6 the secrets of the spiritual heart

Very few people understand the heart. In truth, your heart is one of the masterpieces of creation. It is a phenomenal instrument. It has the potential to create vibrations and harmonies that are far beyond the beauty of pianos, strings, or flutes. You can hear an instrument, but you feel your heart. And if you think that you feel an instrument, it’s only because it touched your heart. Your heart is an instrument made of extremely subtle energy that few people come to appreciate.

In most human beings, the heart does its work unattended. Even though its behavior governs the course of our lives, it is not understood. If at any given point in time the heart happens to open, we fall in love. If at any given point in time it happens to close, the love stops. If the heart happens to hurt, we get angry, and if we stop feeling it altogether, we get empty. All of these different things happen because the heart goes through changes. These energy shifts and variations that take place in the heart run your life. You are so identified with them that you use the words “I” and “me” when you refer to what’s going on in your heart. But in truth, you are not your heart. You are the experiencer of your heart.

The heart is actually very simple to understand. It is an energy center, a chakra. It is one of the most beautiful and powerful energy centers, and one that affects our daily lives. As we have seen, an energy center is an area within your being through which your energy focuses, distributes, and flows. This energy flow has been referred to as Shakti, Spirit, and Chi, and it plays an intricate part in your life. You feel the heart’s energy all the time. Think about what it is like to feel love in your heart. Think about what it is like to feel inspiration and enthusiasm pour from your heart. Think about what it is like to feel energy well up in your heart making you confident and strong. All of this happens because the heart is an energy center.

The heart controls the energy flow by opening and closing. This means that the heart, like a valve, can either allow the flow of energy to pass through, or it can restrict the flow of energy from passing through. If you observe your heart, you know very well what it feels like when it’s open and what it feels like when it’s closed. In fact, the state of your heart changes quite regularly. You can be experiencing great feelings of love while in the presence of someone, until they say something you don’t like. Then your heart closes toward them, and you simply don’t feel the love anymore. We have all experienced this, but what exactly is causing it? Since we all have to experience the heart, we might as well understand what’s going on in there.

We begin this analysis by asking a fundamental question: What is it about the structure of the heart center that permits it to close? What you will find is that the heart closes because it becomes blocked by stored, unfinished energy patterns from your past. You need only examine your everyday experiences to understand this. As events take place in this world, they come in through your senses and have an impact on your inner state of being. The experience of these events may bring up some fear, some anxiety, or maybe some love. Different experiences happen inside because of how you take in and digest the world as it passes through you. When you take in the world through your senses, it is actually energy that is coming into your being. Form itself does not come into your mind or heart. Form stays outside, but it is processed by your senses into energy patterns that your mind and heart can receive and experience. Science explains this sensory process to us. Your eyes are not really windows through which you look out into the world. Your eyes are cameras that send electronic images of the world into you. This is true of all your senses. They sense the world, convert the information, transmit the data through electrical nerve impulses, and then the impressions get rendered in your mind. Your senses are, indeed, electronic sensing devices. But if the energy patterns that are coming into your psyche create disturbance, you will resist them and not allow them to pass through you. When you do this, the energy patterns actually get blocked within you.

This is very important. To better understand what it’s like to have these energies stored within you, let’s first examine what it would be like if nothing was stored. What if everything just passed right through you? For example, when you’re driving down a highway, you probably pass thousands of trees. They don’t leave impressions on you. They’re gone as soon as they’re perceived. While you’re driving you see trees, you see buildings, you see cars, and none of these make lasting impressions on you. There’s just a momentary impression that allows you to see them. Though they do come in through the senses and make impressions upon your mind, as quickly as the impressions are made, they are released. When you have no personal issues with them, impressions process freely.

This is how the overall system of perception is meant to work. It’s meant to take things in, allow you to experience them, and then let them pass through so that you’re fully present in the next moment. While this system is in a working, operative state, you are fine and it is fine. You’re simply having experience after experience. Driving is an experience, trees passing by are an experience, and cars passing by are an experience. These experiences are gifts that are being given to you, like a great movie. They are passing into you, awakening and stimulating you. They are actually having a profound effect on you. Moment after moment, experiences are coming in and you’re learning and growing. Your heart and mind are expanding and you are being touched at a very deep level. If experience is the best teacher, there’s nothing that comes close to the experience of life.

What it means to live life is to experience the moment that is passing through you, and then experience the next moment, and then the next. Many different experiences will come in and pass through you. It’s a phenomenal system when it is working properly. If you could live in that state, you would be a fully aware being. That is how an awakened being lives in the “now. ” They are present, life is present, and the wholeness of life is passing through them. Imagine if you were so fully present during each experience of life that it was touching you to the depth of your being. Every moment would be a stimulating, moving experience because you would be completely open, and life would be flowing right through you.

