HEADING FOR THE HEART--Part 1

We are all born as innocents – pure unadulterated love and joy. What happens to us as we are exposed to life in this world only serves to start our journeys back to the heart. By this, I mean that we become products of our environment. We may grow up in dysfunctional families. We may become victimized. We may find ourselves seeking to earn love instead of simply feeling we are worthy of love. We may find that we become attached to various labels such as our sex, our family identity, our social status, our race, our religion, our careers, and so on.

By the time we reach adulthood, we may not know who or what we truly are; that would simply be spirit in human form. Such was the case in my own life. After a lifetime of trying to fill myself up with people, places, and things in order to feel better, I have realized that I am the only one who can do that for myself. I have come to see that I have been on a journey back to the place from which I started. I'm on a journey back to that place of innocence. I'm on a journey where I am headed back to the heart of true love. I am and always have been a spiritual being having a human experience.

My journey has not been an easy one. While I grew up in a family who I believe loved me the best that they could, I never really felt as if I was loved for who I was. I somehow got the idea that I needed to earn love by being a “good boy.”

Neither of my parents seemed to know how to deal with feelings appropriately while I was growing up. Consequently many of my emotional needs were neglected. I can vividly remember being told that I shouldn't feel certain ways. There were a lot of confusing messages. Consequently I learned to play games with myself in order to escape uncomfortable feelings. I didn't know how to handle them.

I knew that I couldn't live up to the standard of the perennial good boy. I played prosecutor and judge in dealing out a verdict of guilty as charged. The judgment that I placed upon myself was to become a sword that would cut deeply. I didn't recognize that I was inherently good. Instead I set myself up by thinking that I needed to be perfect when that's virtually impossible for a human to be. After all, we all make mistakes. The problem was that when I failed at something, I took on the message that I was a failure. I did that to myself.

Such was my emotional life which is mirrored in the lives of most of us to greater and lesser degrees. Yet I had a part of me that experienced freedom whenever I didn't allow myself to be consumed by negative thoughts or feelings. That part of myself was my spirit. I was in touch with that when my mother read me Psalms from the Bible and told me the stories of Jesus. I loved to look at the sunlight coming through the Gentle Shepherd window at church. He looked so real and so kind. The radiance of his soul shone through. I always had a special place for him in my heart.

As a little boy, I was in touch with my spirit when my father would take me outside where I would gaze into the night sky. There he would point out the Big Dipper and the constellations while I gazed in wonder into the vastness of space. I was in awe when I saw a beautiful sunset. I was filled with a sense of freedom when I glided down a ski slope. I felt as if I was flying. Such were the times when I forgot about my problems and was at peace within my soul.

Author Davis Aujourd'hui