Hearing with Your Heart (HEAR–T)

You may recall the transformation of Scrooge, especially as depicted in the 1951 film version of Charles Dickens's classic story, A Christmas Carol. In the beginning of the story, Scrooge’s constricted heart is expressed by his stooped posture and stingy movements. At the end of the story, he is physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually transformed. He is literally jumping for joy as he cries out, “I’m as giddy as a drunken man. I’m as silly as a school boy.” He is so transformed that his housekeeper thinks he has gone crazy.

Stress can cause us to constrict our hearts as we tense up all over. The muscles around our blood vessels tighten and restrict the flow of blood from our heart. The letters of the word heart give us the clue of how to open our hearts and return to love when stress strikes us. We need to hear and feel with our hearts what our anger, fear, sadness are “t”—telling us so we can transform the constricted energy of our negative emotions back into the expansive energy of love.

We simply express from our hearts what the painful negative emotions of fear, anger, sadness and depression tell us. By expressing them fully and shifting them back to love, we transform them back into the expansive energy of love and joy. We release the trapped treasure of love inside our heart. In short, we return to love as we open our hearts to hear what our negative emotions are “t”– telling us.To do this, we start with the negative emotion and then we shift it to hate and then to love in the following manner. Eventually, as in the blog posting Like the Morning Mist 5/7/10, we can simply skip the hate part and go right to stating what we would love to have happen.

• Today, when negative emotions arise, practice hearing with your heart by doing the following. You shift your focus first and your emotional will follow.

My anger, fear, sadness, or depression, etc., is telling me that
I hate it when____. And that’s because, I love it when____.