as we love a good story. But our hearts long for more. We want to become players. We want to be alive in energetic felt reality of co-participation and co-creation. We want to live our stories deeply and with greater purpose, not just alone, but alongside the many forms of the intimate face of God-Beside-Us. Living in the loving communion. We want to beat with the collective pulse of the divine heart.
The more we practice dwelling in our awakened hearts with others, the more we will find it natural and resonant to live from and with this dynamic, interconnected heart in all areas of our lives.
“The ‘bridge’ to mystical participation is to be found in the ‘interconnectedness between persons’ and nature.”
Trusting and Integrating Your Mystical Heart
When your mystical heart has come alive, you begin to find that it has a lot to “say” and be in your daily life. The first step is learning to trust this heart knowing and being more and more. To not always feel the need to filter it through your mind. To come into the loving awareness of the deeper “WE” field that is always at play among us. The more you join in the play, the more you will feel its reality, its truth, and the deep value of living this way from the heart.
The movements we make from there, integrating this heart awareness and consciousness into our daily lives, will look different for each person and life situation. It will unfold in conjunction with each of our stories and how we are bringing ourselves to bear in the midst. But here are a few common movements.
In the mystical awakened heart, you find you are less bound by your individual wants and desires, and so you are able to operate from your “bigger” heart. You can feel the bigger story and the wider field at play in all situations (even if you can’t “see” it). Life becomes more about “We” and “All” than just about “me.”
Though for those who are more naturally other-focused or heart-outward types, integration might need to found more in connecting more intimately and personally with their own interior heart to complete the resonance and come to more holistic presence. They are already well-aware of the external dynamics, but might need to find how their own unique heart comes to play. What is their own crucial part in the song?
Another avenue of integration might be a movement toward devotion. One of the great paradoxes of the heart is that the more you give away in love, the more you are. A flame shared makes only a greater fire. Of course, this can be abused and manipulated if approached from a grasping heart. And we can “run out of fuel” if our fire of love is not sourced in the eternal flame. But our hearts long for someone to love, for someone to warm, for something to give ourselves to. What might that be for you?
As we find our hearts radiating more from this loving flame, we can also learn to participate actively in the transmission of our heart energy to others. This is coming into our heart power in the field of love, blessing others in mystical and energetic ways that can help foster release, opening, awakening, and more.
How are you finding more integration with your mystical heart?
Answer in the comments below or set the intention to have a meaningful conversation about it with someone you trust, with your WeSpace group if you’re in one, or join us for deepening engagement and co-exploration around the heart center this Tuesday, November 23rd at 3pm CT. Sign up here.