Cultivating Our Capacity for Connectedness
Heart Consciousness Growth
Practicing Community – Part Three
Once we have been unbound by the illusion of our separateness and individualism, we begin to recognize more and more how we are interconnected. We see the myriad ways we are not islands of Self, but members of a collective, divine body of Christ. That is to say—not “members” of a church or religion—but co-participants in the body of God on earth today.
And yet, we may also experience difficulties in actually living into and operating from this place of deep mutuality. While we may feel deep longings and have sincere intentions to engage more directly in our communal nature, it perhaps doesn’t come easily to us. Or we may not quite know how to do it. Though it is natural—in our deepest nature—it may often feel foreign at first. Or we may simply have to pace ourselves to rebuild the atrophied muscles of this under-utilized capacity.
However, even though we need to “work out” these muscles of connection, deep communality is not something that we build with individual effort and focused striving. We find our inner capacities of connectedness coming to life when we relax the grip and become receptive. When we open to the gift of one another and make space available within “us” for “them.” When we widen our awareness in our interior world to find we are not alone “in there.”
This is vital spiritual work in our age of the individual journey, even if we don’t feel it acutely at the moment. The illusion of separateness holds up when we feel things are going well. When things fall apart, that’s when we feel more acutely our need for care and connection from others. The mirage of our self-sufficiency falls away and loneliness sweeps in. The frailty of spiritual isolation.
Or maybe we already feel it. The more. The summoning from just beyond what we currently experience. That we are never alone. That invitation to open up into something more, into a larger story and even, indeed, a larger body.
To come into this more deeply, we will need to embrace the inner work of growing our hearts, of breaking open, of turning toward, of not running away, and many other capacities that widen the channels of how we might participate in our mystical interbeing. Of how we come into ways of being in our deep connectedness.
Coming into a Bigger Heart
I love the part in How the Grinch Stole Christmas where the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day. It’s such a visceral picture of the type of transformation needed—an actual increase in the capacity of our hearts.
And it’s something I have personally experienced. Not that I was ever diabolical like the Grinch, but long ago I used to pray, “God, take from me this heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh.” It took some time and quite a process, but God definitely answered that prayer and more. Not just a heart of flesh, but the burning heart of deep love and bliss came alive in me. And it felt kind of like that picture, bursting the frame of what I thought contained the space of my heart.
One thing I had never really noticed before about that moment for the Grinch. When the breaking point of transformation comes, he’s trying to hang on to the sled with all the stolen goods of Christmas. And he’s hanging upside down. He’s sliding down the hill, about to lose it all. But now he doesn’t want it so that he can withhold and keep it away. He wants to save it so he can give it away. So he can give it back and more.
Often, for our hearts to grow, they need to be broken open. Our world needs to be turned upside down. We need to come to a breaking point.
Breaking Open
Sometimes it is concentrated in a one-time, intense event. Our hearts are shattered in a terrible moment of breaking. Deep pain, enduring grief, and we are forever changed.
Sometimes it is the slow fracturing of our heart breaking piece by piece. The chipping away as a slow death of love abandoned, ignored, abused, neglected.
Today, we may feel our hearts constantly pierced by the regular waves of news bearing the terrible things happening all over the world. It may seem like more than we can bear. And, in truth, it is.
Parker Palmer describes it this way:
“Breaking your heart” (which we normally understand as a destructive process that leaves one’s heart in fragments), is reframed as the breaking open of one’s heart into larger, more generous forms—a process that goes on and on until the heart is spacious enough to hold both a vision of hope and the reality of resistance without tightening like a fist.
The breaking point of our hearts becoming more generous is not when they break, but when we are able to choose to open our (ever-breaking) hearts to something more than our pain, something bigger than our personal story and our separate heart.
Our human heart breaking can open us up to the divine heart shining forth from deeper within. The heart of God that is ever-present in the core of our deepest heart. We come into the mystical heart of Christ, the divine and sacred human flowing with a love of ten thousand hearts bursting forth through what is now an open channel.
Breaking Our Hearts Wide Open by Pamela Castillo
If we haven’t broken open, our hearts will be too small.
If we turn away from the pain and hide from the risk of greater love, our hearts will shrink away.
Turning Toward
“There is no community unless you are willing to be wounded.” – Bayo Akomolafe
To come into the spiritual practice of growing our heart’s capacity, we “take heart” and find the courage to live from this deep heart. The strength of the divine flame that burns brighter with every heart co-joined in radiant presence.
This gives us the capability to not just respond to the external circumstances that come toward our heart, but to meet in deep mutuality and loving strength that which we know will eventually wound us.
