Lately, I’ve been revisiting the exquisite writings of Rumi.

My own son, Rumi, is 10 months old, which means that my sweet little thinker will soon be asking where his name came from. Amidst my journey to revitalize my intellect with these powerful works, my gaze fell upon this printed treasure:

“Tend to your vital heart, and all that you worry about will be solved.”

—Rumi

In channeling the scarcely scattered whispers of mindfulness that stumble through my consciousness, I slowly began to piece together ways in which we could all tend to our vital hearts.

A few years ago, I attended a retreat in which one of the speakers offered an evocative parallel to contemplate: Every single morning, a man went to visit his neighbor. While he would chat with his neighbor, he would hear the neighbor’s dog crying and whimpering while asleep on the doorstep. The man beheld this occurrence daily for years until he finally asked about it. The neighbor responded that the dog was crying in his sleep because he was lying over a bed of protruding nails in the floorboard. The man asked why the dog volunteered to sleep in the same painful spot over and over again. Why wouldn’t the dog shift a little? The neighbor replied, “Because, it just doesn’t hurt enough.”

Does it have to hurt enough before we make a shift against the pain? Are we happy? Are we living our truth? Are we tending to our vital hearts? Living authentically does not require money or materials. We’d just have to fulfill these few simple feats:

Fall in love with our own mess:

We mess up. We fail at one thing or another. We open the door for misery to find us (sometimes repeatedly). We take too long to let go of some things. We have been irresponsible, insensitive, careless and foolish with no exodus within range.

So what?

Imperfect, chaotic beauty is all over the place. Mistakes are what unite us with our humanness. We need to cultivate peace and acceptance of ourselves by owning our faults and fiascoes. Love the light that is sometimes interlaced with darkness. Call a truce with limitations.

Our former flaws cannot be given the power to shape our future actions or to obscure our authentic selves. Recognize the mess. Regret the mess. Explore the mess. Work through the mess. Own the mess. Love the mess… and, move on.

Listen to our core and trust what we are hearing:

Make a commitment to align actions with the inner illumination and wisdom from within without fear, judgment or self-doubt. Be attentive to impulses, flickers of wakefulness, funny feelings, synchronicities, happenstances, flukes, coincidences.

Follow these whispers as they form an atlas illuminating a personal pathway to serenity. When the path is shaky, when the journey becomes dubious, these are the moments especially, in which instincts and hunches ought to be used as celestial navigation for our lives.

Be authentic:

Follow that truth, that innate wisdom which lies somewhere between intuition and invulnerability, between the awake and the insentient mind. Seek and withdraw when needed. Excavate immeasurably beneath any echelons of logic. Wander through the delicately laid intricacies of life by confiding in the soul first and the head, a very far second. Set intentions that are aligned with the deepest values of our vital hearts. Sow the seeds of dreams, and watch them unfold.

This is healing to both mind and spirit.

Setting intentions and acting upon them helps us to have true introspection into the light and shadows of ourselves. Let these intentions ground and guide peacefully though life’s waves.

Let go:

Bliss is abundant, but we cannot gain access to it if we don’t attune our minds to this conscious evolution we are attempting to experience. We need to move into a healing space by letting go of everything damaging we’ve been holding onto.

Like a crescendo in a masterpiece, pathways of possibility permeate life with passionate harmony, but we can only see these pathways if we first let go of negativity and of attachments to specific outcomes. We need to be in continual progression. We need to be fluid. We need to flow around any destructive and egocentric anchors.

We all possess the right elements to shift our lives from chaos to clarity. We have the capacity to configure an expanse of pivotal and persevering beauty in our lives. We need to take these simple steps to grasp the glory of an awareness far beyond our consciousness, to behold the rapture of the depths, the radiance of our inner strength.

Go deeper. Trust. Be open. Feed only that which fulfills. Tend to your vital heart, and all that you worry about will be solved.

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Apprentice Editor: Karissa Kneeland / Editor: Catherine Monkman

   Photo: qthomasbower/Flickr