Welcome to your fine heart!
May it find all the happiness and love it yearns for!
Are you ready for the next beautiful Mystery?
Friend, what’s it like to be you? Are you tired most of the time or do you have a surplus of vital force? Does your body feel heavy and difficult to move, or is it light, like a leaf on a breeze?
What’s it like to live inside your body? Is it wonderful in there or are you having a tough time?
Do your joints feel like well-oiled hinges or rusty hinges?
Do you feel strong or weak?
Is your heart happy or full of wounds and regrets? Is your heart responsive to life or thick and numb?
How’s life going in your mind? Is your mind a peaceful, pleasant place, or is it a war zone? Is it organized or cluttered? Is it fun to have your mind, or a painful obligation?
All in all, are you enjoying being yourself?
In this Mystery you will begin the grand expansions of your heart. You will see the quality of your life improve before your wondering eyes.
Mystics break out of body bondage through numerous expansions of the heart — of the sense of self. Your feeling of self-awareness imprisons or liberates you. Happily, you can do something powerfully liberating about the state of your heart and the quality of your life.
You will find great satisfaction and have tears of joy as you regularly experience the profound dimensions of your increasing self-awareness.
Take your time with these upcoming levels of mystical expansion. Go slowly. Savor and assimilate what your heart shows you. In the next few months, take the time to do each level well before you go on to the next one. These levels are progressive. It’s difficult to experience the third and fourth expansions until you can deeply enjoy the first and second.
Empathetic and sympathetic people will experience expansion more quickly. However, those hearts which are most painfully bound need expansion more desperately. The heart, your center of self-awareness, is the key to your connection with others and with your own higher consciousness.
Remember, it’s easy to begin developing the levels of heart expansion because you know what it feels like to be you! All you need to do is start with your present heart, your current sense of self.
As you experience each of these expansions, you will discover you are also making a spiritual Ascent. Your mystical awareness will increase significantly.
Is your heart ready to escape from its old prison cell and suffocating atmosphere? Your heart knows the way out.
Expansion of the Heart
First Level — The Shoes
To begin the expansion and liberation of your heart, mentally and emotionally put yourself “in another’s shoes.” You already know what it feels like to be you, don’t you? So, now imagine and feel what it would be like if you were certain other people. Choose a person with whom you are quite familiar (a friend, a loved one) and reflect on what it would be like if you — as you are now — happened to be that person: living in that body with that person’s talents, problems, and his or her life situation.
Sit comfortably and allow yourself fifteen minutes or more to imagine you are walking in his or her shoes. Feel that you are seeing life through his or her eyes. Feel you are inside that chosen person. Ponder what it would be like to live through the days of life as this chosen human being.
- Is it a pleasure or burden to move about in this particular body?
- Do you enjoy or find it difficult to live with this person’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and personality?
- Are her/his relationships loving or empty?
- Is this person’s life situation fulfilling or exasperating?
- Is this person’s quality of life satisfying? Or painful to endure?
Remember, in this beginning expansion you are not trying to read the chosen person’s mind or accurately know his/her actual experience of life. You are striving to sense your own self, your heart, in a different way: What would it be like for me if I were Sally? Or Bill?
Go ahead and say to yourself, “Well, if I were Bill (or Sally), I’d feel and think…”
Proceed in this manner. Have fun with it, and be as thorough as you can.
The Goal of This Practice
The goal of this practice is to give your heart, your sense of self, the freedom to view life more broadly than it does habitually. Normally we are so preoccupied with our own lives, our personal fears and desires, that the heart contracts — its energy flows exclusively toward self-preservation and self-enrichment.
In considering what it would be like to be another person, you free the heart to direct its energies differently. This begins the process of heart expansion.
The Best of Life!
Likely, due to a brief fifteen-minute period of mentally and emotionally putting yourself in another person’s body and life, you will find that a greater appreciation and regard for that person develops. Indeed, why not conclude your practice saying the person’s name and wishing her/him well? For example, you might say, “Bill (or Sally), I wish you the very best of life,” and then fondly conclude your practice.
This Week
Over the next week, practice six more beginning expansions, proceeding in the same manner but with six different loved ones or associates. Likely you’ll enjoy yourself a great deal and will find a growing affection for, and understanding of, these dear people.
Then, in the weeks ahead, enjoy more such expansions as you focus on each of the loved ones and other important people in your life.
Focus on Strangers, Too
And, finally, you’ll expand the heart greatly by focusing on people you don’t know at all, strangers of all kinds — people of power, people of poverty. The wise, the foolish. Female and male. Strong and feeble.
What would it be like for you to be that penniless leper? Or that child at play? That mother? That musician? That teacher? That victim, or world leader?
And, remember to conclude each period of expansion wishing your chosen person the best of life.
Enjoy Your Expansions
In developing this first level well — putting yourself in the shoes and lives of others — you will find you are not only expanding the general condition of your heart, but you are beginning to embrace all other hearts.
The time will come when your heart readily and comfortably makes a connection with everyone — friend and stranger. When you can put on many kinds and sizes of shoes, you are ready to ascend further and expand more.
Reflection
“You don’t know anyone
until you’ve walked
in his (her) moccasins.”
—American Indian Proverb
Hello again.
How have you fared “in the years’ steady sifting?” Have you dear friends and much sunshine in your life? I certainly wish this for you.
Mystics learn to regard the Infinite as a dear friend, also.
Its time to review the sixth Mystery.
- Mystics break out of body bondage through numerous expansions of the heart, of the sense of self.
- You will have great satisfaction and know tears of joy as you regularly experience the profound dimensions of your increasing self-awareness (beyond self-preoccupation).
- The heart, your center of self-awareness, is the key to your connection with others and with your own higher consciousness. Start with your present heart, your current sense of self.
- Those hearts which are most painfully bound need expansion most desperately.
- To begin the expansion and liberation of your heart, mentally and emotionally put yourself in “another person’s shoes.”
- Remember, in this beginning expansion you are not trying to read the chosen person’s mind or accurately know his/her actual experience of life. You are striving to sense your own self, your heart, in a different way.
Try out the shoes, sandals — and bare feet, too — of people you admire. Why are they so special that you appreciate them so?
Reflection
Why did I have to fight
And struggle so hard
Just to be me?
Should being myself
Require so much exertion?
Why can’t I jest be?
Perhaps I labor
To be what I’m not,
And the Self I seek to maintain
Isn’t truly me at all.
Oh who am I—
In my nature,
In my essence,
In my untroubled,
Effortless presence?
