Clean Your Heart

Clean Your Heart

The heart is not simply a pump. It is a filter and the center of feeling intelligence. If, because of unethical behavior our hearts are not clean, we can't really feel ourselves. If we can't feel ourselves in a good way, we can't connect with ourselves. If we can't connect with ourselves, we can't connect with Others or the Living World. What we aren't connected to we don't value or care for. And thus goes the modern world.

Many traditional and ancestral cultures come with a deeper awareness of what the heart is. In Japanese, there are three words for heart. While shinzou refers to the physical organ, kokoro, unites the notions of heart, mind, and spirit. Likewise in Aramaic, the word for heart, leba, means the center, the seat of intelligence, the pith, marrow, or best part of anything (there are hold-overs from this in speaking of an artichoke heart, for example).

Sometimes, in our lives, we do things that dishonor the deeper wisdom and intelligence of the heart, and by so doing find ourselves exiled from our own center. Sometimes this happens as a result of trauma: individual, collective, or ecological. Collectively, this has happened to modern civilization.

In this practice, we begin to explore tactical ways of reconnecting with our hearts, and engaging in the reparative work to remove and heal from actions and experiences that have shut our hearts down, closed them off from us, and taken us out of connection with ourselves.