Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better.
[00:00:13] Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and this is the Spiritual American.
[00:00:30] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare and I'm your host. And today we will be talking about living from the heart or voice from the heart. Hearing the voice of your heart.
[00:00:46] It's a beautiful topic. Before we get started, please consider, like, sharing and subscribing. You know that that helps YouTube to share this content with more and more people and also consider sharing with your friends and family so they can benefit as well. And so let's start this beautiful topic, living from the Heart.
[00:01:09] With all of these episodes, I usually start, like, going through what it is that we need to get past to get to the heart. And that's what I. Where I came from, like, I came from a society and a time and a family upbringing where I didn't feel that that was really important. It was much more important to be able to do the right thing, say the right thing, be successful. On the outside.
[00:01:38] The figuring out what I'm feeling or listening to my heart was not really emphasized or I didn't have any. Much of any education in that or exposure to that idea growing up.
[00:01:55] So many of you might be like me, but I'm going to start with what it is to listen to your heart first of all. Then we can talk a little bit about what the obstacles are.
[00:02:07] So listening to my heart means that in the moment of any situation, I can sense intuitively my own feelings, my own, you can say wishes or even desire, like a pure desire. What you really wish for. You can sense it in yourself.
[00:02:33] You can sense if what you want is appropriate for that time. So living from the heart also means that I have a natural sensitivity to what's going on around me.
[00:02:45] Imagine if you're in a room with your family, let's say a family gathering, let's say Thanksgiving or whatever, some holiday, and you're with your family and Uncle Jeff is doing this and Aunt so and so is doing this, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that's predictively happening around you.
[00:03:07] What am I feeling at that time so we can talk about the different feelings I might have. And there was a. There was an episode a few episodes ago called the Memory Trap. Especially with family, there's a lot of memories that come up when we're with Family. There's a lot that gets stimulated when we're around family, right? But if I was to forget all of that, if I was to forget all of my memories and forget everything and just be there and feel. What is it that I really feel in my heart about these others?
[00:03:41] And the real feeling that I probably have in my heart is that I love them.
[00:03:46] I love them and I'm happy to be with them. I'm happy that I have a family, something like that. It might be just very simple.
[00:03:57] I feel that those feelings. We call those pure feelings, let's say pure feelings and good wishes, we have those naturally. But I feel that we have many, many other oppressive thoughts and feelings and memories that are covering up that pure heart. Let's say.
[00:04:20] Here's another example. Let's say at work, maybe I got into the profession I'm in for a certain reason. Maybe I was inspired.
[00:04:29] But in the moment, am I radiating that feeling from my heart? Do I have gratitude that I have my job? I mean, it might sound weird because we're so used to being a different way.
[00:04:47] I just remember that whenever anybody used to say, just do these positive affirmations or just follow your heart or something like that, I would listen to that and I would say, you are out of your mind.
[00:05:02] There is no way that anybody could live like that. I'm too busy thinking this way or whatever. It would just be completely dismissed as something that wasn't possible.
[00:05:14] And I can see why. I would think that because of the way I was brought up. Like I shared. If that was never exposed to me, why would I think that it had any value?
[00:05:26] But I feel that this has the greatest value.
[00:05:30] Being able to live authentically from your own heart has the greatest value in life.
[00:05:39] For me to say that is something. It's a transformation. It's a complete transformation for me to say that.
[00:05:47] I think my experience was that all my decisions were made from what I learned. So my decisions, my decisions of who to marry, my decision of what profession, my decision. And none of that is bad. I'm fine with it. Actually, I did very well, considering. But the thing was that I didn't really choose from my heart. I remember going back, there were certain decisions about relationships down the line where I remember thinking, I didn't even want to be. Be with this person. But I did it because.
[00:06:18] Or I really don't want to say yes to this thing. But I say yes because I don't really want to say no.
[00:06:29] But I say no because I'm afraid or I Stayed home, stayed home because I was afraid. Because.
[00:06:37] Because is the extra stuff that's on the heart now. Living from the heart doesn't mean that you can just. You know how some people say, oh, I'm being honest, I'm brutally honest. And they just say, whatever. That's not living from the heart. Because the heart doesn't want to hurt, right? I would never want to hurt anyone. I don't want to hurt myself, and I don't want to hurt others. So this thing about honesty, sometimes people say, oh, yeah, I'm just telling the truth or whatever. It's not really honesty because they're not being sensitive to hurting the other person. Like, I know some people joke around. Like they'll joke around, and they joke around in an insulting way, like they're using insults. And you could say, oh, I'm just joking around.
