A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart … Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
—Meister Echkhart
Back in my late 20’s I began to experience a singularly compelling desire. My heart longed to connect with the high desert vistas of the American Southwest. In my mind, I walked alone for days or months, even years, across an arid and timeless landscape. The earth bare beneath my feet, red dust rising in the rhythm of each step. The sky wide and clear and infinitely blue. Over time my clothes would become sun-bleached and tattered. I wanted to keep on walking until everything inessential had dropped away. Until all that was left was dry white bone. Never had the work of Georgia O’Keefe felt so true to me.
I knew even then that this recurring fantasy of walking through the desert had something to do with making an inner pilgrimage of sorts, to find out who or what I was underneath it all. At the time, however, I had little understanding of the intelligence of that longing heart or what I would eventually discover there at its center.
Instead, the impulse to make this trek was mostly about wanting to strip away the increasing pain of my marriage, the dissatisfaction with the life I was living, and the even deeper, mostly hidden pain of so much unresolved loss from my early life.
Like most people, the genesis of my spiritual journey did not begin with some lofty ideal of enlightenment, but was motivated simply by the wish to be free from the mess and muck of my life. Perhaps, I thought, if going into the wilderness worked such wonders for the likes of Jesus and Siddhārtha then maybe it would work for me.
That desert trip was never taken. But the inner pilgrimage and the stripping away happened eventually. It took meditation and midlife, with another marriage and another divorce, to finally crack me open. And like all heroes on an archetypal quest, the real journey ended up being the one through the wilderness of my own psyche.
There I often found myself alone, lost for days in dense woods, shivering in hidden caves, falling into enchanted wells, falling under dark spells. In time I tamed a few dragons and confronted innumerable demons. I was never truly alone though. Fortune brought unexpected guides who appeared to teach and encourage me, and along the way enemies turned into allies.
In the classic narrative of the hero’s journey, the protagonist—transformed by the initiatory ordeals endured—symbolically reunites with the object of the quest. Perceval recovers the Grail. Dorothy recognizes the power of her ruby slippers. I too eventually discovered that the treasure I so desperately sought was the one I had been carrying with me all along. The treasure of my very own heart, my true home.
Embrace the wounded heart with the bigger heart.
Let the human heart be found by the heart of being.
—Adyashanti, The Revolution of Being
We tend to think of the heart as something either physical (an electro-mechanical pump) or vaguely metaphorical (“the heart center”). As I explored the terrain of my personal heart with all its sorrows and joys, the walls around it began to dissolve. And in that dissolution, a deeper heart revealed itself as a primary portal to the infinite, radiant space of awareness itself.
To the personality side of me, this was not just a realization but a revelation: a revealing of the profoundly awake and subtly loving quality of everything within and around me. I came to sense that the heart could “see” and “hear” and “feel” in some way. This heart center was an organ of direct perception and of clear knowing. And thus the deeper space of the heart was both a soulful guide and the ground of all being in which this “Dina” was rooted.
In this new awareness, something in me began to relax. I became more connected with my body. I felt that I would always be both continually healing and no-thing to heal, continually evolving and no one to evolve. Emotions seemed less sticky when there was plenty of space in which to feel them. I had more trust in my lived experience as the primary teacher. It became easier and easier to allow all of my experience to be held in love.
In his recent book, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence, John Prendergast beautifully describes this multidimensional aspect of the spiritual heart by mapping out its topography.
For him, the personal heart is the carrier of our wounds, attachments, and ordinary joys. This is our heart functioning at an ego identity level. Here we perceive ourselves to be only a separate self located somewhere inside an individual body.
Prendergast points out that our inner child parts also reside here but nearer the soul level of the heart. And it is at the cusp between ego’s pain and the soul’s imagination that we can integrate and heal those early life wounds:
“These childlike parts are also closely connected to a native innocence and essential qualities of being. These parts live on the borders of the soul [where] we discover that these apparent troublemakers are also unknowing gift-bearers.”
The soul level of the heart lies in-between ego and the universal Self. This is the subtle energetic realm of the archetypal, the shamanic, and the transpersonal. He writes that “when we are open and attuned to this level, we feel ourselves moving more intuitively in harmony with a great flow.”
The level of the Deep Heart, which he also refers to as the Great or Universal Heart, is the unbound nature of consciousness itself. Here we discover pure Being at our core. Fortunately, he reminds us, the more deeply we engage with our ordinary or personal heart, the more it can serve as a powerful passageway to the realization of our true nature or Presence.
I cannot recommend this book more highly for its clarity, intelligence, and unique insights. It is an authentic transmission of the writer’s own heart wisdom and his words are alive with truth. Again and again he invites us to answer the call to journey to the heart of who we are:
“There is a light in the core of our being that calls us home—one that can only be seen with closed eyes. We can feel it as a radiance in the center of our chest. This light of loving awareness is always here, regardless of our conditioning. It does not matter how many dark paths we have traveled or how many wounds we have inflicted or sustained as we have unknowingly stumbled toward this inner radiance. It does not matter how long we have sleepwalked, seduced by our desires and fears. This call persists until it is answered, until we surrender to who we really are. When we do, we feel ourselves at home wherever we are. A hidden beauty reveals itself in our ordinary life. As the true nature of our Deep Heart is unveiled, we feel increasingly grateful for no reason—grateful to simply be.”
No claims on enlightenment here. Believe me, I’m still living in the mess and muck of my little life. But it’s lighter now, knowing that the root of who I am is infinitely grounded in the heart of Presence itself.
