Partial Book |

If your eReader doesn’t allow you to download these links directly to your device, please go to http://www.awakentheheart.org/book to download the mp3 tracks.

Dale’s introduction to the book (1.6 mb)
A guided “soft-body” meditation (13 mb)
“Guided Heartwork” (18.2 mb)
Awareness meditation (13.5 mb)
Unwinding Beginning (24.02 mb)
Unwinding Dawn (12.12 mb)

Praise for Heartwork

“There are in this world illnesses that seek healings in just the same way as aspirants seek liberation—the right catalyst is crucial. Dale Goldstein is just such a catalyst for healing.”

Stephen Levine, author of A Gradual Awakening (Anchor Press, 1979), Meetings at the Edge (Anchor Press, 1984), and Healing Into Life and Death (Anchor Press, 1987)

“Heartwork gave me chills when I first picked up the manuscript. This wonderful book is simply the truth about what it takes to heal and become vibrantly healthy.”

Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Mother-Daughter Wisdom (Bantam, 2005), The Wisdom of Menopause (Bantam, 2001), and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (Bantam, 1998)

“With Heartwork, Dale Goldstein has created an important addition to the growing body of work integrating modern therapeutic approaches with awareness practices from spiritual traditions. But this book—in which Goldstein’s compassion, experience and wisdom come shining through—is also visually striking and aesthetically rich. It shimmers with beauty and a sense of grace transmitted. The practices Heartwork offers are simple and powerful, and anyone willing to take this journey is sure to have some direct tastes of what all hearts truly seek.”

Russ Hudson, author with Don Richard Riso of The Wisdom of the Enneagram (Bantam, 1999).

“This amazing and ground-breaking book by the master psychotherapist Dale Goldstein distills a lifetime of brilliant wisdom into a deeply moving and loving manual for profound spiritual transformation. Far and away the best book on personal transformation I have ever read. Read this book and you will never be the same.”

Kenneth Porter, M.D., President, Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy

“Dale has gifted us with a beautiful synthesis of his personal experience, essential principles in psychotherapy and a basic understanding of spiritual teachings. Heartwork is a powerful invitation to readers to make fundamental personal change, pointing the direction, mapping the territory and supporting the journey. The descriptions of both content and process are specific, detailed, comprehensive and thorough. Through the creative inclusion of sensitive poetry, vivid illustration and the richness and poignancy of others’ experience, the book calls us to reach deeply beyond our intellectual structure. In helping us learn ‘What We Really, Really Want,’ Dale also gives a glimpse of ‘Who We Really Are.’”

Burt Giges, M.D., President-Elect, Association for Applied Sport Psychology

“Heartwork is a manual for going deep into yourself and emerging transformed, an invaluable guidebook for self-discovery.”

Donna Thomson, author of The Vibrant Life: Simple Meditations to Use Your Energy Effectively (Sentient Publications, 2006).

“Dale’s work is innovative and groundbreaking. It combines meditation, therapy, bodywork, music, language and more in a way that creates something new and fresh and healing. Heartwork captures the spirit of the work and is the next-best thing to being with Dale in person.”

Michael Hull, author of Sun Dancing: A Spiritual Journey On The Red Road (Inner Traditions, 2000)

“Heartwork is the one book to take on your spiritual journey. The author knows how hard it is to be afraid of something and not be aware that you’re afraid. The work is on target: how to get to what you don’t know is bothering you—and heal it.”

James O’Hern, author of Honoring the Stones (Curbstone Press, 2004)

Heartwork: How to Get What You Really, Really Want

Photo-illustrations by Richard Wehrman

Copyrights and acknowledgements for poems and quotations are an extension of this copyright page.

The illustrations in this book incorporate and make use of the creativity of numerous photographers without whose works this greater work could not exist. Credits and copyrights for these artists are an extension of this copyright page.

Book design by Richard Wehrman

www.merlinwood.net

Edited by Katy Koontz

Heartwork Institute, Inc.

