From a reader in Malaysia:

I have felt spiritually stuck for a long time.  It’s like I am in a box, suffocating with cramped thoughts and feelings. I need help.

Most of us are in a prison of habitually patterned thoughts and reactive emotions: fear, pride, anger, a feeling that we won’t get what we need, defensiveness, sadness, and fantasy.

A lot of the time we feel badly. We live for the break out experiences that make us feel “good.”  Or we strenuously keep up a stream of feel-good fantasies and activities.

We over-eat, over-play, over-sex, over-relate, over-work, over-compute, over-think, over-hide, over-plan and over-dramatize. We even “over-yoga,” choosing forms of practice such as “power yoga” and “hot yoga” that kick up our internal winds and cause us to feel momentarily inspired even as we slip into a state of chronic exhaustion.

When we start to become more aware, we begin to feel the walls of our prison.  The reality of our condition becomes more present to us. This is actually a good thing. The pain we feel now is honest pain.

We get or feel stuck when we have not opened our hearts to embrace and follow the messages of compassion, pain and longing that are now arising from our enlightened Self.

What is called for now is a change in our lives – a break from our stale, habitual patterns. We must follow the messages coming from Self and abandon old concepts we have been clinging to and old behaviors that no longer serve us.

We must be willing to change, even if this means breaking with convention – our own conventions or the conventions that have been imposed on us by family, culture and traditions.

What is called for is heart.

Heart means a combination of honesty, courage, daring, determination and true feeling. It means being loyal to your real Self, no matter what. At the same time, heart means a kind of softness and surrender.

We must surrender our pride, or whatever is holding us back, and let Self lead us. We must surrender to our Self.

We must set our heart free and follow where it leads. This is the way out of the “box”: to have heart, listen to your heart, and follow heart.

Anahata chakra, the heart chakra, is not the seat of gooey emotion, impulse or romantic, egoic fantasy. It is the heart of nondual consciousness and wisdom. Use the teachings of the tradition to develop your relationship to this heart, and all else will follow.  You will be following your Self to freedom.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

Posted by Shambhavi on November 5th, 2009 | Explore More! Tags: chakras, freedom, nonduality, resistance