Tools for the Heart (pt3)

Active Willingness: If you are like most people, you’ve discovered that it’s not enough to simply desire the divine life, nor is it enough to simply change your thinking about yourself and about the divine life. Your heart cannot grow effectively bigger, your spirituality cannot grow deeper, unless you choose to act out the divine life. There must be active willingness. Action brings life to our desires and thoughts. And in an ever-strengthening cycle, it reinforces them. Without a corresponding change of behavior, our desires and thoughts remain inside us and ultimately fizzle out. So this, too, is a profound tool for the soul and heart.

Here’s how Jesus put it: “I will show you what it’s like when someone comes to me, listens to my teaching, and then obeys me. It is like a person who builds a house on a strong foundation laid upon the underlying rock. When the floodwaters rise and break against the house, it stands firm because it is well built. But anyone who listens and doesn’t obey is like a person who builds a house without a foundation. When the floods sweep down against that house, it will crumble into a heap of ruins.” (Luke 6:47-49, NLT)

Acting in harmony with the divine life, choosing to walk through life within the Energy and Spirit of God, manifesting the qualities of a godly life, help build the strong foundation that stands firm. It’s one thing to say what we think is important. It’s another thing to live it out. The truth is, we are most strong and fulfilled when we’re living in alignment with our beliefs and values.

So what are some behaviors you can practice acting out that will strengthen and build your desire and thoughts of the divine life? What are actions you can take to deepen your compassion and help you live a more centered, peaceful life? Fortunately, you don’t have to guess. There have been spiritual practices used as regular disciplines to engage the spirit, heart and body more deeply for centuries by people serious about shaping the divine life within their lives.

Tools for the Heart (pt2)

Thoughts: There’s an ancient proverb that says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”  (Proverbs 23:7, KJV) It’s amazing how powerful our thoughts really are. They actually shape our reality. What we often say about ourselves creates the narrative of our lives.

Have you ever sat down and written out all the limiting beliefs you tend to say to yourself from time to time, those self-statements that keep you from trying things or moving forward in your life or keep you paralyzed from action? This is a profound spiritual tool for your heart.

Develop a chart called, “My Beliefs and My Stakes.” In the first column, describe carefully your limiting beliefs. List each one of them with as much detail as you want. What is the statement you tell yourself that keeps you from doing something important in your life? What is a negative belief you have about yourself? Write it down in the first column.

In the middle column write the corresponding empowering belief. Turn the limiting belief around and make it positive. Make sure you are describing the correspondingly accurate, matching, motivating belief, the true flip side of the coin. For example, if your limiting belief is, “No one wants to hear what I have to say,” your empowering belief might be, “What I have to say is valuable and important and worth listening to.”

You will be amazed at how strengthening it is to articulate your empowering belief. Stating it will actually make you feel strong. In fact, affirming, positive statements and thoughts that are true have been scientifically proven to strengthen our body muscles. So state these new empowering beliefs out loud regularly. Make these self-statements, the new thoughts and beliefs about yourself. Make them your new default!

But just new thoughts aren’t enough. In the third column, write down two or three actions you will take that drive the stake of your new empowering belief into the ground, proving to yourself that you’re serious about living out this new belief. Strong living is all about thinking clearly and acting strongly. When our thoughts and actions come into alignment, we are living in integrity and we develop a much higher level of trust in ourselves – and so do others as they react to us. So make sure you fill in this third column boldly, creatively, and intentionally.

There’s a saying in the New Testament that, “God did not give us a spirit of fear and timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7, NCV) The Greek word for “power” here is dunamis from which we get our word “dynamite.” The divine spirit is dynamite power in our lives. It is the opposite of fear, timidity and intimidation. It’s a power that revolves around boldness and courage. God doesn’t want us to disintegrate into our limitations. God wants our lives to explode with creative energy and synergy in connection with Him, the resurrection power that creates life out of death, radical transformation and newness.