Rochester, New York

For my father, Allan Goldstein, whose favorite quotation was Shakespeare’s “This above all: to thine own self be true,” whose favorite historical figure was Abraham Lincoln (on whose assassination day he died in 1998), and who passed on to me a soul hunger for Truth.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank my good friend Richard Wehrman for his magnificent artwork, design and poetic contributions to this book. It would not be anything without him. Next, I thank my life partner, Carolyn Cerame, for her exquisite sensitivity, incredible intuition, deep insight and unending support. Next, I thank my parents, Allan Goldstein and Estelle Goldstein; my children, Devan Goldstein and Jessica Kamens; my sisters, Wynne Bouley and Jan Goldstein; and my grandmother, Lizzie Radlow—all of whom, each in their own ways, taught me about unconditional love. I also express my deep gratitude to my ex-wife Ellen Goldstein for insisting that I grow, for helping to birth and develop Heartwork and for sticking with me through the hardest times of my life. I also thank my dear friends, too numerous to list, but especially Paul Kuhl and Richard Wehrman, who for 35 years have given and continue to give me the love, support, understanding and challenging I’ve needed to continue on my path.

I also thank all my clients and students who have given themselves to the difficult and challenging work of trying to understand who they really are, thereby forcing me to look more deeply into aspects of my own being that I may have been ignoring. It continues to be a great privilege and honor to witness with awe, and facilitate to the best of my ability, your unfolding into your true nature.

Next, I wish to acknowledge my principal teachers. Alia Johnson, my teacher in the Diamond Approach, serves as an ongoing inspiration. I am eternally grateful to her for her wisdom, depth, breadth and maturity of character and for her unswerving commitment to my awakening to my true nature. She has both challenged and affirmed my understanding and continues to drive me—she would probably say “invite” me—ever deeper. Toni Packer saved my spiritual life by giving me the space, encouragement and guidance to find my own way. Philip Kapleau, my Zen teacher, taught me about frustration, pain, patience and perseverance. Fred Thompson, my first teacher, taught me how to meditate and how not to live.

Many thanks also to my primary therapists (Connie Donaldson, who has been bringing her wisdom and compassion to the highs and lows of my life for decades, and Bekah Murdock, who taught me that it’s OK to feel my feelings completely).

I am deeply indebted to the Heartwork book committee, especially Kenneth Rich and Elise Buskey (co-chairs), and the dozens of others who put time and energy into manifesting this book and without whose efforts and wise counsel the book would never have seen fruition. I am equally indebted to the many individuals who had enough faith in this book to help finance its creation and production.

And, of course, the book wouldn’t have been a book without the workshop participants and clients who submitted their experiences to share with the readers. My gratitude goes to each one of you, whether your stories are included here or not. And equal gratitude goes to all those who read and gave feedback on the manuscript in its formative stages and to those who proofread it before publication.

I want to give special thanks to the people over the years who have gone way out of

their way to help Heartwork flourish, including my “angel” administrator, Annette Barron; present and past Heartwork executive directors Karen Cooper, Trish Andraszek, Patricia Dorland and Hallie Sawyers; the Heartwork steering committee; Heartwork’s principal Texas sponsors Donna Berber, Philip Berber, Cis Dickson and Maribeth Price; and our Texas angels and event coordinators Joann Gorka and Margie Mensik and primary helpers Brenda Bailey, Elise Buskey, Emily Carpenter, Andy Clawson, Marcie Gass, Brenda Gleason, Doug Gorka, Clayton Lee, Donna Sue Lee, Diana Livingston, Traci Noge, Ken Rich, Spencer Richardson, Donna Ries, Brian Stovall, Janice Wagley, Elaine Webster and Jeanne Yamonaco. I want to thank Brian Cooper for helping Heartwork realize its organizational potential; Philip Berber, Jonathan Bregman, Brian Cooper, Peter Davidson, Ross Garber, Devan Goldstein, Les Gourwitz, Bruce Peters and Jeremy Seligman for their sage business advice; and Dr. William Craig, internist extraordinaire, who has partnered with me in bringing total health care to his patients.

I am deeply indebted to Stephen Levine; Christiane Northrup, M.D.; Russ Hudson; Kenneth Porter, M.D.; Burt Giges, M.D.; Donna Thomson; Michael Hull and James O’Hern for their willingness to review and endorse the book.

Special thanks to my good friend Todd Carter for his inspired Unwinding compositions. Thanks also to Juliet Van Otteren for her beautiful portraiture.

Finally, I want to thank my superb editor, Katy Koontz, for her expertise as an editor, her love and guidance, her support and encouragement, and the work she has done and continues to do on herself that allowed her to understand what I was trying to say in this book.

Precautionary note:

This book is written in a specific and deliberate order. For maximum benefit, please do not skip any parts and, especially, please do not read ahead.

