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.” 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 I’m not going to force my shoulders open for better posture or to expose myself. They curl around my heart for a reason, they’ve always attempted to protect me.

There’s wisdom in the walls and in the fire. I and we need protection; to protect is so natural, so human and so necessary sometimes. 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.

I’ve been contemplating Liberated to the Bone by Susan Raffo, a juicy recommendation by a dear 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…”

Phew… 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?

"The intelligence that is here in the cellular membrane, this very thin wall of fluid and fat, is where we decide who we are, and who we are not. 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). This is too freaking real…

And, I wonder when I/you/we can actually choose? What happens when I tap my shoulders and my chest, give words to my painful and joyful feelings, and practice letting them go in embodied fluidity? What happens when I open my heart and free my Love anyway, even while “knowing that the loving faces will one day fade to indifference or bone”?

What happens when- even amidst violence and fear and suffering- 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 predestined 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!

This is the first of what I hope will be several posts about heart-opening as a mission, where I practice and invite collective practice with these ways of heart-tending, inviting our hearts to open; and witness what happens day to day, relation to relation.

In explosive times of polarization, domination and separation globally and microcosmically, what an urgent responsibility it is for us to tap our hearts and call on the wisdom keepers pumping in our very chests; to invite open these ancient, compassion and resilient lovers holding the medicine that’s desperately needed to pave new ways.

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…my fiery heart is receiving more intentional care to cool off. 💦 ❤️‍🔥

"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.