While you’re navigating Heartspace, take time to make sure it is your voice that is guiding you.
There are no distractions in the world- everything in our experiences is meant to guide and drive us in the exact directions we’re headed. That means that none of the friends, technologies, adventures, or ideas you have ever had were the wrong ones. They are all right, every single one.
Living in our Heartspace challenges us to live in full responsibility for ourselves, calling us ever further on our walk towards deliberate and intentional personal engagement. As we rely more on our internal engage of personal engagement, Heartspace in turn asks us to get genuinely authentic with ourselves. That means allowing our most honest selves to speak to us in whatever way we’re comfortable and capable of that. For some, that means meditation and prayer. For others that means partying and concerts. There are no wrong paths to finding your Heartspace.
A great American preacher and teacher named Howard Thurman once charged us with how to operationalize Heartspace in our lives. He wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Those are the directions of Heartspace – come alive!
In turn, that is what we must do in order to engage our communities, as well- charge them with coming alive. We must work with everyone in equal measure to ensure that we all have the opportunities we need in order to find out what makes us come alive. But we can only do this with others after we’ve done it with ourselves- if that is what makes us come alive!
That’s a formula at work here: We cannot ask others to do what we aren’t doing ourselves. Do not encourage someone else to get their life on track if you are derailed yourself. Do not try to teach another person if you are not actively learning yourself. Do not teach your children to look inside themselves if you are busy looking all around you for answers. This is what Gandhi implored us to do with his simple saying, “We need to be the change we wish to see in the world.”
Heartspace allows for that radical self-responsibility that can shake people out of the bed in the morning, even when they are 94 years old, and say, “I fairly sizzle with zeal and enthusiasm and spring forth with a mighty faith to do the things that ought to be done by me.” That was American religious leader Charles Fillmore, and that can be you, too.
Adam F.C. Fletcher 