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

—Rumi

The Descent

Life’s spectator no longer could I be

And so myself did plunge

Through fear’s dark sea:

Falling, drowning in despairing tears,

Ocean inhaling, sinking to unknown depths,

Imploding anguished cries I disappear into darkness

And am lost.

Then struggles cease,

Too tired to fight,

My being starts to yield,

Begins to pulse in rhythmic union

With all that once seemed foe,

Feeling with each heartbeat

Feared enemy becoming friend.

Then waves embrace and cradle,

Like loving arms enfolding,

As they lift their host up slowly,

In gentle reverent Hands,

Upward through shining rainbow hues,

Until, in one bright blinding flash,

I breathe the sun and hear earth sing

As I begin to dance.

~Maribeth Price

This poem, written by a participant in the first Heartwork Intensive at the Omega Institute in July 1982, beautifully describes the experience of Heartwork. It shows the process Maribeth went through after a near-death experience due to an automobile accident. It also deftly conveys the spirit and transformational power of Heartwork as the primary contributor to her psychological and spiritual healing.

About Heartwork

Heartwork is a simple, direct, powerful

yet gentle tool for opening fully to one’s life.

Both a counseling approach and a way of living,

Heartwork serves to resolve problems at their core

and to open the “heart of compassion.”

Heartwork is a synthesis of Eastern meditative approaches to healing and Western psychotherapeutic techniques, using awareness as the primary vehicle to see into the source of one’s problems.

The basic assumption of Heartwork is that our fundamental state is wholeness. Dis-ease is a separation from this wholeness.

What we identify as our problems are symptoms of underlying conflicts caused by running away from, or fighting against, certain aspects of ourselves. The tensions created by this internal split may manifest themselves as dis-ease in one or more of the interpenetrating aspects of our being: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. In each case, these tensions are held in very specific places in the body/mind.

The solution to our perceived problems, then, is simply to stop running and to look directly into the heart of the problem by quieting the mind, clearly defining the problem, focusing the attention into the area of the body where the conflict seems to be located, and then looking into the very center of this area to find the resolution.

As you look more and more deeply into your experience of the problem, you become increasingly aware of the underlying mental, emotional and spiritual roots of the issue. By allowing yourself to be completely with these split-off parts, you will experience a coming together (a healing or “wholing”) within yourself, in which the dis-ease–producing thought or feeling is released and the problem is resolved.

From this place of peace, you are then able to see clearly how you have moved away from your state of wholeness to create the problem that you have just resolved. Understanding, forgiveness and compassion flow freely from this insight, and healing (though not necessarily curing on a physical level) occurs naturally out of this inner ease. This awareness is then integrated into your actions, so that you can live more harmoniously with others and the world.

The Heartwork process teaches you to use life’s problems as doorways into a space of open awareness and insight, rather than giving problems the power to run your life. As a result, you are continually learning from your experience, and life becomes “The Great Adventure.”

Getting Started

Heartwork is a process of letting go, with awareness, into the truth of one’s being in the moment. It is essentially a very simple process—kind of like falling asleep, except that in Heartwork, one falls awake—but it is not easy. It is simple because all you have to do is find the yearning in your being (to be free, whole, connected, alive; to know who and what you are; to realize what reality is—whatever form it takes for you) and let go or surrender into it and let it take you back home to your authentic, true self. It is difficult because letting go into unfamiliar places inside ourselves is scary. We are used to controlling our emotions, our lives, other people and anything else we think we need to control.

Why is it so scary? For a good reason. Most people think they’re afraid of the unknown. Actually, that’s not true because it’s not possible to be afraid of the unknown. The unknown is unknown; it is not a thing that one can fear. What we are really afraid of is what we think we might encounter on our journey inward: our fear, anger, pain—everything that was too much for us to feel when it happened, so that we had to wall it off from our consciousness. That could include negative self-images and beliefs, aloneness, emptiness, nothingness, existential angst or even the much-talked-about dark night of the soul. And the truth is that we usually have to go through all of these to come home to ourselves.

Many people are afraid to make this journey because they believe that what is at the deepest level inside themselves is bad, some “original sin,” and they don’t want their belief to be confirmed. (I distinguish between “belief” and “faith” in that faith is based on direct, personal experience, whereas belief is merely a thought.) How could we live with ourselves if we knew that our true nature was really awful? So many of us don’t ever look deeply enough to uncover the truth of who or what we really are, which is absolutely the antithesis of awful (but it is awe full!).

