Heart Awakening
An interview with Rod Taylor
by Eduardo Sierra for Mutuality Matters Issue #10
Rod: About six months before that Transfiguration Retreat, I had a deep clarification of the condition of heart awakening that this embodied, non-dual (Second Birth) awakening really is. I had been aware that Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality, used the term “heart awakening,” but I wasn’t clear what that meant after my awakening. Second Birth felt like a whole-being, whole-bodied awakening. There was no separation between me and anything I experienced. It was me arising in the pool of consciousness. But I wondered what did he mean by using the term “heart awakening?”
Then later I experienced a couple of significant shifts that answered that question for me. In the second deep shift I realized that consciousness had its seat in my heart. When people in traditional paths talk about awakening, it will often tend to be an awakening in the area of the head, as a head-oriented seat of consciousness. Well, I had been living in the embodied, awakened condition and I knew the seat of my consciousness was not located in my head whatsoever, it was actually whole bodied. However, in this more recent realization, it became crystal clear that this whole bodied awakening had its seat in my heart. And in that realization, it was clear that there is nothing outside of consciousness, therefore there is nothing that is outside of my heart. Everything exists within my heart.
Eduardo: Big Heart eh?
Rod: It was such a surprising realization. It occurred for me when I was in China traveling with a Qigong teacher’s group in the high mountains on the China side of the Tibetan border. I had just spent the previous day hiking in the most beautiful place up to about 10 or 11,000 feet high. Afterwards, my body was feeling traumatized from strained breathing during a whole day of hiking from 10,000 to 11,000 feet. It was cold, damp weather, below freezing and it was snowing, and my whole breathing system and my body was very strained.
The next morning we were sitting in the bus, going to another location, and I was ruminating about my old habits of thinking. A remnant of an old idea I had was that you go to the mountains for spiritual experience, and I had had some of that uplifting attitude before coming to these mountains. And now here I was, feeling my whole body heavy and worn out from this breathing discomfort, and I’m thinking, boy this is a big contrast to what I’d been expecting.
Then, I realized that I’d been focusing on the discomfort of my body, while of course, I’m also always awakened in consciousness. Somehow, with the feeling of my body being physically weakened like this, in contrast to that as I tuned into consciousness I was able to recognize the subtle seat of consciousness was actually in my heart. Then I immediately realized that everything was held within my heart, nothing was excluded. I was in a country of a billion people, and my heart includes all of them, too! I realized that this is my nature within my heart, and of course there isn’t anything outside of that. It was a beautiful recognition that brought understanding and experience about the nature of unconditional love.
Nowadays, after that realization, even if I feel crabby with someone, there is no denying that I’m still fully holding them in love in my heart.
The personalized heart, the heart chakra, can kind of open and close, based on what is going on around a person. This heart awakening, it is not specifically the heart chakra. It is the seat of all Being, of all consciousness. It doesn’t open and close, it is the realization of whole-Being awakening.
Eduardo: oh, nice!
Rod: So, if I’m standing in a line and somebody cuts in front of me and I’m feeling grumpy towards them, it doesn’t in any way displace the love that holds them. When I realized the seat of consciousness was within my heart, I also realized the fabric of consciousness is Love. It wasn’t an intellectual idea; I was surprised to realize, oh! it is undeniably all Love. That is its nature. It isn’t an emotion, where you’re trying to feel something toward somebody. It isn’t an emotion. It’s a condition. It’s the fabric of ‘What Is,’ the nature of ‘What Is.’ So that’s different from the traditional view of the heart in which people feel the personal and emotional quality, which is of course very beautiful, but this is the ground of Being itself seated in the heart which is holding all that is in this fabric of love.
Eduardo: Isn’t it like Einstein said: the heart is the master and the mind is the servant, only we have it backwards in the West?
Rod: That’s a beautiful recognition. So often the common teaching is: do your best to be more loving. However, heart awakened love isn’t something that you try to do, it’s your nature and the nature of everyone and all that is; it’s who you are. With this in mind, in the deepened opportunity to gaze with another in a group, the nature of love is the field in which the gazing is occurring and the experience of this is delicious!
Contact Rod:
http://www.awakeninginwholeness.com/contact