And when this divine dunamis is coupled with divine love and redirected energy (“self-control,” the word used for the bit in the horse’s mouth that directs the horse’s flow and energy to where the rider desires; in this case it’s referring to redirecting human energy to correspond to the divine Energy), all things are possible. New life emerges. Confidence and courage spring into reality.

Tools for the Heart (pt 1)

There’s an ancient saying, “What you sow you will reap.” It’s all about cause and effect.  The analogy is from agriculture. The farmer operates by this principle. He plants the grain. He provides the right conditions for the growing of the grain seeds. He cultivates the ground, plants the seeds, waters the plants, fertilizes as necessary, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. And in the end, he harvests the plants.

The farmer never enjoys a harvest without first sowing the seeds. And if he sows rice seeds, he gets a rice harvest. If he sows wheat, he gets wheat. He never sows corn and harvests apple trees. What he sows, he reaps.

That’s a profound principle when it comes to spiritual growth and development. We have to take responsibility for sowing the seeds of the qualities we want to see grow and be harvested. If we want more love, we have to “plant” love. If we want peace, we must “plant” peace. As Gandhi famously said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” And then we have to cultivate the conditions most conducive to growing what we truly want to experience and manifest.

Here’s the way one New Testament passage describes this reality: “People harvest only what they plant. If they plant to satisfy their egos and self-centeredness, their egos will bring them ruin. But if they plant to please the Spirit, they will experience the divine eternal life from the Spirit. We must not become tired of doing good. We will receive our harvest of the divine eternal life at the right time if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:7, NCV) Notice this is about our willingness to “step into” the flow of the divine Spirit and Life. If we want to experience the realities of God we need to place ourselves in that environment, in those activities and places that nurture the qualities of God. We grow our hearts bigger by placing our hearts in God. It’s the law of agriculture and spirituality: you reap what you sow.

And even as the farmer uses specialized tools to do his work more effectively, we also have tools that grow our hearts, tools that when used place our hearts in God’s Flow of Life. Let’s look at a few.

Desire: Jesus described a significant tool for the heart: “Whatever is in your heart determines what you say.” (Luke 6:45, NLT) What is the tool? Desire. Passion. Longing. He said it another way, too: “Wherever your treasure is, there your heart and thoughts will also be.” (Matthew 6:21, NLT)

The point is, the object of our desire, passion and longing (what we truly treasure and value) radically impacts our experience of life. So a very effective spiritual tool is to evaluate our desires. What do you long for often? Where is your deepest passion invested? What would you say your desires during the course of any given day say about you as a person? What you want out of life, what you truly value and think is important? We are wired to follow after our passion, desires and longings. That’s the power of the heart. So if you want a life characterized by depth, compassion, joy, peace—if you want more of these divine qualities in your life—than spend time desiring them. Place your focus on those qualities every day. Think about them. Read stories about people who manifest them. Talk about them. Allow your heart to feel them.

Here’s an interesting idea next time you have the remote control in your hand. If you’re watching a movie and you come to a scene that stimulates in your heart the qualities you desire, rewind that scene and play it again. Watch it carefully. Allow yourself to feel the desire, longing, passion for the divine qualities being manifested. Rewind it again and play it. Watch it. Feel it. Reflect on it. Talk about it with your partner or friend watching with you. Consider doing this throughout the whole movie, spending time focusing on the divine qualities being shown.

The point is, we must redirect our desires, passions, and longings to those qualities we truly want manifested in our lives, those divine characteristics that deepen and grow our hearts. So we have to practice feeling them, exposing ourselves to them, letting our hearts grow into them over and over again.

Perhaps this is why Jesus made the statement, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” (Matthew 5:6) Passion, desire and longing are being affirmed and blessed here. But not just any kind of desire. Jesus says the desire and passion for justice and right are what will be filled and blessed. He specifies the object of desire because he knows that we are wired to follow after what we long for. So make sure you’re longing for the best and the most good in life.