When I first began the deep feeling part of my journey, I started writing a book entitled Cheap Insights. I made all of one entry into the book: “I used to think that when I got through my fear that I would come to life. Then I realized that my life was in my fear!” By allowing myself to feel my fear completely, I lost my fear of being afraid and I began (after a few decades of emotional anesthesia) to allow myself to re-experience the full range of human emotions—fear, sadness, anger and joy! I began to come back to life in my feelings.

When we split our consciousness off from our feelings, we feel disconnected from ourselves, others, the universe and God. We cannot let love in or out; we cannot appreciate the exquisite beauty and awe of life. We feel, as A. E. Housman once suggested, alone and afraid in a world we never made.

So how then can we do the impossible—let go into the very places that so terrify us, the places we have separated ourselves from for decades? Actually, the way it usually happens is that the opportunity catches up with us—we don’t have to go looking for it! For most people who do this challenging work, life has become unbearably painful, difficult and unsatisfying. And at that point, they have two options: either take the journey inward or medicate with prescription drugs or other addictions to deaden themselves. (This is not to say that psychopharmacologic medications are never appropriate and necessary for one’s journey; but the reality is that we frequently use them as crutches to avoid our issues rather than as tools to support us in working with those issues).

Here’s how it works. Picture a funnel. Our true nature is a single point at the bottom of the funnel, whole and undivided. We first split from this wholeness when we get the idea that we are a self that is separate from others and from the universe. We call this split the formation of the ego. I’ve been asked why we make this split in the first place. The only answer I’ve ever heard that’s worth repeating came from my Zen teacher, who said we split from wholeness so that we can experience the joy of coming back home to ourselves! With the formation of the ego, we have moved one layer up the funnel away from our true nature.

With the ego come the notions of space and time. We perceive space because now we see an inside (the ego, or the “I”) and an outside (the universe), whereas before it was all one thing. We perceive time because while the universe will seemingly go on forever, the self will not. And because it is untenable to live in the awareness of our ultimate demise, we split from ourselves once again and tell ourselves that while our bodies will die, our consciousness, our soul or our spirit (or who we convince ourselves we really are) will not—it will go on forever. And so we make another split as we separate our physical selves from our soul or our spirit and move up the funnel away from our true nature.

Now to make matters worse, certain parts of our mind or soul or spirit are unacceptable to our parents and our culture. I’ve come to understand that we have four fundamental emotions—joy/love, sorrow/pain, fear (the movement away from sorrow/pain) and anger (fear or pain projected outward because we are unwilling to feel those more vulnerable emotions). Of these, only joy/love is truly acceptable in society. (And actually, we only say it is; look at how we react to people exuberantly enjoying themselves!) But guess what happens to our joy when we cut off the other three feelings? It gets cut off, too, because you can’t have real joy unless you accept pain. Is it any wonder that we see so few truly joyous human beings in our culture beyond the age of 2 or 3? We also judge as unacceptable certain desires (such as greed, lust and envy) and even certain out-of-the-ordinary states of awareness (such as ESP, intuition, channeling and psychosis).

And so we split again into what Carl Jung called the persona (those parts of ourselves that we believe are acceptable to our culture and that we are willing to express publicly) and the shadow (those parts we believe are unacceptable to others and that we consequently try to hide from the world as well as from ourselves). Now, the problem with the shadow is that it has to somehow find expression or life. After all, it is called the shadow because it sticks to us wherever we go, yet it remains hidden and dark. Because we won’t let it breathe fresh air, so to speak, it sneaks out in some other way, unconsciously, hurting others and ourselves.

To make matters even worse, certain things happen to us as we are growing up (and “growing up” continues even when we’re 80 and beyond) that are just too painful or too frightening to fully experience at the time. So we wall these experiences off in our unconscious mind, where we store those events and aspects of our being that we protect ourselves from experiencing. Thus we move one step further up the funnel to the point where we are living our lives—on the upper rim.

