jeff’s comments on my last post about gratitude about open hearts reminded me of something very beautiful that alice walker, one of my favourite authors (the temple of my familiar is one of my all-time favourite books), once said in an interview with sharon salzberg for shambala sun, a buddhist magazine:
“You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts. I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count. But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger. In fact, I was saying to my therapist not long ago, “You know, my heart by now feels open like a suitcase. It feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase just falls open. It feels like that.”
Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, that feeling Pema Chodron talks about in tonglen meditation, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it. And that’s the way I’m used to my heart feeling. The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it. I think that is the way it’s supposed to feel when you’re in balance. And when you get out of balance, you feel like there’s no wind, there’s no breeze, there’s just this rock and it has a big thing sticking through it. I don’t know how you get from one feeling to the other, except through meditation, often, but also activism, just seeing what needs to be done in the world, or in our families, and just start doing it.”
click here for the rest of the interview.
isabella mori
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