Introduction
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Saint- Exupery (1900-44) from The Little Prince
If you were given one wish for our world, what would it be? Ours would be, quite simply, that each and every one of us could feel at peace. And we believe that the gift of peace begins with hearts filled with love.
Who among us does not desire more love in our lives? And who among us hasn’t sighed, and pushed ahead with the busyness of our day and our lives, letting the opportunities of love slip away? A hug from a child is shortened to take a phone call, a friend is seldom contacted because of distance, a compliment from a mate goes unacknowledged for a question about a bill, a favorite charity is pushed to the back of our minds for “later.” It seems the truly important, heart-connecting moments are so often neglected. And our lives, all of our lives, are made smaller.
We know we want and need love, to both give and receive in full measure. But how do we slow down and allow more love into our lives, when inner and outer pressures detract us from our heart’s deepest desire? There are many extraordinary individuals who have dedicated their lives to answering just that question. With the knowledge that such role models exist, we asked them directly for specific and practical advice and guidelines on filling our lives with love. “How,” we asked them, “do you do it?”
So, the idea for this book was born. We created a “wish list” of possible participants, individuals who have been teaching us – and much of the world – about love for many years. People who have earned the reputation as experts on love. Sometimes we had doubts. Would these wonderful teachers be willing to share their knowledge in an original, single compilation? In the end, though, we let our willingness to take the chance and our need to know rule, and we went forward. We invited each teacher to discuss his or her own way of filling life with love. Almost without exception, the individuals we approached agreed to share their wisdom and insights into why we need to fill our lives with love and, most important, how we can do it.
We were rewarded beyond our greatest imagination. The depth of sincerity of each of the participants is overwhelming. We saw, up close, how each contributor makes an honest and true effort to “walk her walk,” to “practice what he preaches.” Never before have we met and worked with individuals so completely and sincerely dedicated to a loving existence. The peaceful spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi once said, “My life is my message.” We believe that the same thing is true for each of the participants in this book. Each of them, in a unique and personal way, tells us with certainty how the heart is the fundamental source of our connection with all of life.
Love – giving and receiving from the heart – involves compassion, stillness, gratitude, peace, intimacy and relationship with others, and service. From the perspective of the authors of this collection, love is the only true measure of our success in life. Nothing else ultimately matters. As Mother Teresa is quoted in one of the articles, “We cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”
Creating this small thing, this original anthology, is for us an act of great love – for ourselves, for each other, for our families, and for you, our readers. We’d like to thank all the contributors for the richness they have contributed to our own lives and to the lives of so many millions. This project, these writings – these people – have changed and enriched our own lives in profound and remarkable ways. We wish this, most of all, for you – that you, too, will find new ways to bring love into your life and that you find the peace a love-filled heart brings.
From the heart,
Benjamin Shield, Ph.D.
Richard Carlson, Ph.D.
“The Birthright of Our Heart” by Benjamin Shield, Ph.D. in Handbook for the Heart
“This is the essence that give breath to our bodies and to our souls. This is the breath of God. It infuses each of us with life and purpose. It endows us with the grace to give and receive the way our bodies breathe out and breath in.”
Love is there—always. Yet it is often difficult to embrace this wellspring of love that resides within ourselves and is available to us each and every moment. It is not something that we must create, it is us. Love is our essence—the fundamental energy that nourishes us. It is our birthright.
From our creation we are sent on a journey to reclaim our birthright. When we encounter obstacles along the way, we continue the journey—not by overpowering something outside ourselves, but by letting go of something inside ourselves. We do this by keeping our hearts open, risking vulnerability, letting go of past hurtful experiences that block our ability to love, and allowing others to love us.
We could say that love is like the sun. Clouds may pass over it and temporarily block it’s warmth. But the sun, like our essence, continues to shine. Our lives my move between joy and disappointment, but the love within us never diminishes. We can ignore, hinder, and even deny this love—but we cannot destroy it. We can forget love, but love does not forget us.
