Keeping Your Heart in the Present

 

Some think that keeping your heart in the here and now is just too abstract a notion to consider.  By heart, I mean your spirit, conscience, center.  This part of each of us is manifest in our emotions.  While there are large range of emotions to consider, and while it is often very useful to name and distinguish between them, in large part and for our purposes today, lets boil them down to just two: Love and Fear.  In one way or other all emotions are variations of, or spring out of these two.  Negative emotions like hate, anger, prejudice, jealousy generally spring from fear.  Positive ones like affection, kindliness, optimism and joy, spring from love.

 Success in keeping the heart in the local time zone, on the present date, depends more on understanding and realization, than it does on doing something.  Understanding comes from asking questions.  Correct understanding comes from asking correct questions.

Here a few suggestions:

1. Where is my heart?  Is it with a distant loved one?  Is it doing something I’d love more than what I’m doing?  Is it in a place I’d rather be than the place I am? 
2. Why is it there?  Is it conducting surveillance on a loved one I don’t trust?  Is the grass really greener on the other side of the fence?  (This is truly a more emotional than mental notion.)  What is better about there than here? 
3. Who is responsible for this disconnect from joy?
4. What must be done to bring my body, mind and spirit back into the present?
5. How is this done?

We all get into situations we’d rather not find ourselves in; places our hearts would rather not be.   We are left with two choices.  We can take our body and mind to that place; we can follow our hearts.  This is often a great choice!  Even so, life has a way of setting us up in situations, and we have a way of choosing situations that don’t practically allow for (at least immediately) following where our heart leads.  Often following our heart entails a great sacrifice.  Sometimes it can even be quite impossible.

It is the impossible times that need the most focus.  The idea is to find joy always, even in difficult situations.  In these cases we need to bring our heart back to where we are.  Here a few ideas on how to do that.

 In Disney’s movie, The Other Side of Heaven, a young missionary leaves the love of his life behind to spend several years in Tonga.  He teaches us a great lesson in keeping our hearts in the present while loving someone who is far away.

1. He trusts her.
2. He trusts himself, he is loyal and demonstrates his fidelity to her.
3. She is not all he loves and he discovers that loving something or someone else, does not need to diminish his love for her.  Each love is not the same and he can differentiate between them.
4. His heart brings her, emotionally, to him; rather than taking him, emotionally, to her.  This is not to say that she comes to Tonga, but that he loves her where he is rather than where she is.
5. You will observe that the strength of his success lies in love and not in fear.  Fear would have caused him to dread the possibility of a Dear John.  Fear would have drawn him to her rather than her to him.  Fear would have made it difficult, if even possible, to love those he was serving and living with in Tonga.

So, whether you find yourself off to college, stuck in Iraq, lost in a corporate cubicle, or confined in a penetentiary, you can keep your heart there with you and experience genuine joy.  All you have to do is let your heart do it’s job in the immediate moment.  If you can’t trust that other loves, outside the confines of you present, won’t be there upon your return, that love is based in fear and isn’t really love at all.

 What does all this have to do with JOY?  Read:  Your Heart, Your Head and Your Backside.

Take Action:

If any of this was helpful to you, capture it for yourself by writing your impressions about it.  As you write reflect on something you might commit yourself to in order to move toward fuller joy.  Be sure to ask questions of yourself.  Be honest.  Learn from your heart and make use of that knowledge.