SUMMARY NOTES:
Your heart has the potential to show you a truth, beauty, and clarity about life that your ego — your mind, emotions, and beliefs — can’t understand.
Your heart has the power to awaken, educate, and evolve the structure of your ego relatively quickly.
You know you are starting to experience heart-consciousness when two things are present: 1) you are witnessing or observing your ego rather than identifying with it, and 2) the witness value is naturally loving, caring, and kind.
Once you are established in your heart, the superpowers of your full human potential are activated. It is from your heart that you can step into all of your greatness.
FULL TRANSCRIPT (edited for clarity):
There is a new reality awaiting us. It’s the heart’s reality. It is the reality that the consciousness of the heart already knows, already perceives.
We make a distinction between head and heart, between ego mind and heart. And when we make this distinction, we do not vilify the head; we do not vilify the ego mind. Instead, we acknowledge its blessings and its limitations.
Remember that this state of mind, this ego mind, (Divine Mother reminds us) it is organically created. It is a part of the process of consciousness evolving, consciousness knowing itself.
Ego is a collection of beliefs, a collection of certainties. And therefore it is a collection of perceptions and stories about everything — from yourself to everyone in your life, and to life itself.
Most of the human experience is ego experience. And this is not a criticism. This is an acknowledgement that we live in the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. The stories are constructed by beliefs and upheld (or structured) in emotions. And as real as these beliefs feel (and they feel real because our emotions tell us that they are real), we cannot deny the intensity of emotion, of feeling.
These stories, these beliefs, these feelings: when we examine them it often feels like we are examining reality itself. The stories that we tell about life define our experience of life.
We just want to acknowledge how powerful the ego mind is. We want to acknowledge what this ego mind is constructed by (or with) in order to contrast it with the heart — to recognize the distinction between one and the other. As we recognize the distinction, we begin to define the contours of awakening, the contours of freedom, the path that we walk between head and heart (or ego mind and heart mind).
It is your heart that has the potential to show you unprecedented experience — to show you a truth, beauty, and clarity about life that your ego can’t understand. Your heart can show you who you are, what you are, and the multi-dimensional structure of creation that the ego can’t learn for itself.
Actually, it can learn it for itself. But it takes a long time. Heart has the power to awaken, educate, and change the actual structure of the ego relatively quickly — evolve it.
We can use the analogy of parent and child, a wise parent and a young child. The ego is the child. And it will grow on its own. The child will grow even without parental supervision, without insight and wisdom from a wise parent. But it’s a slow process full of many mistakes. If this child has wise parent present throughout its childhood, it helps that child to grow relatively quickly and with less discomfort.
When we speak about the heart, we speak about it as the seat of profound wisdom — the seat of the wise parent, the elder. So every time we sit here, no matter your experience, invite yourself into the space of the heart — the visceral, literal, energetic domain of the heart; the region of the heart; that space between the pelvic floor and the crown of the head. Because something dwells here. Heart dwells here. Heart’s capacities and abilities dwell here.
The first primary experience of the heart’s consciousness (when we know and notice that we are in our heart, or we experience as our heart) is when we are attentive — when we are experiencing a relationship with our thinking and our sense of identity.
So if I’m moving through the day, completely encapsulated by my thinking (completely identified with my identity as Matthew), when someone speaks to me and I respond with the confidence (the certainty) that I am Matthew, I’m beholden to all of the emotions that are present. I don’t question them. In other words, I am these things. That’s when I’m in my ego.
I know I’m starting to be in my heart when two things are present. One is this witnessing, this observing, even if it’s subtle. And the other is that I’m witnessing with the quality of care, a quality of love, a quality of kindness. These are all words describing the same innate nature of heart (love, care, kindness, a simple spontaneous desire for well-being).
This is the nature of your heart, the nature of your heart’s consciousness. So if you are looking to practice this, and you’re just sitting there in the witness of your life, your emotions (like in mindfulness meditation). Witnessing is something that is discussed in countless texts around meditation — mindfulness (sometimes referred to as a metacognitive awareness — awareness of thought, awareness of cognitive processes).
We’re not yet in our heart, unless we are also in touch with caring, with a subtle quality of kindness. It feels like peacefulness, even like a generous nature. The heart really does feel like the kindness of an ideal father; the kindness of an ideal mom. What it feels most of all like is our own innate kindness.
Anything that is not kindness (not caringness) is no problem. We simply know that it is not heart awareness, not heart consciousness. It’s not yet your heart. And that’s no problem. That’s how effortless the heart is.