Love creates the strong foundation for our lives. And it is often the simplest of loving moments that continue to strengthen this foundation. I am often reminded of a story that I heard sometime ago. A radio commentator was talking about her vacation at a beautiful seaside town in Mexico. One afternoon she saw an elderly couple strolling hand in hand along the beach. They were clearly in love, and there was something about them that made the commentator feel that they had been married forever.
Later that day she saw the same couple at dinner. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she apologetically introduced herself and asked the secret of their wonderful relationship. The answer surprised her.
The woman was genuinely amused. “Our secret is that my husband has always been a bit hard of hearing! You see, we were married during the Depression. Both of us worked two, sometimes three, jobs just to make ends meet. One day I came home so exhausted, I said to my husband, I’m so tired my teeth hurt!’ Well, he took me by the hand, sat me down, took of my shoes, and lovingly rubbed my feet!”
She continued, “I think you understand the mix up! But from that day on, this became our little ritual. At the end of each day, my husband has always lovingly rubbed my feet. With this simple act, he shows me daily how much he loves me, and, in turn, I remember how much I love him. And not matter what else is going on in our lives, or in our world, we always remember how easy it is to love each other.”
There are many times that I find myself afraid to take the risk of loving, to become vulnerable and tenderly openhearted with another human being. The wounds from hurtful experiences have created fears and obstacles that hinder my ability to love. Learning to identify and remove those fears is one of life’s most challenging processes. When I feel overwhelmed and afraid to love, I try to remind myself that love, not fear, is the template upon which our world is build.
Much of my inner work involves releasing the fears—past, present, and future—that interfere with my access to love and loves access to me. This is a lifelong process of facing myself consciously, discovering that my fears are just masks for old pain and not premonitions about the future. In this process of letting go, I try to focus on those things in my life that nourish the experience of love. I try to focus on those things that help me to let my ego boundaries melt, to lose my self-importance, and to release my daily worries.
We do not have to sequester ourselves in a monastery to do this. The unique, daily moments that each of us have in our lives can continually reconnect us with love. Watching my dog, Annie, Play with her friends, I feel the unabashed joy she experiences. Listening to music such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” wash over me and infuse me with it’s beauty softens the harsh edges of the day. Simple acts, such as taking a walk in the woods, holding a door open for a stranger, or just remembering to breathe deeply and consciously are all things that help me to give up some of my limitations, to let myself expand, become more spacious, and to move myself gently toward that center of my being, into the heart of love.
This ongoing process of connecting with my center enables me to merge more fully with others. When this occurs, my perspective widens, my senses sharpen, and I become more permeable to the love within me and to the love given by those around me.
Love is more than a thought and feeling. Love is behavior. It means spending time with our children as they struggle bravely to read. It means being with friends as we allow them the space and opportunity to share their lives, their dreams, and sometimes their tears. It means really trying to see things through another’s eyes. We become renewed by giving our love away—in our relationships, our work, our communities, and most important, to ourselves.
Equally important is the action of letting love in. we do harm to ourselves and to those around us when we withhold the events of our day, when we brush off a compliment or when we refuse to let our mates hold and comfort us. We not only starve our own heart, but at the same time deprive our partner’s heart of the joy of giving.
Sometimes love is not found in the “doing.” It is often discovered in the quiet moments, in the nurturing of ourselves and others, in the space we create in our lives for love to enter.
The folly of chasing after love is reflected in the story of the Zen student searching for enlightenment. He was so over zealous that he spent morning, noon, and night meditating and praying, and seldom stopped to eat or sleep. His Zen teacher worried as he watched the student become weaker and more exhausted each day. Eventually, he sat down and expressed his concern with him.
“Why do you not eat and get the rest that your body and spirit deserve?” he asked.
“Because I seek enlightenment and there is not a moment to waste.”
