Becoming Heartful
“The Heart Center” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Transformation happens when our learning is infused with intentional processes of becoming.
Each week, following an ICN article, we share invitations into deeper becoming. These may be spiritual practices, ways of deeper engagement, and opportunities for life integration.
Our becoming happens personally, communally, and globally as we cultivate transformation through the I, the We, and the All.
Our intention with this rhythm is to foster an intensification of our mystical practice, deepen our embodied engagement, and support the enactment of life integration for the transformation of ourselves, our neighbors, and the world.
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST WEEK, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO FIRST READ THE ARTICLE INFORMING THESE PROCESSES: “the radiant heart of love and bliss”
We invite you to consciously and intentionally engage in the following processes for your personal lives, WeSpace groups or other spiritual communities, and global participation.
Your Heart’s Desire
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Poetry as a Portal to the Heart
Poetry and the arts can be wonderful portals to help us enter into the felt awareness and experience of our embodied centers. They help us integrate our participation and understanding through engaging our mythic and magic structures of consciousness.
The following poem by ICNer Pete Armstrong is offered as an invitation to guide you into deeper heart engagement:
Your heart’s desire
As though in a dream, wandering the land,
I come across a shrine, and enter in.
An old man sits silently and smiles.
A question bubbles up within me
and floats into the space between us:
‘How can I be happy?’
I hear only kindness in his voice:
‘Wait a little in this place, and consider:
What is your heart’s desire?’
In the pause, I know the answer
is not about more holidays.
And then into the silence,
a voice begins to sing sweetly
bringing happiness to the room;
it is my heart, answering for herself:
‘I wish to give love, on and on,
more and more, without stint.
I wish to be wide open to the joy
of this immeasurable life.
I wish to be with God again,
beyond words, as love.’
The old man fades, as does his smile;
the room too disappears, as though in a dream.
The echo of the song remains.
From: The Words on my Face
To hear this poem read aloud, along with several more poems on the heart, click here, where you can also download a pdf with 10 poems from Pete and learn more about him.
The Heartful WeSpace with Spirit Guides
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Engaging with the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us
In the relational heart, we open up to loving connection not only with other physical beings, but also with spirit guides and other mystical forms of the face of God-Beside-Us. This is a God close enough for our hearts, which is a vital experience in integrating The Three Faces of God in our spiritual life.
While we can experience connection with Guides from any of our centers, our hearts are often a primary space of relational awareness in the WeSpace. An open heart creates receptivity in us to sense, engage, and partake in experiencing the divine in this way.
There are five primary ways we receive messages directly from the presence of God, Jesus, and our guides, or while in their energy fields.
1. Hearing words sounds like someone talking in your mind (audible words are much less common). This voice will never be negative, condemning, or harsh. The tone of this voice is almost always even and calm.
2. Visions arrive as images or scenes in your mind. A picture appearing in your mind’s eye is most common with people who tend to be visual in their lives. These are often faint, fleeting impressions rather than full blown open-eyed images. They can be symbols that hold a deeper meaning, such as colors, a nature scene, or an object. Freely welcome and embrace both the symbols and their deeper meaning.
3. Emotions give you spiritual knowing that comes from feelings. This is one of the most common ways we receive messages from spirit friends. These are promptings from deeper, non-ordinary, subtle states of consciousness.
4. Body sensations are forms of physical feelings that communicate spiritual knowing. An itch here, or a tingle there. These could include the sensation of someone touching you, warmth, cold, wind, vibration, pressure, sensing physical growths, or other bodily feelings.
5. Gut instincts are the intuitive ability to sense something. These are like a download that occurs in your gut and is recognized by your mind within a few seconds. Thoughts begin to appear in your head. They may seem random or coming from nowhere and have the “quality” of a memory. You should notice any messages that appear in this way because they come from deep within, unfiltered by a busy mind filled with negative messages learned from your childhood and culture.
All of these forms of spiritual knowing can be from your inner, awakened consciousness or the means of communication from a divine spirit guide presence speaking to you through our embodied ways of knowing. Or some of both!
Trust the first word, image, words, feelings, sensations, or intuitions that come to you. They are usually the most accurate because we haven’t had time to run them through our filters like we do as we begin to think about them.
These ways of engaging with spirit guides is taken from the previous article, How to Connect with Your Mystical Companions, part five of the series You’re Never Alone – Meeting Your Spirit Guides.
If you’d like to learn more about spirit guides, click here to read part one, or check out the entire series!
“Living Heart” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Practicing Heartfulness Now
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A 5-Minute Meditation to Enter into Our Heart Space
The following new meditation from Martha O’Hehir is a guided practice to help you enter into your heart space. If you’re new to moving into your heart, or you would like to cultivate a greater ease in presencing through your heart throughout your day, this practice will help you do so more easily:
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN