The Conundrum of Being Openhearted

Looking at how being open hearted is not opposite to having boundaries and communicating them clearly empowers us to be open hearted in a way which is healthy, life affirming, and nurturing for everyone including us. 

Transcript

The Conundrum of Being Openhearted

Open heartedness is one of the staples of spirituality and spiritual community right along with the Golden Rule and "Know Thyself". It's something we're taught when we're really young, basically at the same time we're learning colors, shapes and the need to share. Over the past decades we've added more dimension to it through Yoga, which teaches about the need to open our chest, breath into our heart, slide the shoulder blades down our back, and be mindful of our heartbeat.

We've deepened our connection with open heartedness even further as we've come to better understand chakras and manifestation practices. The Heart chakra is where emotion enters into the process of manifestation as the result of infinite love mixing with the physical. This is the place where we know something to be true regardless of the facts and despite what fear and our gut are telling us is reality. It is the deep knowing which defies common sense, connects unconditionally, is the home of hope, and asks us to defy the odds. Its wisdom works to breach the gap between what our minds think and what our bodies experience with varying rates of success. It is where we begin to weave manifestation into being hence the theme of this energy center is "Not My will or Thy will but Our will be done." 

This part of who we are is where some of our most current dramas emanate, from mass shootings, refugee relocation, ongoing wars and terrorism to name a few, and yet deals with some of our most ancient of myths and prejudices. It is also where we retreat when connecting directly with individuals becomes too fraught or difficult. Charles Schultz summed this up distinctly when Linus said, "I love mankind ... it's people I can't stand!!" 

It is in the heart which things "get real" for the first time, moving from the spiritual and theoretical into the physical and therefore urging us to experience the world and respond to it through emotion. In this energy center we move from the realm of thought and inspiration and decisions to action. We experience for the first time a connection with the world around us as well as our own becoming. We enter into the world and begin to feel. 

The emotions here are not about the individual or their reaction to an individually experienced world but a response to the greater connection between all things, the larger picture of existence. For example, these are feelings of shock and sorrow at a mass shooting in a school or mall, the devastation of a terrorist bombing of a civilian population, or a natural disaster which devastates a community. Those moments when you were completely aware of yourself and yet immersed in a greater You – that's Heart Chakra. 

To be open hearted is a very good thing. However, it's not a complicated skill or something most people struggle to understand. Often children pick it up just from watching the adults around them, if not from caregivers or parents, then from extended family, school or even their friend's parents. So why do adults so often come to feel they need to work on being more open hearted, get told by others they should be more open hearted, or experience feedback which points to them not being open hearted enough?

Well, in part, open heartedness suffers from the same problems as our current misunderstanding about ego. Most religions have wisdom teachings which are direct about how we should care for others as ourselves, think of the lowliest among us first, and be sure to give where and when there is need. These teachings are seen in a modern context as universally good and to be applied to all humans or a generalized "everyman" and so are experienced as one size fits all.

However, these wisdom teachings which have come down to us were never intended for a general audience. Most people who would have had access to such writings, teachers, and teachings would have been exclusively empowered males of some level of privilege. They would have been land or business owners, educated elites, political or ruling class families or those with enough power to have gained access to these arenas. From Hinduism to Buddhism, Islam to Judaism, ancient Greeks to Romans, these lessons were aimed at those who tended to overuse or abuse power. Those who were more likely to forget they were/are their brother's keeper, and they are meant to support their community by being of and a part of it, not above or beyond it. Hence the injunction to step out of ego and into service.

Which, as a side note, is why the teachings of Jesus were so very radical in their day. He included the poor, women, slaves, minorities, criminals, and those thought to be beneath notice in his audience. He was one of the few in oral or written history who truly taught to anyone and treated them as equal.

Spiritual teachings about staying out of your ego, opening your heart and focusing on service as a means to walk a spiritual path were never meant for those who had no power or whose life was defined by service and servitude such as women, slaves, animals and others who were considered property. How much more service can you do when your entire life is about doing for others? How ironic is it to be told not to covet what others have when you are never allowed the freedom to covet anything other than freedom? 

Going back to Christianity, what if the sins enumerated in the Bible, the sins of being hard hearted or too much in your own ego, weren't universal, but instead were formulated to describe a masculine perspective? If so then they would describe the negative aspects of men, not necessarily of women. In fact, if you look at the seven deadly sins you'll see, in general, male empowerment run amok, then look at the seven virtues which are meant to be their remedy and you can see women's service work made to seem saintly rather than a sacrifice of sovereignty.

I've found this concept fascinating for decades because it points to something I have found in my work, that women don't tend towards the same sins as men, but are told they do and so work to redeem themselves from something they aren't doing.

