Emotions

Emotions and moods can be utilized in the work to train the heart to connect and focus. For example the emotion that accompanies the freeing and opening out of your energy by heart (your own or others) is joy. So, to free your energy simply induce a feeling of joy – be joyful. It's the difference between being a victim of your moods & feelings or the master of them. Think of it as putting on a new costume (the word induce is related to the Latin induere which means to put on clothes). Of course to change the way you feel (are) just like that isn't so easy, especially if for whatever reason you're riddled with worry or anger or doubt (fear). What it requires firstly is the realization that most of what you appear to be is not the real you at all. The real you is the essential sparkle deep down (in the heart) that appears in glints and glimmers regularly but fitfully. When you're working well and correctly this sparkle ignites and informs your energy which flows unimpeded through and into whatever you are doing. Everything else (thoughts, ideas, opinions, habits, assumptions, etc.), which we lump together in the term self, tend to constrain or redirect this process. The self always thinks it knows best. The hegemony of self. It's like a strict parent directing a child – over-riding the child's heart with alien and unnatural impositions. Eventually, the child's heart becomes so plastered over that she loses touch with it and becomes instead her conditioning, or her resentful reaction to it. The job of the teacher is to break through this shell and reconnect the student to their heart. It is the most difficult job on earth, for both the teacher and the student. The problem is that the cultural environment we have created for ourselves is generally of the self and conspires in every way possible (especially through distraction and over-stimulation of the mind and senses) to prevent our heart succeeding in its revolutionary overthrow of its overbearing oppressor, even to the point of convincing the heart that it should naturally take second place to the ego. The outcome of this is that a stupendous effort is required to even begin to burst through. Courage. Cor (heart) and rage. The word gives a clear indication of the intensity and fury with which the student must redirect their energies, and where that energy must come from, if they wish to realize their humanity.

Emotional strength is the attaining of some degree of mastery over them. Not letting them run away with themselves or with you (indulgence), understanding how they layer, transform and oscillate (yin/yang – realizing that they are all in essence the same – just intensity of feeling – and so readily transformable), and putting them to use for you in the work. They are essential because without them you are not operating from heart. The heart feels – deeply. It laughs, it weeps. It can be gentle or fierce. It can love and it can hate. But above all it is vulnerable. It is very easy to knock and hurt an open heart. In a way you could say that this is the problem with the human race – that so much seeming success is attendant upon a closed, hard and even empty heart. The only healthy way around this is to train as a warrior – to always head into the fray with no possibility of retreat. When forwards is natural to you then your heart is safe and you will eventually accumulate enough energy and power to slip through heart to deeper realms. The training begins with encouraging heart, which is naturally unselfish and connective, to leap into the activity. To do things with heart. Forgetting self. For this joy is essential.