It is human nature to let ourselves become fixed in certain patterns that can hold us back by constricting the heart, limiting what we are able or willing to feel and know. It is by changing these patterns that you can allow your heart to express fully and to give light and love to yourself and then out into the world.

Our tendency is to seek out patterns of safety and comfort and security, but in truth these are transient and fleeting, often mere shadows of what we had imagined they could offer to us. Their magic does not last long, for our discontent surfaces eventually.

Why the discontent? Part of the reason is that we are not made to remain static or unchanging. We are wired to be curious, to move beyond what we are. We are created with an insatiable curiosity to find answers, to experience life, and to allow the vulnerability of love.

The Energy of the Heart

The heart seeks love. The heart IS love. This gives it immense power.

There is scientific evidence that an electromagnetic field of energy operates in your heart just below your conscious awareness:

“The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG). The magnetic component of the heart’s field, which is around 100 times stronger than that produced by the brain, is not impeded by tissues and can be measured several feet away from the body.” (HeartMath® Institute)

Imagine that kind of expansion, feel it extending out from your heart as you stand still in one place. That field  informs you about what is going on around you every moment — and you can decipher those messages if you don’t react to emotions you feel but instead “listen” to the awareness that lies beneath them. If you remember that those emotions are as transient by their nature as the “fixed” patterns you cling to. If you are open to allowing that awareness of the heart’s field to speak to you.

Heart Awareness

You experience this electromagnetic field of the heart every day, every moment. It apprises you of the presence of others. Through it you intersect at the energy level, the electromagnetic level, and sense your connection with other human beings — it informs you of the true nature of that connection.

The thought of changing our ways and beliefs — our fixed patterns — can frighten us, and some of us would do anything to prevent whatever we think that change means or could bring. We feel threatened by it. Yet if we yield to that fear we begin to close down the heart and attempt to shut down its expanded field, to retreat from  connection and communication with others who do not share our “safe” patterns.

Yet even that does not really work. Eventually, all things change. And that is the conundrum — as humans we seek security and predictability, but as humans, it is the last thing we are capable of sustaining.

We are always, in the present moment, in the midst of change that appears in the next moment, and the next, and the next. It is life. It is the heart of life. We are meant to live within that awareness.