Category Archives: Adam Fletcher’s Topics

In the cliche world of self-help, it’s often said there are no conditions to true love. This is true of our connections in the world and within ourselves, too, no matter what they are. In the place where they happen, Heartspace, there are no conditions.

I’m sitting in the heat of a warm Pacific Northwest summer Saturday. The sun is beaming onto my lawn, and my flower gardens are dancing with the nurturing wisps of honeybees and bumblebees doing their day labor. My child is playing calmly in the shade garden, whipping around a bamboo rod and narrating a pleasant story of some sort. She’s just loud enough for me to know she’s there. Our cat is meandering through the grass, munching on the occasional chute.

I am connected to all of this in deep ways. There are no conditions for my connections. I don’t absolutely need my daughter to do anything in particular; yet, I’m deeply connected to her. I don’t totally need this yard; yet, I’m deeply connected to it. These two connections are not the same, and they vary by degrees, but there are no conditions for either one.

In the place where you make connections to the world around you, there are no conditions. Instead, there are only opportunities for you to personally engage with whatever you want. No right or wrong, good or bad, up or down matter here. Instead, it’s all about whether you see your connections or not, whether you see Heartspace or not. A spectacular thing about Heartspace is that it doesn’t require belief or even acknowledgment. Whether or not we’re engaged in Heartspace, its always going to be there. That’s the essence of there being no conditions.

Learn more about Adam Fletcher from his website at adamfletcher.net.

A rich guy followed the king of his region to France to fight during medieval times. In the middle of a battle, he had a vision and knew there had to be another way. Soon after, he went back to his lands, and soon headed towards Rome. Once he got there, young Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1182-1226) soon gave away all his worldly possessions and started begging near the Vatican. Over the rest of a lifetime, Giovanni came to be called exclusively by his nickname “Francis” to recognize the love he had for the place he’d fought. He went on to become a monk, founded a religious order, and performed miracles several times. Only two years after his death he was named a saint, and has been honored as the patron saint of the environment and animals, and is one of the two patron saints of Italy.

During his life, Saint Francis’s teachings were important to his country and all of Catholicism. He roamed the countryside teaching, spreading the Gospel, and living his life like he thought Jesus Christ had lived his.

Whatever the reason, Saint Francis arrived at very deep understandings about the nature of the Universe. In his study about the character of all things in relationship to each other, Francis stumbled into one of the tenants of the Heartspace Teachings. He wrote, “No one is to be called an enemy. All are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourself.”

In the same way the Buddhist believes there are no obstacles, only different ways to get somewhere from here, Saint Francis believed there is no way another person can harm you- only different ways for you to understand other people.

Perfectly engaged in the worlds within and around us at all times, Heartspace shows that there’s no way for anything to work against us, since everything is constantly working for us. Even the most humiliating, deceiving, and relentlessly horrifying circumstances and people are merely different ways for us to understand ourselves in the Universe.

Every single thing in life—inanimate or in motion—is engagement. In this same way, St. Francis was teaching us that every person individually is truly responsible for themselves to the core. There’s no other person who can take our happiness, joy, understanding, or peace away from us. This is true all ways, in all ways.

The agreements we make through Heartspace, including the invisible strands that connect to all things everywhere. Coloring ideas, actions, people, and outcomes on one person allows us to see the intricate ways way relate we may suffer from.

In these days, life can be about honoring the trickster. The trickster is that force that wants us not to take ourselves- or life- too heavily or with too much seriousness.

Life gives me plenty of opportunities to laugh at myself, particularly in hindsight. The grace of these days is that I’m learning to laugh at myself in the moment. That lets me shake off the blues and greys of those moments and rise, lightly walking along with whatever comes my way.

The sacred part of it all is see that whatever comes my way is what it is; my response is subjective and can be changed.

Combining those two beliefs? To me, that’s going lightly down your sacred way…

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Everything that happens to us leaves some trace behind; everything contributes imperceptibly to make us what we are.” Looking out from Heartspace into the world around us, we can see that our personal engagement, our community engagement, and our universal engagement are endlessly in force to secure, sustain, and compel our sustained connections to the worlds within and around us.