Lifeletter #135: Melting the Heart Wall

A few years ago I went to another town to facilitate a communication training. Shortly after I arrived, a man came in to help me set up the group room. He walked in the door and greeted me with so much warmth and open-heartedness that I was disoriented. I was literally thrown off by the genuineness, the innocence of the warmth he expressed. I didn’t know how to relate to the welcoming tenderness of his energy. I was surprised by this, a bit unnerved. I tend to think of myself as someone who invites and enjoys this kind of loving connection.

Throughout the morning, I kept wondering about him. What had happened to him to create such open-heartedness? I could sense that this man was living outside the constraints of our everyday conditioned consciousness. What was it that had so thoroughly melted the walls around his heart?

At lunch, I found out from his wife that he had been involved in a serious hang gliding accident a number of years ago. He had suffered long-term brain damage as a result of the accident. His wife described the radical change in him that followed the accident, and what it was like to live with someone who did not have the kind of defences the rest of us have. She spoke about how beautiful and also awkward it could be at times, living with a man who did not have those heart walls in place.

I have spent a lot of time since then, contemplating that meeting. I was moved and touched by the profound humanness of this man. I could tell he was not holding on to a feeling of superiority or inferiority. His greeting bathed me in a feeling of our basic goodness and our fundamental equality. And it sparked a deep awareness in me of the price we pay in our culture for the development of the mind and intellect.

We are living in an age in which the mental realm is incredibly powerful. This is where our evolution has taken us. We can’t go back-we can’t become simple farmers or indigenous people. The intellect is here to stay, and it needs to be respected and well used. But if we don’t know how to integrate it with the other dimensions of our being, we end up with a heart and a body that are shut down, isolated and diminished. We don’t become fully human. Too much mind breeds a lot of separation and loneliness. And the loneliness goes very deep. It becomes part of how we experience reality. We don’t know how to melt the walls around the heart. We don’t even know they are there-we are so accustomed to living inside them.

Jean Vanier, who founded the Arche communities all over the world for people who are disabled, wrote a lot about his life with these people. He passed through a deep transformation, after spending many years with disabled people. He talks about how many of us so-called ‘normal people’ began to feel disabled to him. We may be high functioning, but we have forgotten how to love-truly, generously, and without holding back.

Sometimes we think of people who are disabled as ‘weak.’ And yet they carry a great power in their hearts.  Vanier remembers what Jesus was trying to communicate when he said to the apostle Paul, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” Vanier says, ““Our society will really become human as we discover that the strong need the weak, just as the weak need the strong.”

That’s an interesting perspective, is it not? I’ve noticed in my work how easy it is for us to judge whatever we call weakness, in others and in ourselves. We might carry a kind of contempt for it. I see this a lot with couples. Women often complain to me about the weakness in their men. What if this weakness is carrying gifts for us? What if being strong is not at all what we think it is?

I really wonder about this—about how superficial our ideas of weakness and strength are. I wonder what would happen if we got in touch with a deeper, truer strength? I feel the possibility of this, and it opens up something deep in my heart. I feel the presence of another kind of strength- a power that melts the walls around the heart. A strength that will allow us to live undefended, transparent and open to life.

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing          

-ee cummings

 

with love,

Shayla

 

 

“Those in need and those who come to help are all being healed and are all, together, becoming more human,” Vanier