Seeing With the Eye of Your Heart
Our whole business in this life, is to heal the eye of our heart, whereby God may be seen.
I heard this quote in a conversation the other day, and it really made me think about the value of doing personal growth work. We often live inside a barrier of our wounds, and the energy it takes and the noise it makes keeps us disconnected not just from others, but from our own wise side that lives inside us, connected to our source.
What keeps us from healing? A lot of it is our fears that we will discover that the worst things we believe about ourselves will turn out to be true. That we are unloveable at our core. That we will discover something at our core that we can’t forgive ourselves for.
It’s time to change our stories about ourselves and heal the eye of our hearts. There are multiple ways to do that, but I’ll share with you some of the ways that I do.
Here are my top three.
1. Be actively grateful to myself and others. What this means is to find one thing about yourself that you are grateful for. Right now it’s writing this blog post, as I am committed to writing more regularly and can always find a million things to do instead. (Dusting, anyone?) Next, find one thing that you are grateful for toward another person (bonus points if you can find something about someone you tend to be critical of!). I heard Wayne Dyer speak one time about keeping a picture of the conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh in his study so that he could remind himself to find something about him to be grateful for. He admitted that he struggled at times so it made me feel better about when I struggle as well.
2. Speak to yourself like you’re someone you love. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes talk to myself in ways I’d never tolerate from another person. So when you catch yourself doing it, apologize! And then say something sweet to make up for it. You may think this is a silly exercise, after all, who else can hear? But we live in stories of our own making about ourselves, and challenging these stories that we often mislabel as “fact” is a powerful way to make positive shifts in our lives.
3. Practice fun! I can be so darn serious sometimes, getting bogged down in my own overly-serious expectations of myself that I forget to do something fun for myself. I took a photography course recently simply for the fun of it. I enjoyed taking photos so much that when I showed some to a friend, she hired me on the spot to take photos of her husband for Christmas. That was a delightful surprise, but had I not given myself permission to have fun, that wonderful experience wouldn’t have happened. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: whether you think something is fun happens in what you say to yourself. So your question is, “What can I do that is fun?” and “How can I make what I’m doing more fun?”
Our hearts often heal in little bits and pieces. In gratitude, self-caring and fun lie our seeing of God. No sunglasses necessary!