There comes a time when consciously relying on Heartspace is the way you live. Rather than deliberately going out and making things happen, people who consciously, consistently, and completely live in Heartspace allow things to happen. They know that the lasting connections they have to the worlds within and around them will support them in infinite perfection, and that things will work the way they work.
We can only learn and advance with contradictions. The faithful inside should meet the doubtful. The doubtful should meet the faithful. Human slowly advances and becomes mature when he accepts his contradictions.
– Shams Tibrizi
Along the road to this consciousness, everyone can experience their own kinds of distractions, roadblocks, and aversions. These can come in so many forms, just like the things we’re connected to: ideas, people, places, memories, knowledge, beliefs, and our own selves can all prevent us from living completely within Heartspace. Barriers may lead to dropping out, quitting, leaving, resting, isolating, integrating, complicating, simplifying… but those aren’t the barriers themselves. Identify for yourself what the barriers really are.
When faced with obstacles to their personal engagement, many people confront it willfully. They try to jump over the barrier, knock it down, ignore it, go around it, or tunnel under it. Others ignore it or wait for it to go away on its own. Barriers depend on perspective. One of the things we know about Heartspace is that no situation, wisdom, or knowingness is absent of lasting connections- that’s why we are engaged in the roadblock in the first place. Barriers are not necessarily teachers, or demons, or unresolved conflict from your childhood. They may be resting places. They may be bridges. They be simply be barriers.
For me, willfulness itself is a barrier. Throughout my life I have struggled and pushed, forcing boulders uphill and suffering the eagle eating my liver everyday. When I was young I learned we needed to struggle in order to succeed. There were few things we couldn’t get to if we tried hard enough. I have spent an adulthood releasing that notion, first learning to work smarter and not harder, then learning to release the idea of work. Today, I have a livelihood that sustains me, and my work is integrated into my lifestyle. But my willfulness still challenges me, as I want to see this, that, and the other thing appear in my life right now. “If I just work hard enough…” Rather than seeking to remove the barriers that prevent me from consciously relying on Heartspace, my work is to simply be with those barriers, which in this case for me is willfulness.
See your barriers and name them. Greet them for what they are- things you are engaged with right now. And then let them be. You may need to actively work to resolve them, but the first step to living consciously from Heartspace is to listen to yourself and see what the barriers are. As we learned earlier from the Cycle of Engagement, we can validate ourselves, authorize ourselves to make change, take action, and reflect on that process next. But first, we have to listen to ourselves to determine what the barriers are in the first place.
Heartspace is a wide open expanse that holds all of our engagements, convenient and inconvenient, lasting and temporary, strong and fleeting. Using Heartspace for all its worth can allow us to move beyond where we ever thought we’d travel, and that may be your goal. Go there, stay here, or rest behind; all is well, right now.
Here’s an underlying reality: There are no barriers in Heartspace. There is nothing that prevents us from being engaged with anything else, ever. We can experience things are roadblocks, and that’s what this article presents and deals with. However, ultimately, nothing can stop you from engaging in anything, ever.
Adam F.C. Fletcher 