What a Mystery Is the Heart
Did you know that the distance from your heart to your toes is approximate in scale to the distance of our sun to the most distant planet in the solar system? Your heart sits in a relative center to the whole of your body as does the sun to the planetary bodies held in its field of gravity.

Did you know that all creatures—from the common garden gnat to the great whales that swim the seas—have nearly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime, assuming a natural life and death?

This heart within us that beats so steadily, keeping the vital red stuff of life surging through us, is a kind of three-dimensional reflection of a Higher order of Heart whose Life pours out to us to animate our own. Imagine a water-drop shot out from the spray of a thunderous Niagara Falls; complete in itself with all the qualities and capabilities of water, and yet only a microcosmic version of the timeless ocean from which it springs, and to which it returns in its endless rounds, rushing through countless rivers and streams.

If this description of the heart seems majestic, tireless, and timelessly magical, that's because it is just that! In some ways we each know this to be true. Each time we intuit our native home to be amongst the unmeasured stars, or sense within us a vitality and capacity to give from resources without end, we've felt the beating of our Real Heart.

Strangely enough, at least at the outset of one's self-investigation, it is this vast potential that we feel beating in us that makes our present state of self seem so dissatisfactory. We dwell as a captive of our own unrealized possibilities, so that a vague, but definite, awareness of our incomplete interior condition calls out to us.

Does Your Heart Need Healing?
Somehow we know that our hearts are broken and need healing. The wholeness we could be calls out to us with each ache coursing through us because of some unkindness we embrace and then send out from our heart to the heart of another. The True Spiritual Path begins with self-awareness that our heart needs repair, which brings us to the heart-stopping discovery that a broken heart cannot heal itself! Only the Living Light can return our heart to its Rightful Character. Only what is Whole can heal what is divided.

Does your heart need this kind of spiritual healing? Ask yourself if any of the following is true for you:

1. We spend most of our time thinking only about ourselves.
2. Our thoughts dwell on dark and gloomy imaginings, or we experience varying states of despair, defeat, or anxious doubt.
3. We're likely to agree with, or give ourselves over to fiery feelings. We consent to states of conflict, becoming identified with angry or resentful vibrations as they make their way through us.
4. We never see the choice to put the interests of someone else before we consider those of our own.
5. Our principal sense of contentment and well-being is derived only from pleasures that we give to ourselves.

Even a casual glance at this list reveals our hearts need work-work done upon and within them-if they are to heal. This ought to be clear to us, but it's not. Most of us have tried countless measures to make these repairs ourselves, including new relationships, attempts to control social or economic powers, charms, crystals, healers, pulsating lights, chemicals, organics—the list is as long as our heartaches that never quite disappear. Where can we find the healing we need?

The repair of our heart cannot be attained through any process of mental or emotional amendment, but only through spiritual replacement. Healing the heart is not about its gradual reformation, but its permanent restoration.

We must see the impossibility of trying to realize a whole heart by adding things to it, regardless of how sublime. Seeking solutions to our perceived suffering merely sustains two equally false notions: first, that we can climb out of our own unwholeness by throwing ourselves a rope; and second, that this haunting sense of incompleteness within us—that ever-seeking sense of "I" that drives us along trying to service its desires—is somehow connected to who we really are, to our Essential Self. It is not.

Surrender
The only real solution to healing our broken heart is to be found through its surrender. Our task is to deliver our heart to the only place where such a replacement is possible, and then not do anything but watch what happens. The more we meddle to make things happen, the slower one's true mending proceeds.

Where can we go to surrender our hearts while letting go of all concern for the outcome? It is in the heart of our remembrance of God while—in the same moment—we watch with quiet impartial awareness what we are shown by His works. If we're willing to put our heart in God's hands, to bring it into the Celestial Repair Shop of the Living Light, and to do this with no other wish apart from inviting Wholeness to make Its Heart the same as our own, it will be done.

Several times a day, take a few quiet minutes to consciously surrender your heart to God. Do your best to remember that when you ask for this special Work to be done within you, your part is to remain watchful (not wanting) no matter what you may see revealed to you about the content of your heart. Make effort and Truth will teach you the Way.

© 2002 Life of Learning. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to reprint with author credit only.