The Deep Hearts Core – Spiritual Direction for Difficult Times

Meeting at the Deep Hearts Core

Have started a podcast called the Deep Hearts Core. This will be a weekly podcast including heart stories, heart song and mystical poetry

The first podcast is called Stairway to Heaven and looks at the word you need to ensure that you get what you came here in this world to be.

In the second podcast you are told the wondertale about the Tuatha de Danaan – the beautiful people who were driven under ground.  This is a metaphor for many of us who live our lives judging our success or failure.

Have a listen.  You will need broadband to download these files.  Simply click on the podcast button below to immediately here this invitation to buying a stairway that takes you to that place of unimagined beauty and creativity – your deep hearts core.

 

 Buying a Stairway to Heaven: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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For anyone of this Irish storyteller’s age, one of the best music albums of my time was the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  It is one of those moments in my life when I remember the day of its release. It was a sunny day in North Wales.

This was an album of major innovation.  The Beatles created it by becoming different characters. These characters were the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On this album is a song written by John Lennon called ” A Day in A Life.”  This song invites us to live each day of our lives rather than, as he writes:

“Woke up, fell out of bed.

Ran a comb across my head.

Made my way down stairs and had a cup

And somebody spoke and I

Fell into a dream.”

Many of us fall into a dream upon waking.  This is the dream of habit.  We do things routinely.  We fall out of bed and we comb our hair mechanically.

The somebody that speaks when you make your way downstairs (a metaphor for habitual thinking) is what Zen calls monkey mind.  It is the mind that you see operating in the character played by Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day.

In this movie Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) goes to the annual Groundhog Day festivities.  After a surprise blizzard traps him in a small town hell, things get even worse. Phil wakes the next morning to find its Groundhog Day all over again, again and again.

This is what many of us, in a psychological sense, are doing in and with our lives.  Everyday we play the same day over and over again. A Day in A Life becomes the same day, just like Groundhog Day for Phil Connors.

One reason for this is that the day is taken for granted.  It is not seen, let alone felt to be a potential grace note, not only in your life, but the lives of everyone else.

How do you, how does Phil Connors, leave the hell of everyday sameness? One key is that he begins to lose his main character trait.  This is cynicism.  He has become cynical about life.  He thinks he knows it all.  He even tries to end it all but when he wakes up the next morning it’s Groundhog Day all over again.

The way out of the sameness he finds is to develop his talents in full, feel what he feels, to fall in love, become vulnerable and available to others.  In this romantic comedy he is well assisted to really wake up by the character of the relentlessly cheerful girl played by Andie McDowell.

A life of purpose and a fulfilled life is a life filled with intention to serve the highest creative expression you have come here to be.  It means really waking up one day,, one moment at a time.  When you really are awake you enter the timeless.  This is the state of being that we in Ireland refer to as the Land of the Forever Young, Tir na Nog.  This is the opposite of living a Groundhog Day existence.  This is the invitation to the forever now.

Wake up each morning, before someone speaks and you fall into a dream, the dream that you are playing small, take five minutes to ask yourself what you truly value.  This is what your heart values and what your talents are intended to express.  Write these values down and make it your heart’s intention to be true to them.

Be sincere in this asking.  Ask that you be enabled to radiate that which is intended to be played through you. Then each morning you can awaken with a sense of empowerment to the one true power that animates all life. 

Then you can play the great tune that you have come here to feel attuned with.  Then there will be no Lonely Hearts Club Band but a band that surrounds you and makes each day in your life another day of loving.

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Unfortunately those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life.

 -Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

The author goes on to say:

Either they do, or in trying to lead a more mundane life, they exist as non-entities, what T.S. Eliot called, “Hollow men.”

Campbell is quoting about the hollow men is from Elliot’s poem The Waste Land.  This wasteland exists in many people’s lives.  It exists in the lives of those who are by all accounts successful and have ‘made it.’

You may make it in your life situation but this does not mean that you have lived a life that love has intended that you live.  It does not mean you have followed the call to venture into the uniqueness you are intended to be.

It tends to mean that you live a paradox that is empty.  It is that you have been filled up with all sorts of information, roles and allegiances that are what you say is what you are ‘about.’ What is forgotten is the call to be what is authentic.  You are filled up but at the centre you are hollow.

As hollow men and women walking this cultural wasteland of never enough, we miss the experience of fulfilment.  We move around the world and what some wisdom traditions call these ‘hollow’ people hungry ghosts.

Imagine people who walk the world and have large open mouths.  They are always consuming but what they eat does not satisfy.  It does not touch their bellies.  So like those who are starving, their bellies are distended. They have large heads and are thin, even emaciated. This is a hungry ghost.

They are not walking in beauty – a Native American invitation.  They are walking the wasteland of never enough.  They are not in direct connection to a food source that the wisdom leader requests when he prays Give us this day our daily bread.  This is not the daily bread that is mostly a combination of vitamin pumped air and flour that we buy in our local shop as bread.  This is not what is referred to as the staff of life and is the very stuff of life.

To answer the call, “to be or not to be” will make you, like Hamlet, an outsider.  You have to choose to become all that life invites you into and the being of that wholeness. This means walking your unique beauty. This may at various stages feel anything but beautiful.  These very stages are known and within all traditional wonder tales and fairy tales there is assistance at hand to make the transition.

This time is a great time to be alive.  It is a time when you have choices to leave the wasteland of being a non-entity to quote Joseph Campbell and find your unique and wonder tale pathway to bliss. The invitation is always being extended but it has stages along the way that you are required to pass through.

Issue a calling card that will invite your authentic self and your authentic wisdom voice to journey on the real way to the treasure contained within such a call.

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