He teacher placed his hand on the student’s shoulder and replied, “What makes you rush ahead after enlightenment? Perhaps all your hurrying carries you away from what you seek. Maybe enlightenment is actually behind you, and all you need to do is stand still and let it catch up with you!”
This story reminds me that we can choose to judge ourselves or to love ourselves. When we are in judgment, we become carried away by the failures and heartbreaks of the past or transported forward into the idealistic fantasies of the future. We hurry backward and forward desperately seeing love that already rests patiently inside our own hearts, waiting to be discovered. In the moments that we consciously transcend judgment, self-criticism, and self-doubt, we create the environment for compassion and love for ourselves as well as others.
The effects of experiencing genuine compassion reach far beyond our own lives. It can transform our world in ways we could never imagine. Rollo May once described compassion as being in a music shop, and plucking a single string of one violin. Then, the same string on all the other violins in the shop begins to resonate.
It is the willingness to receive and be received that is the most fulfilling and enduring of our shared moments. Through our willingness to participate in and to witness each other’s growth, we become guardians of each other’s souls, guides for each other’s journeys. Then we can lead each other into the light as well as into the dark places—the abyss of old hurts, childhood wounds, and long-held fears, which must be illuminated and understood if we are to grow.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” I often find that the degree to which I am able to accomplish this labor of love is proportional to the degree of importance I give to it; that the expression of love is the highest priority and good that we can accomplish while we are here on earth.
Love is there—always. It lives as we live. This is the essence that gives breath to our bodies and to our souls. This is the breath of God. It infuses each of us with life and purpose. It endows us with the grace to give and receive the way our bodies breathe out and breathe in. in the end, the measure of our lives will be the sum total of the love we have shared; of the selfless, loving moments that coalesce to define a life whose marrow and being is the expression of our birthright.
Afterword
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched . . . but are felt in the heart.” — Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)
We hope that this book has, in some way, inspired you to let more love into your life. The movement of one grain of sand, some believe, can affect the entire world. So too, the simple willingness to make love the foundation of our lives can begin to bring more love into our heart and, subsequently, into our world. A wonderful teacher affirmed that “the shortest distance between two points is an intention.” Often a simple change of our intentions can create the beginning of a whole new life.
We live in a culture that tells us love is “out there” somewhere. If we earn the right income, drive the right automobile, have the right hairstyle, and wear the clothing that is in fashion, then we are worthy to find love or love finds us. In contrast, the contributors to this collection teach the simple, yet essential, understanding that love truly does originate from within. In truth, our ability to give and receive love is directly proportional to our ability to love ourselves. We alone have the opportunity as well as the responsibility to create the love we desire in our lives.
It is comforting to be reminded that we already possess the most essential aspects of love in our heart. Accessing this love is most often a process of letting go of those obstacles that block love’s expression. If we let go of those personal “speed bumps” along our journey, such as fear and low self-esteem, and truly let love in, moment by moment, we are well along our path to having the love we desire.
However, our intentions must be coupled with action. Japanese philosopher Takuan Soho once said, “One may explain water, but the mouth will not become wet.” To make the words of the contributors to this collection truly our own, we must actively “push the envelope” of our ability to love. We wouldn’t expect our bodies to get stronger and healthier without stretching and exercising. In the same way, by integrating intention with action, we must exercise our souls and minds and hearts to bring love into our lives.
Don’t forget that loving is a process that must be attended to if it is to grow and thrive. It is our hope that, as you finish this book, it becomes not an ending but a fresh beginning. You will doubtless find, as have we, that just when you feel you
have reached your goal, life offers your next lesson – yet another opportunity to live even more from your heart. Ram Dass said, “The ultimate test of even the most enlightened gurus is when they go home and spend a weekend with their parents!”
We feel honored to be a part of this project. We have worked with some of the most inspiring, loving people we have ever known. It has also been our honor to have you as our reader. It’s our wish that this book affect your life in a positive light. It has ours.
With respect,
Benjamin Shield, Ph.D.
Richard Carlson, Ph.D.