Alchemy of the heart...

A day, perhaps 3 weeks ago, the sun rose to a specific angel and cast a spectrum of light into some dark caves of heavy thought and endless question. Ever since, I've been doing less talking and more listening. Listening to the world around me a bit, but mostly listening to the world that exists within my heart.

I think I must have been born with an enlarged heart because the capacity of my chest cavity, at times, feels much too small to contain such an organ that beats persistently with such heavy emotion and love. I have this little theory that, if this were the case, I simply looked at my heart as a malfunctioning annoyance that needed to be silenced and trained by the mind that moves and thinks in an organized and logical fashion. I must have written a letter before I knew how to write, and it went something like this, "Dear heart, you are much too much for me to live with in this world that appears so harsh and hard." So here I am a few decades later re-learning how to open my heart and live by its wisdom.

I spent my afternoon at a yoga workshop titled "Alchemy of the Heart." I suppose I showed up with some expectations of how I wanted it to go. I tend do this a lot, have an expectation and then....well, then life is life and of course it never matches up. But anyway, I was saying I had a certain expectation of today's yoga workshop. I showed up with the attitude, that looked at you, the expert (the workshop leader) as the one who was going to tap into my heart, bust down the walls and say wallah! It didn't really go like that, but there has been a gradual shift that I've been feeling for some time now. Its like that feeling when Spring is coming; the air changes, new life buds and you know, you just know good things are happening. It's just like that.

Every morning, I peer out my west facing window at the view of the Pacific Ocean that I have vowed never to take for granted. I close my eyes, my only way of knowing how to fully take in a moment through my heart and I allow my breath to flow into that space. Sometimes it aches, other times it feels numb, but more and more it feels like an old best friend that has carried me home to a joy so sweet only silence could be its praise. And there in that silence is a simple steady voice that is only mine.