But that’s not what happens inside most of us. Instead, it’s more like you’re driving down the street, here come the trees, here come the cars, and it’s all passing right through you with no trouble. Then, inevitably, something comes in that doesn’t make it through. There was this one car, a light blue Ford Mustang, that looked like your girlfriend’s car. But as it passed by, you noticed two people hugging in the front seat. At least it looked like they were hugging, and it sure looked like your girlfriend’s car. But it was a car just like all the other cars, wasn’t it? No. It wasn’t just like all the other cars to you.

Let’s look carefully at what happened. Surely for the camera of the eyes there’s no difference between that car and the others. There’s light bouncing off of objects, passing through your retina, and making a visual impression on your mind. So at the physical level, nothing different is going on. But at the mental level, the impression didn’t make it through. When the next moment comes, you no longer notice the rest of the trees. You’re not seeing the rest of the cars. Your heart and mind are fixated on that one car, even though it’s gone. You’ve got yourself a problem here. There’s a blockage, an event that got stuck. All the subsequent experiences are trying to pass through you, but something has happened inside that has left this past experience unfinished.

What happens to that experience that didn’t make it through? Specifically, what happens to the image of the girlfriend’s car if it doesn’t just fade away into deep memory like everything else? At some point, you’ll have to stop focusing on it in order to deal with something else—like the next stoplight. What you don’t realize is that your entire experience of life is about to change because of what didn’t make it through you. Life must now compete with this blocked event for your attention, and the impression does not just sit in there quietly. You will see that your tendency is to think about it constantly. This is all in an attempt to find a way to process it through your mind. You didn’t need to process the trees, but you need to process this. Because you resisted, it got stuck, and now you have a problem. You see the thoughts start up: “Well, maybe it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t her. How could that possibly have been? ” Thought after thought goes on inside. It drives you crazy in there. All that inner noise is just your attempt to process the blocked energy and get it out of the way.

Long term, the energy patterns that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront of the mind and held until you are prepared to release them. These energy patterns, which hold tremendous detail about the events associated with them, are real. They don’t just disappear. When you are unable to allow life’s events to pass through you, they stay inside and become a problem. These patterns may be held within you for a very long time.

It is not easy to keep energy together in one place for long. As you willfully struggle to keep these events from passing through your consciousness, the energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind. This is why the mind becomes so active. When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, that unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression, ” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.

In order to understand this, let’s first take an in-depth look at the physics behind these blocked energy patterns. Just like energy waves, the energy that comes into you must keep moving. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get blocked within you. There is a way that the energy can both keep moving and stay in one place—and that is to circle around itself. We see this in atoms and in planetary orbits. Everything is energy, and energy will just expand outward if it is not contained. For there to be manifest creation, energy must get in the dynamic of cycling around itself to create a stable unit. That’s why energy manifesting as an atom forms the basic building block of this entire physical universe. Energy cycles around itself, and as we’ve discovered, atoms have enough harnessed energy to blow up the world when that energy is released. But unless forced otherwise, the energy will stay harnessed because of its equilibrium state.

This process of cycling energy is exactly what happens with a Samskara. A Samskara is a cycle of stored past energy patterns in a state of relative equilibrium. It is your resistance to experiencing these patterns that causes the energy to keep cycling around itself. There is no other place for it to go. You won’t let it. This is how most people process their issues. This packet of cycling energy is literally stored in your energetic heart center. All the Samskaras you have collected over your life are stored there.

To fully appreciate what this means, let’s go back to the example of the light blue Mustang that looked like your girlfriend’s car. Once the disturbed energy patterns are packaged and stored in the heart, they are basically inactive. It may look to you like you have handled the situation and that you have no more issues with that experience. You may not even mention the event to your girlfriend because it would look like you were jealous. You didn’t know what to do, so you resisted the energy, and it got stored in the heart where it could fall into the background and not be bothersome. While it may seem like it’s done, like it is all over and gone, it really isn’t.

Every one of the Samskaras that you’ve stored is still there. Everything that did not make it through you, from the time you were a baby all the way to this moment, is still inside of you. It is these impressions, these Samskaras, that encrust the valve of the spiritual heart. That encrustation builds up and restricts the energy flow.

Now that we understand where the blockages within the heart come from, we have answered the structural question of how the heart gets blocked. You can certainly see the potential for impressions to build up to the point where very little energy can make it through. If they build up sufficiently, you will find yourself in a state of depression. In that state, all becomes dark. This is because very little energy is coming into your heart or mind. Eventually, everything appears negative because the world of the senses must pass through this depressed energy before it gets to your consciousness.

But even if you aren’t prone to depression, your heart still gets blocked over time. It just builds up. It doesn’t always stay blocked, however. Depending upon life’s experiences, it can open and close quite frequently. This leads us to our next question: What is the cause of these frequent changes in the state of the heart? If you watch carefully, you will see it is related to the same stored past impressions that caused the blockages.

The stored energy patterns are real. A Samskara is actually programmed with the specific details of the event that could not pass through. If you experience jealousy because you thought you saw your girlfriend hugging someone in a car, very detailed data about that event is stored in the Samskara. It has that event’s vibration, it has that event’s nature, and it even retains your level of sensitivity about the event.

