Path With Heart

One of my favorite book passages is from The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada. His teacher tells him there are a million paths in life.  Castenada asks, “then which shall I choose?” to which the teacher replies:

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

This can be applied to many things in life, and it can be applied to forgiveness.

The Path of Forgiveness is a path of the heart. It can be very frustrating for those who want to figure everything out with their head. (It’s not possible.) This used to be a frustration of mine as well. But I’ve learned over the years to trust my heart much more than my head.

The Path of Forgiveness is a path that also requires us to develop emotional awareness and intelligence. This is not easy either, given our cultural emphasis on mental prowess and scant attention to emotional development.

This is well explained by Michael Brown in The Presence Process:

In life, we automatically grow physically by putting the correct or appropriate nutrition into our body. Our mental growth is also spoken for when we enter and attend the basic schooling experience. Yet our emotional growth, which usually begins to slow drastically at about seven years of age, receives no real attention as we move into and through adulthood. In this world, we have proven ourselves to be remarkably physically adaptable. In the last hundred years, we have also become mental giants, but sadly, we have also become increasingly emotionally dwarfed. The turbulent state of the world we live in today is a testimony to the fact that it is the playground of the emotionally immature.

In other words, it’s time for us to grow up emotionally!

This is especially important for those on a spiritual path. It is the emotional experience of love and devotion which enables us to make contact with our spiritual selves:

This emotional experience fuels our ability to penetrate the vibrational realm. Meditation in its purest form is a tool intended to drive us out of this physical world experience along a mental pathway into our hearts. When we are in our hearts, we are one step away from our Divine Presence. It is our Divine Presence which then oversees our entry into the vibrational realm.

The key is in shifting our emphasis from mental understanding to emotional truth, i.e., to feeling. It is committing ourselves fully to the journey. And always but always choosing the path with heart.

Happy Thanksgiving!

warmly,

Eileen