[00:07:28] You're not really living from the heart if you're doing that. Because what if the person is hurt?
[00:07:35] And why am I coming up with insults? Why do I have to put somebody down?
[00:07:41] So you see how these things that we do, these natural things that we do, like we insult, we joke, we. We tell people things.
[00:07:52] Maybe we're too aggressive with our language or behavior.
[00:07:58] Maybe I don't share enough. Maybe I'm a little bit too detached. Maybe people don't know how to be with me.
[00:08:06] So I think living from the heart means that we're in our natural state, and the natural state is in harmony with everything else.
[00:08:17] How do I get to that stage?
[00:08:20] I think little by little, we need to start removing some of the other things that we're doing.
[00:08:29] I remember I had a friend who. He used to do that joking thing where you kind of insult the other person and it's a joke. And it would be like, oh, I'm just joking.
[00:08:42] And I would not tolerate it at all. For some reason it bothered me. I wouldn't tolerate that kind of joking.
[00:08:49] I think I have memories of things like that happening to me as a child, and it was very painful. So with that, with this friend, I just didn't tolerate it, and the friend stopped doing it. Like, that person learned that maybe that's not okay to hurt somebody else.
[00:09:04] I had another person that did it and accused me of being too sensitive.
[00:09:10] That relationship is no longer right. So being sensitive is not a bad thing.
[00:09:20] We just have to be able to be sensitive, but also be honest, be authentic. And little by little, the world around us will start to reflect back. So living from the heart means that as I'm pulling Off these old behaviors that maybe are hurtful or not authentic to me or not what I really feel or not what I really want, that there's a possibility of taking steps for things that I really do want.
[00:09:50] I'll give another example. With my family now, I have been working on, like how I'm remembering them, how I'm thinking of them. What is my heart say?
[00:10:05] Maybe if you're listening to this, you have a lot of memories, painful memories or something. Those have to be dealt with first. I have to say the heart is like underneath. It's underneath all of that other stuff.
[00:10:18] So it's my job to help myself remove some of that other stuff. But generally we can practice in meditation getting in touch with our heart. And I'll give an example of how to do that.
[00:10:30] So what I've been doing is I've been changing the way I think of people in my mind, changing the way I remember them.
[00:10:40] That's a way to get closer and closer to your heart. Because I'm no longer afraid of this family member. I'm no longer thinking negatively of this family member. I keep changing it and trying to upgrade my memory of them so that I no longer am holding on to that stuff. That's over. My true heart, My true heart loves them. They're my family. Of course I love them.
[00:11:02] So what is the practice that we can do to help open up our heart, get that circulation going? I call it sometimes angelic circulation. What can we do to start doing that? What we can do is what we call mansa seva, or mental service. Service through the mind. And what that does is. I just mentioned it. One way of doing mental service is how you remember people. That's one way because I'm not talking to them. So it's mentally I'm changing my memory of them, my awareness of them, the way I think of them.
[00:11:34] But I can also do mental service to serve the whole world. So how do I do that? Well, I can imagine that I'm sitting still and I'm peaceful. And in my heart I feel peace. I feel still, I feel content, let's say. And then I wish. I have a pure wish. I wish that all souls would feel peace.
[00:11:57] I wish that all souls and all of nature would feel peace. We do this in our evening meditation, 7pm meditation. We do world service theme for that meditation. I recommend doing this in the evening. Like maybe before bed, like just take a few minutes and sit quietly and just say, get very still and get very calm and very peaceful and just say to Yourself. In my heart of hearts, I wish that everyone would be peaceful. I wish that everyone would be happy. I wish that everyone, all souls and all of nature would experience contentment. Whatever it is you're feeling, wish that for the whole world.
[00:12:40] And what does that do? You're expanding your capacity for those feelings. Those feelings come from the heart. And also, you can use the word all right. All of nature, all souls.
[00:12:54] When you use the word, all the intellect is not engaged. It's just the heart. Yes. I love all. Everyone. Everyone, Everyone.
[00:13:03] So there's this feeling of expansion when you have that feeling.
