The Power of the Heart: Finding Your True Purpose in Life (29 page)

A spiritual partner can help me to become aware of a part of my personality that I wasn’t aware of and that’s why spiritual partners are precious. I always know that Linda, for example, is supporting me when I become annoyed, or irritable, or angry.

Sometimes we fall in love when we see someone as perfect. Then, later, we see they aren’t perfect and we consciously learn to love them even more.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality.

—YOKO ONO AND JOHN LENNON

Your emotional system can be divided into roughly two elements: fear and love. In every situation, it is up to you to choose between the energy of fear and the energy of love. The fear referred to here is not the
emotion you experience at times when you feel physically threatened, when an animal growls at you, for example, or you are standing on the edge of a steep rock, or someone intimidates you. That is functional fear, fear that makes you more cautious. That fear disappears as soon as the danger is over. The fear that is the opposite of love is chronic fear: fear that recurs time and time again and is deep-seated.

When you align your personality with your soul, however, you can distinguish between fear and love, and can let love prevail over fear in all your day-to-day decisions.

 MARCI SHIMOFF

Meeting the Dalai Lama, I was so impressed by a particular answer he gave to a question, “How do you view people?” And he said there are two ways to look at people. I can look at the surface things about everyone that make us all different, or I can go to the deeper, more primary level and look at the things that make us all the same, the things that connect us, our basic common human essence. He said, “And no matter who I meet, I meet them and look at them with that primary vision of that essence that connects us all. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to the head of a country or a person on the street. I look to the heart and I see my heart and their heart. We’re all the same.”

Boy, doesn’t life look different when we see that common humanity between us.

When someone makes you anxious, try to see that he or she is merely activating an anxious part of your personality, not trying to exert power
over you. As you work more with that consciousness, the fearful parts of your personality will start to lose their grip on you. You tell the truth, with kindness, even when it is hard to hear.

As mindfulness teacher Jack Kornfield says, “With a loving heart as the background, all that we attempt, all that we encounter, will open and flow more easily. The power of loving-kindness . . . will calm your life and keep you connected to your heart.”

The energy of love extends out to others—to our children, neighbors, community, even to the connections we have with people we don’t know around the world.

 MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Some of the greatest moments of teaching that my father ever did as a parent, he would remind us to take note. It’s like the line in
Death of a Salesman,
“Attention must be paid.” Loving perception is a practice.

Sending loving-kindness out to others improves health and well-being. Scientific studies suggest that practicing loving-kindness increases social connectedness, reduces pain and stress, and increases positive emotions. Also called compassion practice, loving-kindness helps you see things from another’s perspective. It increases the power of the heart.

 MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

There is a line in
A Course in Miracles
[from the Foundation for Inner Peace] which says, “Love restores reason, and not the other way around.” So living without heart might in a particular circumstance seem like the rational thing to do, or even, according to some precepts, the smart thing to do. But ultimately, the only sustainable, the only survivable option for the human race is that we begin living from heart, that we begin living with a greater emphasis, in fact, on a love-centric perspective.

It’s easy for us to talk about love, and to even be loved and to embody love as long as people are behaving in the way we behave, right? And saying exactly what we want them to say. But life challenges us to find an ever more expansive love. Love not just for my children, but for children on the other side of town and for children on the other side of the earth. A compassion that is not just for my interests, and not just compassion for people that it’s easy for me to sympathize with, but also compassion for people that I might not like, and compassion even for people who might have betrayed me, or insulted me, or even worse. Love says, “feed the children.” “We are the only advanced species that is systematically destroying our own habitat. What does love say? “Repair and save Earth.”

Through the heart, we exercise the greatest power of the heart—the power of love.

Marianne Williamson

Maya Angelou’s very presence conveyed vitality, energy, and charisma. A celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist, Angelou wrote about the struggle to survive in a complicated world divided by racism. With myriad accomplishments, she was above all a woman with enormous compassion who always followed her heart, in adversity and prosperity, and who urged others to live from the heart.