Many of you who’ve attended our retreats or tuned in to our Dr Joe Live and Leaving the Monastery conversations have heard me talk about what it means to make the heart bloom. As we’re well into spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, and new growth is appearing all around us, I thought it would be a good time to explore what it means to cultivate a blooming heart.

So many things in nature take time. We plant a seed in the fertile earth, and we have to let the seed germinate. It needs a healthy balance of elements and environment conducive to growth – so it will begin to send roots down into the ground and develop a shoot that breaks the surface – and grows toward the sun.

We water it. We feed it. We weed the soil around it. With just the right conditions, and just the right care, the seed’s potential will evolve into form.

The heart is the same way.

 

Stirring the Soul Awake

What leads us to the desire to make our heart bloom?

So many of us are used to living in survival – flooding our systems with the hormones of stress. This also means that many of us have closed our hearts. Because the heart is the center of creation … and when we’re in stress, it’s not a time to create. It’s a time to survive.

When we’re in this state, our personalities – with our programmed thoughts, feelings, and behaviors – take over. And our personal realities reflect this fallow experience of life. It’s like watching reruns of the same TV show every day. There are no surprises. No discoveries. There’s no mystery. We take the programs – our old stories and memories – from the familiar, known past, and we overlay them onto what becomes the predictable future.

And what happens to our soul? It seems to go to sleep.

The soul is interested in evolving its experience. It’s not interested in the same thing all day, every day. It thrives in mystery. The soul craves the unknown. It wants to expand its experience on its journey back to source.

So, to move from survival to creation, we need conditions favorable to stir the soul. We need to awaken it from its sleep.

 

From Fallow Ground … to Fertile Ground

Unfortunately, the soul typically awakens for many of us when we're faced with crisis. When we reach a point in life where we see that nothing outside of us is going to make the emotions we feel in survival – emptiness; anger; fear; resentment; jealousy; insecurity; discouragement; despair – go away.

Finally, we realize that nothing in our lives will change … until we change.

In these moments of crisis, we have to turn inward. This is when we have to ask bigger questions: “Who am I? What am I doing here? Am I happy? Is this what I really want?” These are soul questions. And these are the seeds we plant.

In survival – in a state of fear – the unknown is perceived as a threat or a danger. However, when the soul is awakened and interested in creating the next new experience, the unknown becomes the adventure.

And so, the soul asks: What else is out there for me to explore? And, with that, we plant the seed that ultimately will lead to cultivating a blooming heart. As the soul stirs, we evolve from fallow ground to fertile ground. We begin to move out of survival, into creation … and we begin to see and experience reality – as it truly is – anew.

Once we’ve prepared the ground with our intentions and awareness … and planted the seed by asking important questions about our experience and evolution … we move into the next stage of practice. We learn to nurture the tender new shoot that breaks through the soil … and provide the right conditions and care to – petal by petal – make it bloom.

We’ll talk about that in Part II.