Setting Your Heart on Fire Seven Invitations to Liberate Your Life

THE FIRST INVITATION Feel Everything Sometimes we kill our heart in order not to feel. --TENNESSEE WILLIAMS In the First Invitation, love calls you to experience your emotions fully. To do so requires learning when and why you deny them, and developing the capacity for reconnection. To love is to open. To love fully is to open wide. When we're wide open, love rushes toward us and emanates from us. We recognize it as the essence of our existence. Naturally, without effort, the illusion of separation vanishes. We experience ourselves as part of one great whole, indistinguishable from all we survey. Too often, however, we shrink from the experience of oneness and then get used to it. We come to mistake the lie of limitation for the boundless truth of love. We let ourselves love family, friends, and country, but stop there. We offer our love to God, but withhold it from much of divine creation. Yet none of this is irreversible. Nothing, outside of our own unwillingness, can keep us from reconnecting. Think of the first time you fell in love. Remember how everything was somehow different, how the entire universe seemed to harmonize with joyful intent? Your senses were heightened, your blood quickened. Daily annoyances became sources of awe. Difficult people seemed suddenly wonderful. All your problems, a moment ago insurmountable, now felt like the smallest hurdle. Sadly, it didn't last. It rarely does. But for however long you're rapt, falling in love causes you to remember the vastness of love's reach. Afterward, if you're like most people, you quickly begin seeking the next one who will supposedly, miraculously, return you to that rapture for good. But you can feel such rapture all the time. Love is yours without a partner, without any object whatsoever, once you're willing to feel everything. To accept the First Invitation means approaching every single moment as you would a lover. You don't just feel the moment but lean into it, let it roar right through you, and meet it with equal intensity. When a moment brings pleasure, such openness is easy. But when it brings frustration or pain, your likely reaction is the exact opposite. You close off, shut down. A shutdown is your instinctive response to any emotion that you don't like or don't want. It's your way of saying either "Get these feelings away from me," or "Get me away from them." Whenever you shut down, you become unavailable to love. Though this initial response is unavoidable, you can always choose to move beyond it. To do so requires welcoming all your emotions, even the most difficult. In doing so you inevitably reopen, gaining immediate access to love even while challenging times continue. As you embrace the fullness of life, with all its trials and traumas, love embraces you in return. All of this happens only in the present, one moment at a time. To determine whether you are open or closed, you must bring your awareness into the present. The simplest way to do this is by turning your attention to your body, and by learning to detect the stress patterns that indicate a shutdown. These stress patterns exist in the body because that's where emotions exist as well. As part of their nature, emotions strive to flow through the body as quickly as possible. And they always succeed, unless you block them by shutting down. While in a shutdown you may find yourself scowling, tensing your shoulders, holding your breath, or all of the above. Each of us is unique in our signs and symptoms, but the more you look for them the more easily they become apparent. Look. Keep looking. Look so often that the very first indication of a shutdown sounds a bell through your whole being. Regardless of how it manifests, a shutdown means only one thing--there's an emotion you're not feeling. Why aren't you feeling it? Because you're afraid. You're afraid that feeliCushnir, Raphael is the author of 'Setting Your Heart on Fire Seven Invitations to Liberate Your Life' with ISBN 9780767913850 and ISBN 076791385X.