When I first heard someone associate the heart and love with action and doing, while something about it resonated, it didn't feel very intuitive to me. But when I thought of the connecting link being courage it started to make more sense. It takes courage to act, especially outside of our comfort zone, where courage isn’t necessarily the absence of fear, but the willingness to face it and go forward anyways, thus conquering it. And then there’s the idioms of “lion-hearted” or having the “heart of a lion", which means to have the courage of a lion, a courageous heart.
What’s interesting is how the heart is also associated with love, which made me explore the connection between love and courage. It doesn’t seem to be commonly taught, at least not explicitly. I think about years ago when someone told me the opposite of love isn’t hate, but fear, while the opposite of hate is more like attraction or admiration. Fear is contraction, love is expansion. Courage is the ability to face fear and go forth, and although courage isn’t exactly the opposite of fear, maybe it takes love to be courageous and face and conquer fear. It’s also kind of funny to think that the Tin Man and the Lion in the Wizard of Oz were redundant. Maybe Dorothy needed only two friends - the scarecrow and the lion. Since the heart is what the lion needs to have the courage.
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You know those times you feel inspired, in the zone? And words emerge that don’t feel your own? It means you are tapped into creative flow. And this is where we want to go. But so too are the words we hear all day not our own. We just identify with them more because we’ve been thinking them so long and so often. They too are just an energy and come from somewhere else - many are societal and ancestral messages, and older more primitive thoughts we pick up when we are based too much in our brains' default processing mode. And there's nothing to be ashamed of that we are receiving them. They are out there prevalent and hard to escape from. And there's nothing to be ashamed of for believing them either. It's hard to break free from the main "stream" of thought. Look at it this way. The important thing here is that those beautiful insights that feel like they are from the divine or something outside ourselves are just as real as the more mundane or actively self destructive mind chatter we hear all day. In fact, I would argue that they are more real. More than just profound truths, they are actually closer to who we really are. The work for us is to get into that receptive state to receive those free flowing inspirational thoughts more and more. And to do this, we must first stop holding onto the old ones, particularly the lies about us not being worthy (worth is our birthright!) and decide we will no longer believe in them. Watch them pass by like a thief in the night, which is what they are, a thief of joy. Even mundane neutral thoughts can take us out of the present and act as a barrier to joy. Finding the things that bring us into a state of calm contentment, helps us to pick up (like radio signals) on the happier thoughts, the inspirations, the wisdom; and if we are lucky, be graced by a state of flow where there are no thoughts at all, only joy, our true essence from simply being alive. |
Author:Amanda I. Greene This is where I share thoughtful, and sometimes unpolished, musings in the form of philosophical explorations, inspirations, poems, and artwork.
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