Invincible Hearts.

Good day dear ones,

Spiritual practices are so important to make space for—not to escape from life, but to lean more fully into life from our stable, tender, strong, capacious, invincible hearts. Just as Cynthia Bourgeault's teacher told her, "we must learn to trust the invincibility of our own hearts" (Love is Stronger Than Death).

Though we may forget, spiritual practices remind us that our hearts are robust. . . that the Collective Heart is unassailable. That we remember this is essential to life in general, and to seasons of disorder in particular.

Those who can stay tethered to, and move from, this reality are needed right now. Let us continue our work of caring for, tending to, keeping clean, and tuning our invincible hearts. Let us stand as One Heart, with the capacity to be death doulas and midwives amidst the ongoing falling away of so much, right alongside the arrival of the not-yet-seen.

With Great Love,

Heather

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Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

Monday, May 5th 

Reading: “Finally they see—and the decisive breakthrough is not so much in what they see as in how they see. They have come to understand that their attuned hearts are the instruments of recognition and that these same attuned hearts will bind them to their risen [Teacher] moment by moment and forever. They have finally located their inner homing beacon.” —Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p.130

Tuesday, May 6th

Reading: “…what Jesus does so profoundly demonstrate to us in his passage from death to life is that the walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire ray of creation, the "mansions" are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love. The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well "hidden with Christ in God" (to use Paul's beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw strength from it (and him) to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.” —Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p.133 

Chant: when were we ever made less by dying 

Wednesday, May 7th  

Reading: “Yes, his physical form no longer walks the planet. But if we take him at his word, that poses no disruption to intimacy if we merely learn to recognize him at that other level, just as he has modeled for his disciples during those first forty days of Eastertide. 

"Nor has that intimacy subsided in two thousand years at least according to the testimony of a long lineage of Christian mystics, who in a single voice proclaim that our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become his body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is his love. These are not statements that can be scientifically corroborated, but they do seem to ring true to the mystically attuned heart.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p.134 

Thursday, May 8th 

Reading: “...mystical visionaries have tended to claim that this "pan-cosmic" saturation of his being into the deepest marrow of this created world was the cosmic cornerstone turned in his passage through death." Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into this invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body—the "Mystical Body of Christ," as it's known in Christian tradition—manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings but more intimately connected with them. He is the integral ground, the ambient wholeness within which our contingent human lives are always rooted and from which we are always receiving the help we need to keep moving ahead on the difficult walk we have to walk here. When the eye of our own heart is open and aligned within this field of perception, we recognize whom we're walking with." — Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p.134-135

Friday, May 9th 

Reading: “How can I, as a human being, sink into the taproot of my heart in a presence that transcends my ordinary humanity, and at the same time utterly permeates it through, and through, and through, and through, and empowers me to be present to do the best I can to be a nurturing person, a protective person, a healing person, in a peace that isn’t dependent on how that might turn out specifically for me or my loved ones?” — James Finley, Turning to the Mystics: Sink into the Taproot of Your Heart 

Chant: Sink into the taproot of your heart (by Heather Ruce)

Saturday, May 10th 

Reading:“We have, then, an indicator as to whether a given person has attained this awareness or not: someone who has learned to avoid placing blame or fault on others, on the world itself, or on circumstances or “chance” in times of adversity, dissension, conflict, and misfortune and seeks first in oneself the reason or guilt in its fullest extent—this person should also be able to see through the world in its entirety and all its structures. Otherwise, one will be coerced or violated by either one’s emotions or one’s will, and in turn will attempt to coerce or violate the world as an act of compensation or revenge. . . Everything that happens to us, then, is only the answer and echo of what and how we ourselves are. And the answer will be an integral answer only if we have approached the integral in ourselves.” — Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p. 141

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