Growing a Bigger Heart

Let’s first unpack this metaphor to suggest some dynamics to growing bigger hearts. One, contrast the containers for water: bowl versus river. Both hold water but the bowl is smaller than the river. Its boundaries limit the amount of water it can hold. And therefore, salt affects the taste more easily in the bowl than in the river. It often seems true that the smaller, more narrow a person’s view and experience of life, the more critical and judgmental that person is, making it quite difficult to embrace change, diversity or difference.

Two, contrast the movement of the water in the two containers. In a bowl, the water is still. In a river, the water is moving. The result is that “salt” is less invasive, less harmful in the river than in the bowl.

When we see life as a journey, a movement, a developmental process, we have more patience with difficulties and difficult people. We are able to cut some slack for ourselves and for others, recognizing that no one is a finished product. We are all still growing and maturing. We are people “under construction.”

Three, moving water in a river can expand the river boundaries because that water has an ever flowing source that keeps the river continually filled and running. Water in a bowl is finite and cannot move the boundaries of the container.

Several principles are implied with this third point from the bowl vs. river metaphor. If we want to grow bigger hearts we must recognize and acknowledge the Source of compassion and peace. The divine source of life flows constantly. God’s presence is everywhere. Our task is to be willing to “step” into that flow and join the current of life. The more we submerge ourselves in God’s presence, the more we expose ourselves to this divine life, the greater our capacity to live the divine life.

For a river to flow full and free, all impediments and potential obstacles must be removed. The reality is that in life there are various obstructions that minimize the impact of God’s presence in our hearts and minds. Just like a human artery gets clogged with plaque which lessens the flow of life-giving blood to the heart and other significant organs, producing a condition called arteriosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries.” The effect can sometimes lead to heart attacks and other severe, potentially life-damaging conditions.

Even so the human heart and mind get plugged or blocked, disrupting the full and free flow of the divine power and life-giving presence into our lives. Egotism and self-centeredness, narcissism, ignorance and delusion, unresolved guilt, paralyzing fear, addictions, distractions; all these tend to minimize the true compassion and inner peace that come from the flow of God’s Spirit.

So what needs to happen? How does one remove these impediments? Are there specific steps and strategies that effectively unblock our hearts and minds so we can experience God’s Life in fullness and wholeness, so we can live with a deep centeredness that remains in a state of peace and contentment regardless of external circumstances?

How Can I Be More Compassionate and Centered?

Thich Nhat Hahn is an expatriate Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist. He joined a Zen monastery at the age of 16, studied Buddhism as a novice, and was fully ordained as a monk in 1949. In the early 1960s, he founded the School of Youth for Social Services in Saigon, a grassroots relief organization that rebuilt bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, and resettled families left homeless during the Vietnam War.

He traveled to the U.S. a number of times to study at Princeton University and later lecture at Cornell University and teach at Columbia University. His main goal for those trips, however, was to urge the U.S. government to withdraw from Vietnam. He urged Martin Luther King, Jr., to oppose the Vietnam War publicly, and spoke with many people and groups about peace. In a January 25, 1967, letter to the Nobel Institute in Norway, King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nhat Hanh later led the Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks.

Exiled from Vietnam for many years, he was allowed to return for a trip in 2005 and again in 2007. Today his home is Plum Village Monastery in the Dordogne region in the south of France and he travels internationally leading retreats and giving talks as one of the world’s foremost advocates of compassion and peaceful living.

If anyone has an excuse to live life with bitterness, resentment and hatred it is Thich Nhat Hahn. He is intimately familiar with the pain of suffering, rejection and intolerance. Yet everyone who meets him and spends time with him describes him as a man of deep, genuine inner peace, contentment and compassion.

Here is a statement he made recently about what it takes to live a life of compassion and deeper centeredness:

“How can we help our hearts to grow every day, to be able to embrace everything? The Buddha gave a very beautiful example. Suppose you have a bowl of water and someone put a handful of salt in the bowl of water; it would be too salty for you to drink. But suppose someone threw a handful of salt into a clear mountain river. The river is deep and wide enough that you can still drink the water without tasting the salt.