So that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. For some of us, it becomes apparent at some point that we are suffering and cannot find a way out of it—not through drugs and alcohol, sex, money, power, success, religion or any of the other addictions or distractions with which we try to fill this nagging emptiness inside ourselves. The reason we get to this point is that our deepest yearning is to regain our lost wholeness and connectedness, and in its great wisdom, our unconscious mind repeatedly creates situations that remind us of the places where we originally split from ourselves. It does this not to punish us but to get our attention, so that we can stop running away from those parts of ourselves that we have split off from. If we are willing to face ourselves, we can then “take the hit” (feel those feelings we’ve repressed) and feel all the way back to where the original pain and fear occurred so we can heal the wound at its source. As my dear friend Cis Dickson has embroidered on the back of her Crooked Back Ranch caps, “Go Within or Go Without.” When we get to this point in our lives, it is actually easier to let go into the yearning than to keep running away from the fear of facing what lies within ourselves. And so the journey homeward begins!

The purpose of this book is to share the essential tools, processes and understandings of Heartwork so that you may have a direct experience of healing your wounds at their source. It is my hope that by using Heartwork on a regular basis as a tool for personal transformation, you will bring peace, joy and love into your life—and by so doing, into the world.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty “yes” to your adventure.

~Joseph Campbell

To maximize your experience of Heartwork, I highly recommend that you work through as much of this section of the book as possible in one sitting. This work is cumulative and tends to build upon itself, taking you increasingly deeper into your being. If you can, take a whole day or an entire weekend to ensure that you have enough time to spaciously explore the Heartwork process. You might also consider journaling your responses to each of the questions posed.

Light

Will someday split you open

Even if your life is now a cage.

Little by little,

You will turn into stars.

Little by little,

You will turn into

The whole sweet, amorous Universe.

Love will surely burst you wide open

Into an unfettered, booming new galaxy.

You will become so free

In a wonderful, secret

And pure Love

That flows

From a conscious,

One-pointed,

Infinite Light.

Even then, my dear,

The Beloved will have fulfilled

Just a fraction,

Just a fraction!

Of a promise

He wrote upon your heart.

For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,

Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain

You hold the title to.

O look again within yourself,

For I know you were once the elegant host

To all the marvels in creation.

When your soul begins

To ever bloom and laugh

And spin in Eternal Ecstasy-

O little by little,

You will turn into God.

—Hafiz

Something wants
to dance out of these words,
to sing a song of praise and thanksgiving.

A voice like the first birds,
calling into the blackgrey suncoming morning

With no particular words to say
or to understand—
just chirping like sizzling popcorn,
water into oil

Dancing on the fire,
feet flying from the flames
but loving it:

these amazing acrobatics
I never knew that I could do,
singing my heart out,
perfectly still

An arrow arcing into dawn,
released to the pull of my own heartwood,
driving deep

Into the clear morning air,
splitting love’s arrow already in my chest,
humming and vibrating still.

~Richard Wehrman

Orientation

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.—Talmudic saying

The essential orientation of Heartwork is:

Be curious about whatever arises in each moment, asking nonjudgmentally, “What is this?” and be open and vulnerable to whatever is there. In other words, be willing to “take the hit” and to fully experience what opens in your awareness.

Surrender into your deepest yearning for awakening, realization (of self, true nature, ultimate truth, reality), freedom, aliveness or wholeness—

and then let that yearning take you home.

The processes you will be invited to practice in this book will give you an experiential understanding of these two statements.

All fear,

all revelation,

all beauty and amazement,

arise from your own Mind.

You are the source of it all.

You stare at vaporous

black squiggles upon a white page,

and insight arises.

From where?

You hear a cacophony of sounds,

no different than wind in the trees,

or leaves tumbling over the ground,

and you bow in gratitude
to your teacher.

Where is this teacher?

You think it all comes from somewhere else.

Listen!

Where is it all actually occurring?

I don’t mean to sound angry—

but this is Me, shaking You:

Right now

these tumbling letters

are rattling around inside your head

and you think

it’s me talking to you,

when really it is your own Mystery—

Alive and fully Present,

creating me, these words,

and everything else you see.

Wake up!

See this one who reads,

this one who writes.

In this search
of a thousand years,

we’ve freed the usual suspects—

and as unlikely as it seemed

in the beginning,

You are the only One left.

~Richard Wehrman

What Do You Want?

“Life is suffering” is one translation of the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. We are all suffering. We all want things we don’t have and we all have things we don’t want. This is the cause of our suffering.

So if this is the simple truth, why can’t we end our suffering by fully concurring with our lives—having what we have and wanting nothing more or less?