I think Dr. Valerie Saiving describes it best in her article "The Human Situation: A Feminine View", found in  the book Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion:

"It is my contention that there are significant differences between masculine and feminine experience and that feminine experience reveals in a more emphatic fashion certain aspects of the human situation which are present but less obvious in the experience of men. Contemporary theological doctrines of love have, I believe, been constructed primarily upon the basis of masculine experience and thus view the human situation from the male standpoint. Consequently, these doctrines do not provide an adequate interpretation of the situation of women — nor, for that matter, of men...

...The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms of sin...have a quality which can never be encompassed by such terms as 'pride' and 'will to power.' They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus, dependence on others for one's self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence...In short, underdevelopment or negation of the self."

This sets up the conundrum I find with open heartedness: most people who list it as something they are working on or "know they should" don't need to, even as they receive consistent feedback that they do and should. At the same time those who do need to work on this often don't care or actively resist doing so for a variety of reasons.

Working to be more open hearted doesn't mean like a flavor becoming more rich, robust, or intense, but more as in the energy center of the heart becomes larger, more active, and possibly even predominant over other energy centers. This tends to mean the throat chakra, the energy center we use to speak our truth, set boundaries, explain ourselves, or ask for clarity is minimized both in power as well as importance as it makes room for the open heart. The more we work to force an open heartedness which is in reality unbalanced and potentially unhealthy, the less we are able to speak up for ourselves, get a point across, or say no. We have language for this such as "my heart was in my throat" meaning I wasn't able to say anything or "I knew what I meant in my heart, but the words wouldn't come."

The enlargement of the heart chakra and it's squeezing the throat also has a knock on or secondary effect of causing us to have second chakra issues or difficulties with money, relationships and self-worth. The throat and sacral chakras work like the wheels on a bicycle. If everything is working correctly and at speed, then the wheels are going in the same direction at the same speed helping us get to our goal. If one is slow, minimized, or not spinning much at all, then neither can the other. 

As communicating (throat chakra) and relating to/with the world outside of us (sacral chakra) are the primary means by which we manifest, their being out of sync or offline can turn us into an unwitting resource to be used by others for their own purposes. This can be seen by looking at where messages about our open heartedness quotient come from. Most messages about this come not from our internal sense of self, wellbeing and interconnectedness, but instead from others and, whether presented as constructive criticism or as describing a fault or flaw, they are meant to spur us to action on this other's behalf. The action may be presented as for our good, but often this is only from the perspective of correcting what is meant to seem like a deficit or flaw. Unfortunately, human beings being...well...human, messages about our need to be more open hearted can and often are used as a means of manipulation, an easy way to get us to do something we don't want to or shouldn't do by subtly questioning and belittling our own knowing and sense of self.

This is why, if someone mentions working to be more open hearted, I suggest they also work on setting, communicating, and maintaining boundaries. 

Communicating our boundaries is a good thing to do. If you don't like pickles, let the person know so they don't end up on your burger or next to your sandwich. If you don't do horror movies, let people know so they don't choose it as the entertainment on Saturday night. If you don't want the dog to pee on the rug, show it where it should go and when, then you won't have to launder the rug...as much. If someone is consistently hurting you through their actions, let them know so they are both aware of the results of their actions and what would be preferred.

However, communicating is not a magic wand. Just because you say "don't" doesn't mean a person can or will stop. As I am wont to say in contentious conversations, "Understanding doesn't mean agreement." A person can be fully aware of a boundary and still violate it.

Also, communication can come to stand in for action or follow through. People quite often get caught in a loop of thinking one more conversation about something will get the other to "understand" the situation by which they mean "come to agree with them" and start doing things the right way. What this fails to recognize is the other person has become habituated to these conversations, knows they result in no change or consequences, in fact have become the consequence which amounts to nothing, and so can dismiss everything said as meaningless words or a minor irritation. Thus, the injured party feels they are setting boundaries through communicating them and it continues to be the actions of the other which need to be corrected. Yet, they don't recognize the disconnect between the boundaries they are communicating, which aren't in reality being set, and those they are setting through ongoing communication attempts.

The key to getting out of this self-defeating loop is to recognize boundaries don't require agreement. 

Boundaries are like gravity. They exist. It doesn't matter what others think, say or do about them, they are there. If they weren't, then it would be impossible to violate them. We wouldn't experience hurt when people walk all over them/us. We wouldn't even know there is an us because boundaries are how we know we exist as a unique being in an amazing cosmos. Boundaries are formed and expressed through our actions in relationship to others. They form and come into being in our sacral chakra while being communicated through our throat chakra. If we are honoring and enacting our boundaries, we support ourselves and our communication, bringing both energy centers into harmony.

Being open hearted is not opposite to having boundaries nor does it need to be a conundrum. On the contrary, just as being fully connected to the ground through our feet allows us to reach for the sky, living our boundaries and communicating them clearly empowers us to be open hearted in a way which is healthy, life affirming, and nurturing for everyone including us.