To see this, let’s watch what happens in the future. It’s five years later and you’re no longer with your old girlfriend. You’ve married someone else and you’re much more mature. One day you’re out driving along with the family having a wonderful time. The trees are going by, the cars are going by, and then a light blue Mustang drives by with two people hugging in the front seat. Immediately, something changes in your heart. Your heart actually skips a beat. Then it starts beating faster. You start getting moody, irritated, and agitated. You aren’t having such a nice day anymore. All of these inner changes occur because your heart got disturbed when you saw one particular car. It is truly amazing to step back and look at this process. Five years ago, for just a few moments, an event took place. You never discussed it with anybody, and now five years later, a light blue Mustang drives by and it changes the energy flow through your heart and mind.

As unbelievable as this seems, it is true. And it’s not only true about light blue Mustangs; it’s true about everything that didn’t make it through you. No wonder we’re so overwhelmed. No wonder the heart keeps opening and closing. The energy that’s stored there is real, and it interacts with the flow of current thoughts and events. The dynamics of this interaction cause the vibrations that are stored as Samskaras to get activated, sometimes years later. This is what happened with the light blue Mustang. Understand, however, that it didn’t even have to be the identical car to activate the stored energy. It could have been a black Mustang or any car with people hugging. Anything in the neighborhood has the potential to stimulate a Samskara.

The point is that past impressions do get stimulated, even old ones, and they affect your life. Sensory inputs from today’s events dig through all the stuff you have stored through the years, and they restore the exact past patterns associated with the incoming events. When a Samskara is stimulated, it opens like a flower and begins to release the stored energy. Suddenly, flashes of what you experienced when the original event took place rush into your consciousness—the thoughts, the feelings, sometimes even the smells and other sensory input. The Samskara can store a complete snapshot of the event. It is way beyond any computer storage system created by human beings. It can archive everything you were feeling, everything you were thinking, and everything that was happening surrounding the event. All this information is stored into a tiny energy bubble within your heart. Years later it gets stimulated, and instantly you are experiencing the feelings you felt in the past. You can actually feel the fears and the insecurity of a five-year-old when you’re sixty. What is happening is that unfinished mental and emotional energy patterns are getting stored and reactivated.

But it is just as important to realize that most of what you take in does not get blocked; it makes it right through you. Imagine how many things you see all day. They’re not all stored like that. Of all these impressions, the only ones that get blocked are those that cause either problems or some extraordinary sense of enjoyment. Yes, you store positive impressions too. When a wonderful experience happens to you, it doesn’t make it through because you cling to it. Clinging means “I don’t want this one to go away. He told me he loved me and I felt so loved and protected. I want to keep reliving that moment. Play it back for me over and over again…” Clinging creates positive Samskaras, and when these are stimulated, they release positive energy. Hence two kinds of experiences can occur that block the heart. You are either trying to push energies away because they bother you, or you are trying to keep energies close because you like them. In both cases, you are not letting them pass, and you are wasting precious energy by blocking the flow through resisting and clinging.

The alternative is to enjoy life instead of clinging to it or pushing it away. If you can live like that, each moment will change you. If you are willing to experience the gift of life instead of fighting with it, you will be moved to the depth of your being. When you reach this state, you will begin to see the secrets of the heart. The heart is the place through which energy flows to sustain you. This energy inspires you and raises you. It is the strength that carries you through life. It is the beautiful experience of love that pours through your whole being. This is meant to be going on inside you at all times. The highest state you have ever experienced is simply the result of how open you were. If you don’t close, it can be like that all the time. Don’t sell yourself short. This can go on all the time—unending inspiration, unending love, and unending openness. That is the natural state of a healthy heart.

To achieve this state, simply allow the experiences of life to come in and pass through your being. If old energies come back up because you were unable to process them before, let go of them now. It’s that easy. When that light blue Mustang drives by and you feel fear or jealousy, just smile. Be happy that this Samskara, which has been stored down there for all this time, has the opportunity to make it through you. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh, or do anything you want. Just don’t push it back down. Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.

So, you have a choice: Do you want to try to change the world so it doesn’t disturb your Samskaras, or are you willing to go through this process of purification? Don’t make decisions based on stimulated blockages. Learn to be centered enough to just watch this stuff come up. Once you sit deeply enough inside to stop fighting the stored energy patterns, they’ll come up constantly and pass right through you. They’ll come up during the day and they’ll even come up in your dreams. Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing. Just let it all happen. Get it over with. Don’t process them one by one; that’s too slow. Stay centered behind them and let go. Just like the physical body purges bacteria and other foreign matter, the natural flow of your energy will purge the stored patterns from your heart.

Your reward is a permanently open heart. There is no more valve. You live in love, and it feeds you and strengthens you. That is an open heart. That is the instrument of the heart as it was meant to be. Allow yourself to experience every note the heart can play. If you relax and release, this purification of your heart is a wonderful thing. Set your eyes on the highest state you can imagine and don’t take them off. If you slip, just get back up. It doesn’t matter. The very fact that you even want to go through this process of freeing the energy flow means you are great. You will get there. Just keep letting go.

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