“When your heart is small, you suffer a lot. But when your heart becomes bigger, very big, then the same thing does not make you suffer anymore. So the secret is how to help your heart to grow. If your heart is small, you can’t accept that person, you can’t tolerate him or her with his or her shortcomings. But when your heart is big, you have a lot of understanding and compassion, and then there is no problem, you don’t suffer, and you embrace him or her because your heart is so big.”

Notice the comparison in the above illustration. Your life is like either a small bowl of still water or a wide, deep and flowing river. The truth is, we cannot keep the “salt” from entering our lives—pain, crisis, difficulties, distasteful people and things happen—usually beyond our control. But we do have the ability to absorb the “salt” and make our lives livable by how wide and deep our hearts are. We can grow our hearts bigger to the point of being capable of embracing all of life.

So the question is, what does it take to grow a bigger heart? What are the keys to centering ourselves more and more in compassion and peace? Are there tools we can use to help expand our hearts and minds and spirits?

Why am I Here? Conclusion

So what is your life purpose? If you haven’t ever articulated it specifically (like writing it down in sentence), what would your current and past behaviors indicate is your life purpose? What is our example revealing about your true purpose?

Is your current purpose worth living and dying for? Is it something that is bringing service and compassion to people? Are you making a positive difference in this world with your current purpose? Or do you need to re-evaluate your purpose? Do you need one that brings you into harmony and alignment with the highest energy of the Universe, divine love?

What do you bring to your life purpose that empowers you to live it out well? Do you know yourself? Is your identity clear? Is your identity based upon something that transcends your own ups and downs and other people’s opinions of you? Is your identity in harmony with God’s view of you?

Is your purpose clear enough and compelling enough so that when you get to the end of your life you and others will know if you’ve lived it out faithfully and effectively? Are you on purpose enough to face the end with no regrets?

An unusual and tragic situation once took place in a hospital overseas. Every Friday morning a patient would die in the same bed at the hospital regardless of the exact medical condition. The whole staff was absolutely puzzled and mortified. Some even began to believe it had to do with the supernatural.

So the doctors finally decided to go down to the ward on the next Friday and watch carefully. Friday morning came. The doctors and nurses were in the room with eagle eyes. Nothing. Everything was normal for a Friday morning. The cleaning crew came in for their regular weekly cleaning of the room. And then the staff saw it. One of the cleaning crew unplugged the life support machine so she could plug in the vacuum cleaner. This poor woman had no idea what she was doing. She was so caught up in her own little world of work that she missed the big picture and people were dying because of her narrow perspective.

What a tragic way to live, being so self-absorbed that we never see how we’re impacting others. We are here on this planet for a reason. We are each wired differently and uniquely to live out our purposes as effectively as possible. Our highest calling is to love and serve unselfishly in ways that bless life not detract from it. And our deepest satisfaction and fulfillment come from living out that purpose faithfully.

Living Your Purpose

Paul was a man of great passion. In the first part of his life, he would have described his life purpose as honoring and serving God by bringing people into obedience to the true religion. He was a tireless zealot with the goal of keeping religion both theologically and sociologically pure. Consequently, he lived out his purpose with great ideological fervor, heading up squads of religious soldiers given the mandate to arrest all dissenters. He was extremely successful in his work. The “golden boy” of the old guard.

Then one day he experienced a profound change of heart. Though the essence of his passion didn’t shift, his life purpose and strategic methodology did. He was convicted—by means of a radical and transformative divine encounter—that the people he had been so vigorously attacking were followers of the same God he was so passionately serving. So if he wanted to continue serving the same God with equal passion, he needed to widen his embrace to include the people he had labeled as dissenters and accept their belief in Jesus as the Messiah of God. We call that a major paradigm shift.