Believe it or not, the answer is that we have lost touch with what we really want and have substituted a whole lot of other things for that for which we most deeply yearn. We go around thinking that if only we had enough money, sex, power, fame, drugs and alcohol, or knowledge, we would finally be happy. But no amount of these things will satisfy us because none of them is what we really want. (That you are now reading this book indicates that you have already figured this out!) The more of these things we get, the more we want, and so we can never be fully satisfied. As long as we think those things are what we want, we can never find the peace and fulfillment we are longing for.

One reason none of these things brings us happiness is that they all are focused on the future. They are all predicated on attaining something that we don’t already have. And happiness can only happen now, in this very moment. We cannot be happy in the future because the future will always be just a thought we are having right now! And as long as we are focused on achieving something greater in the future which will finally satisfy our longing, we can never be truly happy.

But the main reason none of these things brings us peace and happiness is that they’re not what we really hunger for. What we really long for is our true selves—our wholeness and our connectedness with others and with the universe or God. And the truth is that we already have these things because they are innate; we don’t have to go searching for them outside ourselves. The problem is that we don’t know—or actually, that we have forgotten—that we already have these treasures and that we already are whole and complete and connected to all life.

So, how then do we remember that and wake up to the truth of ourselves? This book has been written to help you find your way back home to yourself, to take you on that journey of self re-membering—to reclaim the truth you have forgotten.

Seek the truth

and the truth shall set you free

but what is this truth of which I speak?

it is not factual. . .

although you must strive,

scrupulously,

and relentlessly,

for subjective honesty.

it is not knowledge or wisdom.

although you will acquire both

along the way. . .

it is not a philosophy or a religion.

although it is profoundly spiritual,

and you will develop a personal ethic

of great power and substance.

but rather it is a state of being,

where, suddenly,

self-deception is swept away.

and you are left with the essence

of who you really are.

in that moment,

you are filled with power and glory,

and you are at one with the universe.

all fear and judgment disappear.

and what remains

is strength,

beauty,

and joy.

empathy

and compassion.

understanding

and acceptance.

and unconditional love

for all of creation.

and you will forever long to return

to this wondrous place.

~Carol Swiedler

The journey begins with acknowledging the suffering and dissatisfaction in your life. What is not working? What do you want that you don’t have? Is it a love relationship, your health, enough money, peace of mind, a feeling of aliveness or joy, a sense of wholeness or connectedness? And what do you have that you don’t want? Where exactly are you on the surface of the funnel of your life? Wherever you are, that is your doorway to your inner journey home to yourself.

The following exercise will guide you through the first Heartwork process offered in this book. You may journal or contemplate your answers—whatever works best for you. What is most important is that you become fully engaged in the process. As with everything in life, you get out of it exactly what you put into it. If you give little of yourself to the process, you’ll get little back. If you give a lot, you’ll get a lot back. And if you give all of yourself to the process, you’ll get all of yourself out of it!

Please proceed one page at a time without looking ahead.

The process is sequential, and knowing what comes next will defeat the purpose of the exercise.

So, to begin, I’d like to ask you a question,

and I invite you to give it thorough and serious consideration before you answer. It is absolutely vital that you answer truthfully—from where you actually live your life, rather than from where you would like to live it. And, again, please do not turn the page until you’re done. Now, with all that said,

What do you want?

Now let me reshape that question a little.

And once again, I invite you to consider your answer thoroughly and seriously:

What do you want that you don’t have?

And now the other side of the coin:

What do you have that you don’t want?

Now I want to challenge you with a statement that I believe is usually true. The first time I heard this I didn’t want to accept it. But the more I have thought about and worked with it, the more I see the truth in it:

If you want to know what you really want, look at what you have. What you have is what you really want!

What does this mean? It means that, despite what we tell ourselves about what we want, we always get what we really want. We are essentially run by our unconscious desires, motives, wants and needs. Our actions speak louder than our words! At least 51 percent of each of us wants what we have, or else we would have something else. Just think about it. It must be true! Even with things that are hereditary or seemingly forced upon us, we choose how we want to relate to them. For example, I say—and believe—that I want to lose weight, but I keep overeating. Obviously, for some unconscious reason, I don’t really want to lose weight. If I did, I would stop overeating. The same is true for all addictions (anything we do repetitively to avoid dealing with discomfort)—we say we’re going to quit, but we never do. We really want to hold onto this behavior for some reason that we don’t yet understand.

So before we can change our lives, we must wake up to what is running us unconsciously—we must become conscious of these unconscious wants and needs and of the belief systems fashioned in our formative years. Only then can we come to understand why we do what we do and have what we have.

