Lifeletter #190: The Flame in Your Heart

Someone said to me the other day, “What do I really love, more than anything? How do I know what interests me most deeply, what matters the most? How do I know what to focus on, what to choose, what to give myself to? There are so many choices, so many possibilities. Help!”

I hear these questions everywhere right now. They live in many people that I speak with and listen to. They are not just individual questions; they live in our collective space.

These questions are intimately connected with the work I do in helping people embody the core creativity of the soul. This core creative energy comes directly from what we love, what entrances us, what deeply interests us. This love is like a flame in the heart. It is part of our original blueprint, the utter uniqueness of who we are, and there is no explaining it or justifying it to anyone else.

I remember a few years ago, facilitating a mediation session in our community. It was very intense, as such processes are. A friend of mine who was present approached me at the end of the session and asked, “You really like this kind of thing, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I really do. I couldn’t do this kind of work if I didn’t love it.”

“That’s amazing,” he responded. “I just wanted to run from the room.”

What we love to do, what we are called to do, isn’t always comfortable, easy or fun, although at times it can be extremely enjoyable. Trying to discover it with the mind does not work-it’s more visceral than that, like a bee sting, or a burning in the heart. Once we know what it is that we love, what we are called to do, to give ourselves to, our life is not the same. When we give ourselves to something, the love and devotion in that giving open capacities in us that were invisible before, unknown, and dormant. Energy begins to move in us; insights, intuitions and surprising new feelings arise. We are able to see more, feel more, face more, embrace more. We grow larger, wider, lighter and darker.

 

This core creative energy wants to express itself through us-that is its nature. Our energy flows from what we care about most deeply, what we feel for, in the depths of our heart. If we don’t know what this is, we won’t have the energy to keep going when things are really difficult. Without this depth of feeling and caring, we’ll get caught up in goals and agendas, in what we think is supposed to be happening. We will view our obstacles as enemies. Our real mission, our passion, our core creative impulse, what we came here for, asks us for a lot of persistence and will, but it also requires our surrender. It is bigger and deeper than we are. And in the end, we find out that it wasn’t really us that did the choosing. It was choosing us, all along.

I heard a beautiful conversation on this theme, between Maura O’Connor, who wrote Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things, and Timothy Morton, a professor at Rice University and author of Dark Ecology and Ecology Without Nature. They were exploring the ways that we think about nature and how often we make nature into something separate from us. Timothy’s view is that this artificial distinction is at the heart of all the difficulties we are having with the environment, and the difficulties the environment is having with us. He questions our tendency to put things into neat little boxes and label them ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural.’ He said to Maura, “Instead of trying to prove that the forest has value because it is natural, ask yourself whether you love the forest, whether you are entranced by the forest, obsessed by it.”

My whole being came alive when I heard Timothy ask Maura these questions. To discover for ourselves what is calling us, what we love more than anything, what is of enduring interest, what enchants us, we have to inquire. We have to ask these questions and live with them, explore them, through dialogue with others, through prayer, through writing, through dance, through our day-to-day life. These questions have to walk with us, until a deeper clarity dissolves them. We have to love the questions, until they turn into our answers. We have to be generous enough, brave enough, to let them burn in our heart. Even a tiny flame can light up the darkness.

We can serve each other well by learning to hold and honour these questions. We can evolve together by exploring our deeper capacities to ask, to listen, to be tender, vulnerable and receptive. We can let these questions burn in us, and allow the light of that burning to ignite a flame in someone else’s heart, a sacred space in which to love and respect these

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

-David Whyte, ‘Sometimes’

with love,
Shayla