Have a Heart

By Jan Crawford

I am a nasty old bitch — particularly to the mechanical “people” on frustrating automated answering systems. And sometimes I notice I am being caught up in social ambitions. I can be jealous, insensitive and a less than generous friend. I also do too much unconscious knee-jerk stereotyping. I occasionally still find myself catapulted into frozen fear or rage. And as much as I work with it, my ego can continue to get stuck in blind loyalties and inner identities, especially the flattering ones.

And, like you, I can be love. Not simply romantic or friendship love, but more the state of being that excludes nothing and no one. The kind of love that you can sometimes experience looking into an infant’s eyes or when your separate self just dissolves into beauty as you enjoy a vast vista. For us Villagers, that might be quietly sitting along the Hudson River.

In fact, a friend’s Tibetan teacher urged her to take in a wide vista daily. And I notice that does cause my chest and breath to open more and my eyes to shift their focus from being habitually forward to being more relaxed and encompassing.

This more uncontained love is what I felt recently when I was surprised by a sensation and emotion during a deep meditation. For reasons too complex to describe here, the childhood message to me was that I didn’t have a heart. So perhaps that is why I was so shocked when I noticed the sweetest feeling arising. I laughed with joy and relief when I realized that, at last, I was falling in love with my own heart. It was an unequivocal enjoyment of what was here in this moment and a complete ease in the depth of my being.

I’m so grateful to have survived three experiences of being very close to death. They have allowed me to have a few glimpses of that which is impossible and reductive to name because it is not an object and has no boundaries. Despite the painful distortions and contortions we go through in attempting to become what we already are, this deeper reality appears to be what all creation is made of. It is the ultimate ground of being.

Perhaps you too have experienced or want to experience these moments of freedom from the demands of what some consider to be the fantasy separate self — ideally without several near-death experiences to facilitate it. Of course, no two paths toward freedom from unnecessary suffering are the same. What supports, inspires and companions you is not identical to anyone else’s. While acknowledging that, the following meditation has recently been rewarding for me and you may want to explore your personalized version of it.

A metta meditation is a wish you repeat to yourself that advances your own peacefulness and leads you to further empathy and joy. It is said to yourself for yourself, for your community, for people you love, for those you consider “difficult,” and for all sentient beings. In a recent group Zoom meditation led by Buddhist teacher Heidi Bourne, this metta phrase brought balm to a wounded place in me and to several others with whom I shared it:

May I rest in the beauty and goodness of my awakening heart.

And may all beings rest in the beauty and goodness of our awakening hearts.

Fortunately, to experiment with metta meditations, no formal practice is necessary. When you are resting or feeling a little more relaxed, you may want to explore this practice. It appears our true nature — the Absolute, God, Allah, whatever you choose to call it — wants us to enjoy deepening and opening. So whatever words that are right for you may arise spontaneously.

The meditation may occur, for example, while you’re having your morning coffee, watching the seasons change in St. Luke’s Sanctuary Garden or before you go to sleep. You can close your eyes and allow curiosity about what may be there as your “monkey mind” begins to lessen its grip a bit. Without judgment and with exquisite gentleness, you can then experiment with saying to yourself your own version of words that resonate for you and help open your heart.

As you rest back for a moment, it might feel right to welcome with kindness whatever you discover — even if what you feel is daily anxiety or an automatic rejection of the whole idea. If that happens, I love what author and teacher Sylvia Boorstein suggests. Just sincerely say to that part of your worried, perhaps cynical or angry mind, “It’s OK, Sweetheart.”

The poet and mystic Rumi speaks to why it helps to be gentle on this circuitous inner journey. He wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” In this culture, one of the frequent barriers is the doubts so many of us have about our own beauty and goodness. And if we are fortunate enough to be able to experience our basic goodness, the next barrier may be whether we take the step of opening to see that “my awakening heart” is not only the personal heart, it’s the essential nature of all hearts. And I find this is very good news indeed.