Sometimes I hear voices in my head. They feel ancient because they say wise things.  This usually happens when I’m hiking in nature.  They tell me often that to feel is to pray. They say if we’re not feeling, we’re not living.

Agony and Ecstasy Is A Holy Dance

To feel is to move and to dance to the rhythms of the cosmos. To feel our lives, every inch of it, is to experience the life force within. From the agony to the ecstasy, it’s all an expression of what is holy. Our heart is the chamber that holds the sacredness of life. To drink deeply of its wisdom and its achingly beautiful grace is to experience life.

Where else can we come to know the meaning of our existence, than through the mysterious hallways of the heart? This is the passageway to infinity, and it’s through this beating, rhythmical, ancient vessel of feeling — the love and the pain — that we know we are alive.

What Are You More Afraid of Feeling? Love or Fear?

And yet to truly feel often becomes the very reason why most of us want to remain numb. To feel can be scary and overwhelming.  And yes, some of us can even be more frightened to feel love than fear.  I’m talking about the love at the core of our being here…not the conditioned game of romantic love.

In fact, I believe that most of us are so used to feeling fear and pain, that to open ourselves and our hearts to love is our greatest fear of all. And yet, this is our only real salvation.

Have You Turned the Switch of Life “Off?”

We’ve all danced intimately with pain and sorrow. We know that dance. Our movements are robotic and lifeless. We remain in the darkness of our perfectly controlled lives. Every second accounted for, every decision perfectly planned far in advance. Our fatal error being, we’ve turned the switch of life off. In our effort to not feel any more pain, we’ve become our own jailers. Imprisoned are we with the key to freedom in our very hands, the key that will unlock the heart and allow the thaw to begin.

Our Feelings Are Creative Energy Wasted If Unexpressed

If we are moving through our lives rooted in the fear of feeling the full range and magnitude of our own greatness, our own divinity, what kind of prayers do you think we are offering up to the world?

If feeling is praying, and our feelings are the energy behind all our creative power, we can begin to see the grave error of our ways. To live in fear is to pray for fear. To live in numbness is to pray for numbness. To feel nothing is to not pray at all.

To keep our feelings trapped inside is to flirt with disaster. Feelings are life force. They create movement. When they are unexpressed they create stagnation. Stagnation creates blockage. Blockage is frozen life-force that creates mass. Where there’s blockage, life force cannot flow. If life force cannot flow, the poetry of life disappears from view, and our very existence becomes compromised.

The Courage of Our Fragile, Vulnerable Humanness

It takes courage to let our hearts thaw, to feel vulnerable enough to let the tidal waves of pain and suffering flood and wash away our fears. But the more we allow ourselves to unravel and unwind these bands of restriction, these frozen sorrows, the sooner we become amazed at how short-lived the movement of emotional pain is, how quickly it rushes out and away, freed at last to be transmuted into life itself, and we’re left stunned and wondering why we held on to it for so long.

When we give ourselves permission to feel uncomfortable feelings, (which is a massive act of self love) we are opening up the gate that leads us down the road to freedom. It is here, as we walk along together, as we cry, as we let go, as we mourn, that we begin to feel something else.

Glimmers of Joy Rise Up

We begin to feel little glimmers of joy. We begin to notice the person walking next to us. We notice we are no different, that we want the same thing — to be free — free to love, free to feel.

We begin to see the beauty of the trees as we walk on, the dance of the wildflowers as they sway in the breeze, the warmth of the sun as it gives life to every living thing, the hush of the sky as we look upward and give thanks for the greatest realization we’ve ever come to know…that WE are life itself, and our feelings are the dwelling place for this unfathomable, benevolent power.

Before we know it, joy is welling up inside of us and spilling out. We know it’s impossible to contain it. We know it must be shared.

Trust That You Can Craft A Life You Love

And with this profound knowledge we begin to believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the fate of our world, and our freedom to craft a life we love, is up to us. We begin to trust in our ability to use the energy of love to create unity — within ourselves first — by gently emptying our heart to the silent mystery of the cosmos, the same intelligence that governs the universe.

We Can’t Separate Ourselves From Existence

This is what it means to feel. We can’t separate ourselves from pain, though we do our best to bury it as deeply as possible. We can’t separate ourselves from existence. The two are one. Consciousness is everything. Pain and sorrow. Love and joy. The more we try to repress how we feel, the more we build walls to block out the light of love.

Holding It All Together Cracks Our Foundation

But this light continues to shine. It can’t be put out. It can’t be extinguished. It shines on into infinity, loving us, healing us, supporting us, whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we want it to or not. We can turn away from it, we can shut our eyes, we can build the walls. We can go numb.

We can do all this in an attempt to feel separate, to feel in control, to align ourselves with only that which is practical, responsible, factual, and safe. But all this holding together, all this fanatical energy exerted to keep ourselves and others fooled, will eventually weaken our perfectly put together lives, and a crack will slowly begin to form weakening our foundation.

As long as we remain shut off from our worthiness, we can feel safe that our false beliefs about ourselves are true, that our identities remain intact and anchored to this world we’ve become so comfortable living in. This is the underlying payoff for remaining asleep.

Comfort. Security. Identity. The known.

This time in our evolution is about all of us cracking open. There’s no point in continuing to try and hold it all together. The truth about who we are and what we have the power to create in this world is going to be known.

We Are Creation Itself

We can either let go and accept this evolutionary process we are going through, and move through it with relative ease and grace, or we can hold on tightly, resisting our true selves every step of the way, causing great discomfort, struggle, and chaos.

What would it mean to know that we are powerful and worthy? What would it mean to know that we are the creators of it ALL — that we are that powerful? What would it mean to know that we are in fact, creation itself?

We Think We Won’t Survive Our Feelings

This is where we are being asked to go. Into a new, borderless identity. But that is a frightening prospect for many of us. If we are to believe that what we’ve identified with for eons about ourselves is untrue, then who would we be otherwise?

Loss of our precious identity can be terrifying. If we are to give up such long-held, deeply ingrained beliefs, how will we survive? Will we survive? Can we withstand our hearts breaking open and feeling the pain of our ignorance and the joy of our new-found salvation?

This is where many of us fear to tread. We think we won’t survive our feelings, our power, our worthiness. But we will. It’s our destiny. The world of duality, the only one most of us have ever known, is coming to an end. And it’s ending in our mind.

What Achingly Beautiful Grace Feels Like

No, the earth isn’t going to explode and disappear. It’s ending through the power of our mind to create something else. Something based on new beliefs about what and who we are. Something that feels more like  unity, harmony and equanimity and less like fear and separation. As we move into this new awareness the blindfolds drop away and our eyes begin to see a new reality.

It is an us. It is a we.

It is the agony and the ecstasy of our soul’s evolution.

It’s what achingly beautiful grace feels like.

With love,

Heather xo

P.S. If you have friends, clients or colleagues who you think may be in need of a little Achingly Beautiful Grace, send them this blog. Feeling our life is the juice of our humanness!