We’re describing the ego mind, which for most of humanity is the default state. It’s the current state of evolution. Not only do we think, but as human beings we spontaneously identify with our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs, our convictions, our absolute certainties.
That shift to heart: we are looking to notice what the heart consciousness is. It is not enough to begin to simply watch our thoughts, or watch our gripped identity, or our convictions of the beliefs that are within. That is very important — this mindful quality. But just to be observing is a step in the direction of the growth from ego mind to the greater heart mind, the greater heart consciousness. But it’s not yet the heart. In other words, we can practice a meditation, or practice being aware, but still be doing so in a way that doesn’t bring us into this greater quality of heart.
It’s not enough to be observant. Observance is perhaps the first step. But it must be that you are observing, witnessing, seeing the relationship with beliefs, emotions, and identity with a quality of kindness and caring, and a spontaneous desire (not for the annihilation of lesser feelings or painful feelings), but for these things to be embraced by care, by love, by tenderness.
Again, going to the ideal parent, or the ideal human being with the company of a young child. It’s not enough for the adult, for that human being to simply witness the child, watch the child with coldness, or judgment, or condescension. The growth doesn’t happen for the child without the observance of that adult, that parent, that elder being loving, even subtly so.
This is how sensitive a child is. It’s not enough for the parent to be neutral toward the child, if you’re neutral toward your child, the child feels this as a lack of love, a lack of care. What is required is the spontaneous innate love that the parent has for the child. And if it’s not present, the child doesn’t grow, doesn’t develop in that ideal way.
So that’s the understanding. We can observe it, whether in our own childhood or our experience as a parent — or even just as an analogy. We just have this understanding of, “Ah yes. This is true”. It’s not enough for the child to be witnessed neutrally. The child must be witnessed from a state of care, or kindness, in order for that child to be able to absorb growth and goodness.
It’s the same thing with what we are cultivating in our own self-care. We know we are in that quality of heart-consciousness when not only are we aware of our beliefs, aware of our thoughts, aware of our emotions, but we are aware of these things with great tenderness (or even with a little tenderness). We are aware of these things with the spontaneous desire for the well-being of ourselves.
So say I’m meditating — meditating to cultivate self- awareness. And I’m observing. I’m observing. I’m aware of the thoughts coming up. And then I think, “Oh, I’m so bad at this observing, at this witnessing value”.
I’m still in that loop. I’m still in that child mind that is not yet receiving a higher quality of nourishment. So when we speak of the heart, we know we are in the heart — not only when we are simply relating to, observing, or witnessing our ego (our identity, beliefs, and emotions) — but we are observing with unconditional kindness, patience, acceptance, lovingness (or at least the beginning of those things).
And naturally, being in this heart space, when these feelings of the heart become stimulated, this heart consciousness. Wow, there’s so much spontaneous care and compassion for this one I’ve been identified as all my life. There is so much care and compassion for what he believes, what he sees, his certainty, his conviction about himself and the state of the world.
What naturally will happen as we are growing from this ego consciousness to this heart consciousness is ego, the beliefs will draw us back in. We will lose that tenderness. It’s no problem. We notice that we’ve lost that. And we know we want to come back to heart. And now we know what heart is. It is not just being present with what is unfolding and our thoughts and beliefs, it’s doing so with patience, with kindness.
And if we want to anchor ourselves in what that is, we can just ask that question. “How would the ideal parent be with a hurting child?”
Even if we are not an ideal parent, or we’ve never seen an ideal parent, or we didn’t grow up with an ideal parent, how is it that we intuitively know what love looks like? If we know what an ideal parent is not, that indicates that on some level, our wisdom knows what the ideal mother (the ideal father, the ideal elder, the unconditionally loving human being) is. It’s something we can feel — we can orient and attune to. And Divine Mother claims that you know what the ideal parent is, because it is already in your heart. Your heart awaits you.
So, the true witness-value of your consciousness is not neutral. It is not just observing. It has a bias. It has a bias towards love. Just like a parent that is in their heart, they cannot see their child with true neutrality. They see their child with care. This is your heart already. And come back to this again, and again, and again.
Divine Mother says, “And then you’re home.”
Heart awaits every being in their evolution. Heart awaits us. The heart’s nature is this love.
So when you are practicing, coming back to observing yourself, notice that your motivation to do so is out of love and with patience.
Divine Mother says, “Once we’re established in our heart, then the superpowers of what it is to be human become truly activated. It is from the heart that we can step into all of our greatness. But first, into the heart.”
All love to you. And all Blessings as you move into your heart today.