On Matters of the Heart…
by
Sarah Varcas
"Hello everyone. Just wanted to check in again and let you know how
things are progressing. Overall, life is good, despite the obvious
challenges of recovering from a heart attack and adjusting to the
meaning of my ‘new normal’. It is on the physical level that I most feel
the challenge as my energy levels are still low and therefore any
physical activity is severely limited at the moment. Cue a BIG lesson in
patience! Okay, Universe, I GET THE MESSAGE! However, in the past week
especially I have definitely noticed happiness creeping into my days and
my heart has most certainly been smiling at life rather than cowering
from it…
It does rather seem, from my current vantage point, that
the blessings of this bizarre sequence of events are greater than the
drawbacks, despite how huge those drawbacks sometimes appear (usually in
the middle of the night when I can’t sleep and the poor-old mind takes
it upon itself to run through the ‘doomsday scenarios’ just to keep me
occupied!). Suddenly being awakened to the presence of my physical heart
has triggered a process of what I can only describe as re-heartening,
that is, the ‘heart’ is returning to aspects of myself, my life and my
experience where it was previously absent or had withdrawn through lack
of nourishment or nurturing. There is now an echo that runs through my
consciousness, a heartbeat, which reminds me that without heart in all
its forms and guises, life becomes sterile and frozen. I knew this, of
course, as do we all, but was I living it? Was I listening to my heart
when she told me my mind was leading me off in the wrong direction? No.
Well…yes, but then I’d come up with the ‘yes but’ response followed by
all the reasons why I couldn’t possibly do what I knew I really needed
to do. Or ‘yes I will do them but THIS and THAT need to change first’.
These
days, it seems to me, my heart has found her voice, or perhaps I just
hear her way more clearly now. I turn to her when I need to make a
decision and I listen to her gentle prods in the right direction. Even
(and especially) when my mind says something very different, which
usually sounds terribly obvious and rational but comes as a harsh and
echoing voice from an empty room, not as the soft tones of my warm and
beating heart as she speaks into my life with every breath. During my
first night in hospital I lay in bed trying to sense my heart inside my
chest. I could see her activity laid out as in a foreign script on the
heart monitor to which I was attached, but when I tuned in to her all I
could feel was a deep sadness, as if she was weeping in there. I
realised that in all of my 47 years I had paid her next to no attention
whatsoever. She had beat through every minute, every hour of every day
and I just took her for granted, assuming she’d continue to offer her
unfailing support no matter how much I ignored her voice or hardened her
shell to cope with the challenges of the outside world.
Yes, I had
always had a good diet, lived a relatively healthy life, didn’t do
anything that would particularly put her at risk of physical diseases,
but often I neglected to listen to her, really listen, even when I knew I
should. She was always relegated to a secondary role, a cameo in the
drama of my life. She had the odd walk-on part, and even got a line from
time to time, but mostly it was my head that told me what to do and my
heart that just carried on beating away, keeping me alive to face
another day in which I would pretty much ignore her again! It also
became increasingly obvious to me as I lay there in the darkness of a
hospital ward wondering what the heck was going to happen next, that the
heart I had shared with many others I had, in fact, withheld from
myself. I still wonder at the peculiar kind of martyrdom such behaviour
entails!
Anyway, as I process the meaning and significance of all
that has happened in these past few weeks I can come to only one
conclusion that feels heartily right, and that is that my heart needs to
expand (not physically, of course, because that’s never a good
condition to be in!) but emotionally and spiritually. I need more heart
in my life, enough to embrace everything within and without. Enough
heart to know that no matter how rational the mind and ego can be, when
it feels wrong to my heart it’s wrong, and whatever the outcome of
walking the Heart’s Path, I can embrace it and contain it and move
forward with it, remaining intact and whole no matter what needs to be
let go in the process. I can hear so much clearer now the different
tones of the heart and the mind. The nuance of fear and foreboding that
underpins the mind’s commentary and the reassuring strength that the
heart offers along with her wisdom.
I am also acutely aware that
any notion of ‘protecting my heart’ feels completely wrong and out of
kilter with her truth. There is nothing to protect her from. Nothing
that can damage or diminish her. Any fear that I have had of opening her
up to certain aspects of life and experience have been completely
misplaced and born of ego that needs to feel in control and be top dog,
and what better way to do that than through fear? Any damage done to my
heart has been done by me, not by anything outside of me. This I see and
feel extremely clearly now, hence my need to ‘say’ these words aloud in
my time of clarity, so that if this clarity fades in due course I can
return to its assurance of safety and truth through these words.
And
on that note, I have received several messages from people who are
concerned that I may have suffered this heart attack as a result of
interference from outside forces with ill-intent. I would like to offer
my reassurance that absolutely nothing in what I have experienced feels
at all like anything has interfered with me in that way, other than
myself that is! Indeed, as I listen with greater respect and love to my
heart she tells me very clearly that there is nothing to fear ‘out
there’, for ‘out there’ is also ‘in here’, and the more deeply I can
live and breathe that truth the less the duality of ‘victim’ and
‘attacker’, or ‘self’ and ‘other’, can take a hold in my consciousness.
She speaks to me very clearly on this: We are not
part of the whole, we
are
the whole. In embracing this fact more and more deeply I can begin to
experience the peace of the heart, which truly knows no fear.
Needless
to say, as I am sure is true for many people who experience a sudden
health crisis such as this, the questions ‘Why me?! What made this
happen?!’ have entertained me repeatedly in recent weeks. As I
contemplate their demand for a satisfying logic and order in the
universe I realise that true meaning is to be found not in the events
themselves but in the consequences of them, in what I make of what has
occurred in my life. As such, their meaning will manifest over time as
the consequences of these events weave themselves through my life’s
tapestry. It is all too tempting for me to find a handy ‘peg’ on which
to hang my current situation, and preferably one which gives me back the
perceived control I had over my life which I lost in the blink of an
eye. But to do so would merely create a false and premature closure on a
process which has only just begun. For me, living with the unknown is
my path right now, in terms of whether this will happen to me again, how
fully I will recover, what this all means for my future, as well as the
bigger questions of how this changes my understanding of and
relationship with life itself. I have been plunged into deep mystery and
am finding increasing peace in the knowledge that answers are not
necessary when it comes to matters of the heart. She speaks in a
different language which the mind may forever fail to understand.
So,
yes, there are many blessings on this strange new path of mine. I am
grateful to have been woken up to where I was neglecting my own growth. I
don’t know what happens next. I’ve never been fond of event prediction
and I don’t intend to start now! Life is a mystery and often best kept
that way, revealing itself to us as it needs to in the moment, not set
in stone in the form of events that can neither be avoided nor
influenced. I have always used astrology to set the scene, not write the
script, and as such its relevance becomes even more profound for me now
as I look forward to new beginnings and different voices that guide my
path. Whatever the future may hold in terms of happenings, one thing’s
for sure, never have I loved my heart as much as I do right now and that
can only ever be a good thing!
With much love to everyone.
Sarah Varcas"