[00:13:09] We practice that in meditation. One other way of practicing it, like I said, is doing it with your memory and how you remember others. In another episode I talked about, you can do that with painful memories themselves. You can go back and try to shift some of that. What is the purpose of doing that? We eventually want to be able to live more and more authentically from our heart.
[00:13:33] When we're living from our heart, no one gets hurt.
[00:13:37] I'm not hurt, and no one else is hurt. But I'm myself.
[00:13:44] I'm not hiding. I'm not covering anything up.
[00:13:47] And you'd be surprised when we get some of that stuff off of us and we start acting in this way. Others, I don't know if they react negatively at first. It depends on what the relationship was before. But overall, people respond very, very well to living from the heart. I have one example, and we'll wrap it up from there. I was doing some painting, and someone from the place that I was painting came in, and I was in a. This is unusual for me now, but I was in kind of like a brooding mental mood. I usually. I'm not that way. I was feeling a little bit bad. This very, like I said, very unusual, very rare, but it was happening. So I was kind of, like, wanted to be alone. So I'm sure you can relate to this. If you're in a mood and you just don't want to talk to anybody, you're kind of like, oh, I hope nobody talks to me, because I'm having this feeling. And it's almost like you want to keep drinking in the feeling, which is another topic altogether.
[00:14:52] But there's definitely a feeling like, I don't want to talk to anybody. So at that moment, somebody walked in and started looking at me, like, talking to me. And then I got the feeling like this person just wanted me to talk to them.
[00:15:09] So I had to get over myself. So what I did was, in that moment, I said, look, are you gonna like intuitively, are you going to push this person away or are you going to open up and be friendly and talk to this person and give them what they want? What are you going to do? So it's like I had to talk to myself and I decided I let it go. And I generated as best I could, a friendly face from the heart. Like it was, it was authentic, but the other thing was still kind of hanging there. But I. But I pushed it out of the way or I moved it gently out of the way so that I could give this soul what it was kind of asking for.
[00:15:48] And then she was happy. Like you could see that. After I spoke to her, I said, oh, you're going on your trip and good trip, have a good trip and blah, blah. She was happy. Like she looked at me and smiled like she was happy. That's all she wanted. That's all anyone wants.
[00:16:04] Everyone just wants to be with us, get a smile, be happy, be authentic, have a good wish.
[00:16:15] That's all. It's really simple.
[00:16:18] We have a lot of other things going on. But I want to say that with this practice, self observation, observation of the mind, we begin to realize that these things are not how I want to be. And little by little, I'm peeling them away and I'm learning how to give from the heart. And that I would rather give up that mood than hurt somebody else. Right? Because you don't want to hurt anybody else. We have to realize that these other things that we're doing are hurting. They're hurting me and they're hurting others. People just want to be with you.
[00:16:55] Living from the heart also means that I'm open, right? I'm receptive and open to others. And I'm going to say that even though it may feel not hard, but it may feel like an effort at first, it's actually our natural state.
[00:17:12] It's the other stuff that's unnatural. But we have to work on it. If every. If I have the scale and right now the unnatural stuff is heavy, heavy, heavy and weighs so much. And the natural stuff, I don't even know hardly anything about it, I have to practice it. I have to practice being loving, being generous, being open. I have to practice that and then lighten up the load of the other stuff by peeling it away, learning I don't want to be that way anymore, work with myself a little by little. I'm going to keep on adding to this, living from the heart and lightening up the load of the past, right?
[00:17:49] The miracle of living from the heart is that as we get better at it, our circumstances begin to reflect it, too.
[00:17:57] And that, to me, is where happiness really begins and peace really begins, because my life is now reflecting what I really feel.
[00:18:09] So I'll leave it there. I hope that gave you a few things to think about and hopefully to understand that it's a process and. But it's your natural nature. But we're maybe out of practice, so we'll leave it there. Our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And in this case, healing would be removing some of those old patterns that we're talking about that are hurtful.
[00:18:35] Empowering is when I'm empowering. Empowering the heart is. Maybe that's too strong of a word. The heart is the heart. Right. But I'm empowered now because I'm starting to see progress. Yeah. And then service means that I. Like I did with that other person, I was able to give her what she wanted in that moment. I'm able to be receptive. I'm able to be generous, and that's my natural nature. Thank you all for watching, and until next time, take care.