It’s not that in this radiant heart we can no longer be hurt, but we have the fortitude to choose to turn toward and embrace. We can choose to be with vulnerably rather than run away, instead of fighting, without defensiveness.
We do this because we are free to give in such a way for the other (because we know and feel we are not separate). Just as much, we do it because we know that this is how we grow.
It is not through uniform agreement or monochromatic blending that we find deep community. But through creative tension, pain, and even wounding that we can come into deep resonance. A loving community is not without tension or conflict. They are the gateway into the real thing.
This requires a choice to stay with. A capacity to endure dissonance. To be with what “I don’t like” in a way that frees us from simply following the whims of our own temporary proclivities. The self-referential appetites of the moment.
There is a steady accountability of sorts, not by an externally-binding contract or coercive pressure, but through a deep covenant of the heart to keep showing up. To keep turning toward, moment by moment, that which is authentically real in the field of mutual presence—whether that be the blissful joys of mystical communion or the discouraging disappointments of particular impasses and differences.
As Richard Rohr often says, the two primary paths into deep transformation are great love and great suffering. We live them day by day in the small acts of love and the little, pointed sufferings that come before us. And in truth, these are ultimately the same path.
The generous heart
does not collapse into the easy things,
but rises up in adversity.
It settles for nothing.
Faith lifts it higher and higher.
– St. John of the Cross
Transforming through Love & Spiritual Intimacy
As we practice being with suffering, staying with tension, and bearing forth the new life emerging through, we will find this only deepens and co-informs our path of love.
We will come into, alongside our increasing capacity to bear suffering, an invitation within our hearts toward greater spiritual intimacy and closeness. We will not be afraid of intimacy, but more and more find it the natural state of our hearts.
This does not mean that are best friends with everyone or that we need to be romantically polyamorous. It means that our love is no longer powered by exclusivity. It is not just reserved for the special few who have somehow earned it or cleared a bar of societal evaluation—whether that be familial, proximal, or otherwise.
Touching into the reality of our mystical interbeing, love is not something I contain within my own individual heart and decide when and to who it might be doled out. Rather, it is an already existent underlying flow rooted in the universal divine body and being at the source of us all.
Yes, we still have layers and degrees of spiritual intimacy and community. If we are fortunate, we will find our “Deep We” of close, mystical kinship and intimate presence with one another as sometimes happens in our WeSpace groups.
We will also benefit from being a part of a larger “Collective We” that incorporates a greater diversity of experience amidst our community. This widens the field of possibility for generative co-creation and capacity for collective transformation, both within the community itself and in the outflow of loving expression and work.
We can find as well that our capacity for connectedness will also extend into the “Universal We.” That we are intricately related and co-dwell in the same field of love with all things. That our heart is a single bloom on a tree in a vast forest with a shared root network of the infinite web of linkage and interflow. And we can be with it all. In it all. As all.
In each of these circles of loving presence, we find a degree of intimacy and expression that all flow from and into the same source of love.
And so we become unbound by the limitations of finite resources. Our capacities of love know no bounds nor are restricted to self-imposed confines. The boundaries are permeable and love flows freely, not just within the “in-group” but into the world. It can reach and transform “outside” the context of the community as well through who we are, how we live, and the loving, energetic presence we emit.
How we channel and flow with that love in various settings and situations will vary, but that will not be because of our own lack of inner resources. It will be because of the necessities of the situation and the capacities of receptivity.
This is not an individual power, but is only possible in the mystical community of love. In conjunction with the intimate, collective, and universal heart integrated and alive within us.
This mystical intimacy and liberated love is the full capacity of the divine heart, increased exponentially through each heart and soul awakened to its reality and flowing presence. This golden heart deeply enriches our lives but goes well beyond that. For it is alive and present to so much more than our own personal existence.
How do we come into a heart with such capacity?
Break open. Turn toward. Stay with.
Be with the great love and the great suffering, and the path will lead us there.
Not by ourselves. Not alone. But only in deep, mystical community together.
It won’t be all warm and fuzzy. It will require much of us. And it will take trust—in ourselves, in God, and in one another. This will be the focus of the ensuing part of this series next week.
Practicing Community:
Over the next month, intentionally adopt one practice as a way to increase your capacity for connectedness. Some possibilities could include:
Choose to intentionally engage with a situation you have turned away from. Turn back toward and enter it with loving presence and vulnerability (***this is not an encouragement to remain in abusive or self-denigrating situations***)
Which area do you need to invest more time and energy toward: Your Deep We, Collective We, or Universal We? Open to how that might come forth more in your life
Is there a place of creative tension or conflict that you are avoiding or over-asserting in? The next time you encounter that person/people or situation, connect into the shared heart of the deep field of love among you as you engage.
