Heart Opening is the Mission

Feeling the suffering and Loving anyway

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“You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.”

Maria Popova

In my first appointment with my acupuncturist about 2 months ago, she said I have a “fiery heart.” Now, this was not in a generative-zest-for-life kind of way ❤️‍🔥… but in a heavy-with-grief-anger-and-tension kind of way.

My shoulders curl inward, and they have for a long time. Growing up, I slouched in my posture- often being the tallest girl in class made me feel vulnerable, so I made myself smaller. And as an adult, I feel averse to forcing my shoulders open for better posture (or to expose myself)- do you relate? My shoulders curl around my heart for a reason, they’ve always attempted to protect me. Perhaps there’s wisdom in the curling, and in the fire. I and we need protection- to protect is so natural, human and necessary sometimes.

I’ve been reading Liberated to the Bone by Susan Raffo, a juicy recommendation by a friend and fellow creatrix, Steph Yawa. Susan is a cultural worker and body practitioner who has written this:

"The cellular membrane is like the skin on our bodies. It’s like the ozone layer around this planet. Here, at this membrane, we decide who we are, and who we are not. 

The cellular membrane is there to learn, which means to grow. Life exists to experience itself, as life experiences itself, it learns. The cellular membrane is also there to protect the cell.

And here is the quandary: the cell cannot grow and protect at the same time. Protection for the cell means shutting down reception, shutting down the fluidity that allows learning...

Cellular membranes also get called cell walls. That’s what most people call them. Walls do not allow growth: they only support protection. Cell membranes are intelligent. They communicate, they store energy, and maintain fuel supplies. They are fluid things able to let life move back-and-forth, to evolve and shift in response to how life shows up on either side. They are not walls, they are membranes…”

The pericardium, which translates as “around the heart,” is a double-layered connective tissue membrane that surrounds the heart like a sac and protects our hearts like membranes do. And yet, all natural processes of the body and in nature do not stay in the contraction of protection…unless they’re dead. Hello, rigor mortis ☠️. I am not dead, and neither are you.

In our quest for personal and collective liberation, through our differences and needs for protection, how can we be membranes and not walls?

While catastrophic injustices and suffering keep unfolding before our weary eyes, how can we keep tending to the sounding alarms of rage and grief without letting it inflame our hearts?

"If a cellular membrane shuts down with protection for too long, the cell will die. It literally can’t breathe. This is not something that most people choose when this happens. It usually means something has taken place, an act of harm, and overwhelm by a person, by a virus, by bacteria. Shutting this membrane, this wall, is not something that most people choose.”

Susan Raffo
Liberated to the Bone

Trauma, shame, on-going harm…so much can leave us without choice in whether we protect or whether we grow (or some nuanced non-binary place in between). If we are in the thick of violence or trauma, war or abuse so close to home, it’s not about choice or opening the heart or whatever the fu—.

But for those of us who have access to some safety, clean water, quietude, warm meals and even a warm hug every now and then, I wonder where we have choice that we’re not honoring. It fees like a responsibility for me to tap my shoulders and my chest, give words to my painful and joyful feelings, and practice letting them go. It feels like activism to open my heart and free my Love, even while “knowing that the loving faces will one day fade to indifference or bone”?

I want to keep discovering what happens when I ask my heart, “dear beloved ancient teacher, will you open for me, for our freedom?” What can unfold when I choose to accept my heart’s organic dance of contracting and blooming and contracting and blooming? When I let her be my divinely-lead master, and to let the stories and logic of my mind be her servant? What happens when I choose- or at least intend to choose to allow her growth?

I’m realizing how utterly worthy of a mission it is…to tend to my heart and her inherent courage, to heal the inflammation and free my Love- to make this THE WORK and play!

Through the sheer privilege of my acupuncturist’s needles and fiery cups, nervous system practices with teachers like Sukie Baxter, a prebiotic/synbiotic called Seed for healthy digestion, diligence with my morning pages, and practices for alchemizing my fears and resentments…I’m giving my fiery heart more intentional care to cool off. 💦 ❤️‍🔥 This is also the first of what I hope will be several posts about heart-opening as a worthy and fierce mission. It’s my way of staying devoted to heart-tending and heart-opening even as we witness what happens day to day.

In explosive times of polarization, domination and separation globally and microcosmically, is it not an urgent responsibility for us to tap our hearts and call on the wisdom-keepers pumping in our very chests? Is it not significant activism to invite our ancient, compassion and resilient lovers (our hearts, to be very clear) to the forefront? Could our hearts be holding the medicine that’s desperately needed to pave new way?

"Life will break you.
Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either,
for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel.
It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near,
let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling
all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich
The Painted Drum

Relevant resources and gatherings:

👂 Listen to this episode here.