So now he lived his life with a new purpose. Here’s the way he described it: “Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant, dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him … Now don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself having achieved perfection in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward - to Jesus. Forgetting the past, I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.” (Philippians 3:8-9, 13-14, The Message)

With this new purpose firmly implanted in his passionate heart and innovative mind, Paul lived his life with profound meaning and effectiveness. He faced obstacle after obstacle—imprisonment, beating, shipwreck, exhaustion, hunger, ridicule, persecution, rejection—but because he was crystal clear on his purpose and felt deeply the validity and significance of it, he was empowered to keep going. His effectiveness was legendary. He impacted the then-known world with his message, planting and building spiritual communities wherever he went. He started a movement that continues in force globally today.

Here’s his perspective on his life when he came to the end: “The time of my death is near. I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits me; the crown of righteousness that the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that great day.” (2 Timothy 4:6-8, New Living Translation)

No regrets. No complaints. No capitulations. Faithful to the purpose all the way to the end, he described plenty of failures along the way. But the power of living on purpose is that you can keep going after failure. You don’t have to be defined by it. You can get back on the horse and keep on riding toward your goal. And he did. Notice four principles of living on purpose.

First, it’s important to re-evaluate our life purpose along the way. And if we don’t choose to do it, often life forces us to. A crisis comes that requires an intentional re-evaluation, readjustment, and refocusing. And sometimes, as in the case of Paul, we discover that we’re living with a less than meaningful purpose and need to change the focus.

In other words, there are some purposes more worth living for than others. And it would be tragic to come to the end of life and make that painful discovery. Better to evaluate now whether we’re living for a worthy purpose or not and make necessary adjustments. It takes courage. But it’s absolutely worth it in the end in order to end with no regrets. Are you living the most meaningful purpose possible for yourself? Is your purpose in harmony with what God wants for you and what you were created to live for?

Second, to achieve your life purpose well you need to “forget” the past. That is, not let the past define you whether it’s your successes or your failures. We tend to do several things when it comes to our past: we either glory in it in pride or we wallow in it in shame or we deny it in pain. Any of those responses fixates us in the past and immobilizes us from pursuing God’s goal for our lives.

A man complained to his rabbi of depression. His life lately seemed like an endless string of failures, disappointments, and missed opportunities. Why, he asked, had God condemned him to live such a frustrating existence? The rabbi listened carefully and after some moments of contemplation, he asked the man to reach behind him and remove a large volume from his bookshelf. Assuming this was some profound tome of spiritual wisdom, the man reached for the volume. He noticed to his surprise that it was an almanac of sports statistics.

“Read page 543 aloud,” the rabbi instructed. And the man began reading the lifetime batting averages of baseball’s greatest hitters. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams. “Not one of them batted more than 400,” observed the rabbi. “That means more than six in ten times, the greatest of the great struck out, popped out or flied out. More than six in ten times, they failed. Are you better than they were?” the rabbi asked the man. “Why do you expect more of yourself than they did?”

It’s easy to get fixated on our past. But that only immobilizes us from pushing ourselves toward the goal of our life purpose. We become conservative in our actions, afraid to do anything that might lead to failure again or might make us look bad. We end up paying attention to things we ought to be overlooking. William James, the American philosopher, psychologist and educator at Harvard University, in 1890 wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Third, we must point ourselves in the “right” direction. Not just any direction or any goal will do, if we want to live God’s plan and purpose for us. Some directions are much more meaningful than others. You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “When you come to the end of your life, no one wishes they had spent more time at the office.”

That’s referring to priorities. Right focus. A worthwhile purpose typically revolves around relationships – building meaningful, significant, fulfilling relationships. And that kind of purpose usually involves using your resources to make a difference in people’s lives in some tangible way. The whole idea of service and showing compassion to others makes up the kind of life purpose that brings the highest degree of fulfillment and meaning.

Paul focused the second part of his life on following the example of Jesus and helping people experience Jesus’ love and compassion. And Jesus had once stated clearly his life purpose in this way: “For the Son of Man came, not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for others.”

That example by Jesus is what empowered and motivated and shaped Paul’s life purpose. He kept his eyes on that picture of Jesus and refused to live the many lesser ways to live. He devoted his energies and skills and resources to serving others in the best way he could.