Heart practices:

I encourage you to try the following heart practices in the next few days or weeks:

• Consciously choose to drop from your mind into our heart, letting go of your usual narratives and feeling your heart from within. It helps to use the breath to do this, as we explored in the guided practice.

• When you begin to experience strong emotions, especially difficult ones, become aware of how your mind tries to protect your heart - but try not to scold the mind for this, just bring your non-judgmental awareness to what is happening. Then try to stay with what you are feeling, allowing yourself to open to this experience, and at the same time allowing yourself to be held in the vast spaciousness of God's heart.

• When you read about or listen to news of the suffering of others, make a conscious choice to open your heart and try to listen from there. Picture gradually softening and opening your heart outward to make room for those who are suffering in an expansive spaciousness, but try to feel this from within.

• Try to become aware of your heart responses to people in your daily life, and notice when you feel as if your heart is constricting or hardening toward somebody. Gently invite your heart to soften and open in that moment - picture your heart space opening outward and being able to include this person in a kind, inclusive embrace, knowing that we are all held and embraced in the expansive heart of God.

For Further Reflection:

I encourage you to spend some time in further reflection on this theme. Below are some of the quotes from the talk and additional quotes for you to take this theme further.

R S Thomas: 

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God. This is the deep

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

we launch the armada of

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our

own fathoms. What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

Martha Beck: 

"In the silence I feel a gentle and infinite peace - it trickles into me like cool water down a parched throat."

Cynthia Bourgeault describes the heart as an "organ of contemplation, of luminous insight and compassionate action."

Kabir Helminski describes the Heart as "the source of wisdom and subtle perceptions."

Ezekiel 36:26 

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; 

I will remove from you your heart of stone 

and give you a heart of flesh."

Llewellyn Vaughan Lee: 

"We need to be able to hold the space between stories, between breaths, to become aware of this place of pure being outside of the rhythms of time, and yet also deeply connected to the flow of life, to what is sacred. It is here in this unformed space that the seeds of the future can be held, from where the dreams of the soul of the world can be born ... dreams free from the patterns of the past, born from the song lines of the soul and the world's soul. Here, in the intense vulnerability of the unknown, the unformed, the future is not yet written, but has possibilities beyond even the images of our imagination. ... That is why, amidst all the many demands of today's world, it is of such value to be able to return to silence, embracing stillness, to be a place where the future can be born, free of the restrictions of the past, not caught in any of the hierarchies or dynamics of power that define so much of our present existence, our civilization and it's toxic patterns of behaviour, nor seduced by fantasies of the future. The future will arrive unannounced, part of the miracle of life recreating itself. ...It is a mystery arising out of the unborn, and we are a part of this mystery. We are not separate from life, and with each breath we return to this core, this essence, this primal mystery. ... Here, life is infused with it's sacred nature, unpolluted. Here there is neither past nor future, but an unfolding present, a mystery being continuously revealed."

Wendell Berry: How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.