Marcia's Musings: The Heart as Guide and Messenger
/ GL Admins
I lay on the massage table, the therapist’s hands moving my limbs, spine, and neck in ways I thought impossible to relieve the after-effects of being struck by a driver in heavy freeway traffic last May. That hard hit to the rear of my car turns out to be one of those events that for a long time, and perhaps forever, splinters life into “before” and “after”. The adept, intuitive hands manipulated muscles, fascia, bones, and other connective tissue in ways that surprised me and allayed some of the fear that I will never move with ease again. Before and after.
My mind wandered throughout the nearly two hours on the padded, heated table. It roved freely because safe hands held my body, and it landed gently on intense feelings of delight and satisfaction in that present moment.
The joy I feel in this season of life stems from my close-in family, now including a grandchild, scion of my strong, interesting son and his lovely (in all ways) wife; a devoted, dynamic daughter in love with a solid partner who claims a place in my heart; a solid, respectful relationship with the father of these two children, and friends old and new. Joy flows, too, from the rewards realized in the fifteen years since launching the first Green Lotus a half-mile from my Lakeville home, which permitted smooth work-life balance.
Every day since November 2007 when Lakeville opened, guests and students share stories of change and challenge, too, and enrich my life more than I’d even imagined. My home shelters and sustains me; I love expressing myself through its coziness and beauty – it stands as a living canvas of one of my artistic expressions, writing, speaking, and fashion being the others. Most of the time I feel physically strong, mentally engaged, emotionally accessible to myself and others. And yet.
And yet, my heart whispers of new deep longings. They echo faintly. I strain to pick up phrases and images of what comes next: leading retreats and teaching when I choose; developing different channels for my writing and speaking; living for brief periods in other countries and cities, including near the precious grandson; playing more and working less in the uninterrupted leisureliness of unscheduled time. I long to give back by resuming volunteering for causes that advance love and equality. Because I cannot yet clearly decipher these many whisperings of my heart, I must engage in the practice of patience as I wait for the full reveal. I can do it because I trust my heart which never lets me down if I listen and feel. My heart steps forward to speak to me most clearly when I meditate and engage in internal personal inquiry, especially in practices like Yoga Nidra, mindfulness meditation, and mindful movement, and when I symbolically “bathe” in nature by spending as much time with her as possible.
Trusting your heart demands not only deep listening, but also deep feeling. You cannot think your way to discovering your heart’s deepest longing. You must hear and feel it and then give it voice, clearly and compassionately. Giving it voice means making choices - and owning and facing those choices, some of which will initially cause discomfort. What will people think? How will it play out? Do I possess the stamina and other resources for this change? Is it worth the inherent risk that change often involves?
What about your heart? In seasons of natural reflection – the solstices, for example, and other dates of meaningful ritual and introspection like Christmas, Hannukah, Diwali, Kwanza, Ramadan, whatever is important to you – the heart seeks to be heard. I encourage you to write to capture what you are hearing, to read those stories and poems that support your heart, to listen rather than to petition, to feel rather than to think as you invite your heart to step forward in its role as major guide and messenger. As the end of another year and the beginning of a new one approach, what is your heart whispering or shouting? Are you listening? Are you feeling?
Lindsay is a yoga instructor, empath, intuitive, and chakra healer offering session at Green Lotus Yoga and Healing Center in Mendota.
Earlier this month, I led a training in Yoga Nidra. My heart cracked open. Emotions and feelings flowed. What a gift for us all, students and teachers alike. In sharing our inner life and our hearts’ deepest longings, we find equality.
Hey, God, are you there? It’s me, Marcia. Usually, as I sit on my cushion, I listen for and to you. As you know, sometimes, I call you God, other times Universe. Other times, Goddess. In a long life with you, I learned you hear and answer to many names. I know you’re there.
Today, I pay tribute to a man who learned to live in “the world of and”, who embraced change, a meaningful space in the philosophy of yoga, particularly in the therapeutic approach of Yoga Nidra, and in Buddhist psychology.
At this time of the year, we often feel tender: tender toward other people, tender toward the natural world and all its creatures, tender toward life itself, tender perhaps even toward ourselves. Images both sweet, like a dog and cat sleeping together, and horrifying, like the pain and suffering borne by innocent civilians on both sides of a war, elicit tender thoughts.
The headline for this soul-baring sounds faintly geopolitical and sinister. It’s as though Hercule Poirot stands on deck to solve a great mystery. This situation requires no famous investigator, however. What is unfolding is the normal flow of the sweet river of life and a happy, joyous bend in it. I can’t wait to tell you this long-held secret.
This thought plagues me in a time of impersonality. We sit in offices in our private homes, alone or on endless Zoom meetings that I overhear from my home’s lower level when my children or friends stay over. Oh, yes, they see faces. The sharing, though, is all business…
When the hammer fell, or more accurately the surgeon’s scalpel, and a non-life-threatening complication ensued along with an extended rest at-home, legs-elevated time, I faced down this question: As I age, how will I fill my time and engage my mind and body?
With Barbie, there emerged a more complicated relationship. She didn’t look like anything I witnessed in the strong flesh-and-blood women around me, and it’s only by some miracle that I didn’t start to body-shame myself. I know many others did in the years before we talked about concepts like the male gaze and how it distorts the way women view themselves. This sets impossible standards that maim and warp and cause real illnesses in both men and women and their relationships, however they come together. Especially in the first decade of Barbie’s existence, her white, white world left out everyone else, which matched reality, until the great movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused Mattel, Barbie’s corporate owner, to succumb to the pressure to “show dolls more like me and my daughter”. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
I want to be as truthful with you as I am able. Acknowledging my anger, exploring its roots, and deciding where and when to act feels good…
I’m happy. Right now, I can’t believe how often I am happy. The best news? I no longer wonder how long this joy will last or how to extend it. I’ve come to see that when I’m happy, I can just be in that happy place for however long it lasts.
The lingering effects of this concussion force the Energizer Bunny to slow down and remind me of my True Self which aways craved quiet and stillness. I nap, listen to books, and more deeply embrace internal practices that support my healing.
I walked out the front door of my Florida home, stepping into a sky-blue-bright day blazing with heat, only to find a chicken turtle clinging to the edge of my paver-patterned driveway. As I approached, thinking how much it looked like a painted turtle our children once raised, it appeared more lethargic than frightened.
Of all the paired human emotions, love and loss cause the most challenge for me. As an only child raised and nurtured in the embrace of two warm and closely knit families, I dreaded the passage of time with its inevitable march toward separation caused by death….
Inner wars and conflicts never pass without struggle. Whether the focus is on love, relationship, food, exercise, money, or anything else, once the inner struggle begins, we easily bog down, mired in the mud of indecision and inaction. Ask me: I’m expert on this one.
Trusting your heart demands not only deep listening but also deep feeling. You cannot think your way to discovering your heart’s deepest longing. You must hear and feel it and then give it voice, clearly and compassionately….
I started to examine how the repetitive, mundane tasks of life – whether working on the farm with all it entailed or, later, attending to my own home with its demands for care and payments – felt in my body. The more I focused on the chore, the more aware I became of the emotions and sensations emerging.
This is a song of life. Like most songs, and all stories of life, it contains both joy and sadness, and it begins like this.
The yoga Vedic teaching to speak the sweet truth – Satyaṃ brūyāt priyaṃ brūyāt in Sanskrit – invites us to use exquisite subtlety in communicating the truth which virtually demands that we pause before speaking. The teaching goes on:
Floating when depleted proves to be a strong Rx, a natural one, too. You don’t need to be on an ocean- or river-bound ship to do it, either. Floating, I’ve come to realize, comes in many versions and leads to a more- restive state of mind…
In her cheerful, quiet room, I sit as close to her hospital bed as possible, my hand on her bony shoulder, and turn my full attention to her. Even as she sleeps, I resist the phone….
All day long, I’d roamed the combative realm of divided attention: sneaking in an answer to a text or two while in Zoom meetings; answering phone calls from colleagues and friends while writing emails or editing articles, and cramming some non-descript food into my hungry body while reading business documents. I felt depleted and alienated. Split attention takes a toll on us as we now well know, giving lie to decades of training people how to multi-task.
There comes the time when we take deep stock of our lives. If we’re living a life grounded in the present and in the body, we will have taken stock frequently throughout the entire arc of our lives. What does it mean to take deep stock? When do we know it’s time to do so? How do we do it?
Sweating often communicates the state of our emotional well-being. How many times has a friend, partner, child, spouse said to you, “I broke out into a cold sweat”? How many times have you experienced the cold sweats yourself?
The feeling of happiness moved throughout my body like liquid gold, starting at my heart center. I understood what happiness feels like for me. Because I stayed present the thought was no longer just a thought – it morphed into a physical sensation….
When grief comes calling, it rarely arrives alone. Sometimes guilt accompanies it. It’s complicated and many-layered. Sometimes relief does – the innate gratitude that the loved one no longer suffers – and inadvertently triggers more guilt….
It wasn’t always easy to recognize positive outcomes in the age of the pandemic, given the brain’s preference for negative thinking. Especially in the darkest days our community faced together, all I focused on was absorbing the shock of the “unseen enemy” and its relentless assault…
My mother’s younger brother died a few weeks ago at age 88. One minute he sat chatting from his chair with his daughter, seeing her on Facetime, and the next he slumped over quietly. He left this world on the long, last exhale in an instant without noticeable stress or pain. In what certainly stands as a sign of these times, my cousin virtually witnessed her father passing, his energy moving from one dimension to the next in full digital view.
Grief arrives for many reasons. We often identify the death of a partner, spouse, friend, child, parent, or colleague as the deepest form of grief – and rightfully so. We’ve witnessed the pain of this kind of grief etched on survivors’ faces.