We are constantly creating our own reality, our own world. (Even in this moment, you are creating a reality out of the words you are reading here.) And until we take full responsibility for what we have created, we cannot change our lives. We will remain a victim of circumstances, continually blaming them and other people for our fate. So despite what you tell yourself about what you want, what is the real truth?

What do you really want?

There’s a very good reason why we create what we have. As I explained earlier, we split from our true nature in an effort to protect ourselves from feelings and events that are too painful or frightening to deal with at the time. We wall off these events in our unconscious and create beliefs about who we are and what the world is about. And out of these unconscious beliefs we then create a world—our world—that perpetuates our suffering. (For example, when children are emotionally or physically abused and/or abandoned, they do not yet have the cognitive capacity to deal with such immense pain. They create the belief that the parent is unable to be loving and present because something is wrong or lacking in the child. “I’m not good enough for Mommy to love me,” the child thinks, “but if I’m better behaved, then Mommy will love me.” This “I’m not good enough” belief carries over into adulthood and gets played out in future relationships, creating untold suffering and dissatisfaction. In fact, that belief runs the person’s life, creating the same kind of suffering over and over.)

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the deepest yearning in all of us is to return home to our true nature—to wholeness, love, freedom, joy and happiness. And our unconscious mind, in its absolute brilliance, repeatedly creates the precise situations we need in order to feel our long-buried pain so that we can heal it at its source. We need only to stop running away from ourselves, accept that we have created what we’ve created, and then look and feel into the painful circumstances of our lives so we can heal that split within ourselves and so open into wholeness.

So now, most importantly:

Why do you want what you have?

Take your time with this question. Look and feel as deeply as you possibly can into it—see and feel exactly where the belief that you’re living was formed.

Now that you’ve seen what your unconscious mind wants—what’s been running the show all this time—let me ask you one more time:

Underneath everything, what do you really, really want?

Can you feel where this deep yearning lives in your body?

So…

What’s in the way of your having what you really, really want?

What’s in between your yearning and where you live your life? Please look into this question as deeply as possible because you can’t have what you really, really want until you see what’s in the way of your having it.

And…

What do you have to do to get through or beyond what’s in the way of your having what you really, really want?

What are you waiting for?

The tragedy of life is not so much what people suffer, but rather what they miss.—Thomas Carlyle

We are sailors

on a strange dark sea,

Shoving our boarded boats

from shore and sand

into riotous nights

of wind and crashing

thunder.

When all sane men

( could we but be )

at home well covered

in dry warm

beds lie lee.

But here our driven-ness

and our call,

all soaked and thrown and tossed—

Tumbling,

brothered by fear,

lamped by longing—

Find we are

Rowing,

rowing fiercely

towards the darkest center

of the storm.

~Richard Wehrman

Now What?

In answering the questions in the “What Do You Want?” exercise, could you feel the sense of dissatisfaction—right where it lives within your body/mind? Where in your body did you experience the discomfort, ache or blockage?

What did it feel like?

And how did you then—and how do you now—relate to this uncomfortable sensation? Do you hate it, ignore it, push it away, fight it? Or do you move towards it, into it, embrace it, want to know and understand it?

There’s a saying that I often use, “The only way out is through.” Paradoxically, whatever you are looking for in life—whatever the source of your dissatisfaction and suffering may be—it can be found right in the center of the very thing you are avoiding within yourself.

So I’d like to invite you to end the fight within and against yourself and begin the journey homeward—the yellow brick road back home to your true nature—by allowing yourself to begin to move toward this aching and yearning that you have just come into contact with. In truth, the journey back to your true self is accomplished by making direct contact with this inner longing and then simply (but not necessarily easily) surrendering or letting go—with awareness—into the yearning itself.

The journey requires patience, perseverance, determination, courage, self-forgiveness and compassion, discriminating wisdom, willingness, vulnerability, intuition, power and strength—all qualities that paradoxically are further developed in the process of undertaking the journey.

How do we become so emotionally dead that we create all the pain we’ve created for both ourselves and for others? And how can we come back to the life within us so that we can stop creating all this suffering in the world?

Here is how I understand it:

As I previously explained, when we split from our true nature (our wholeness, joy, peace or love), we create an untenable existential angst or despair. The deepest pain we will ever experience is the pain of separating from ourselves. Think of it as falling out of Paradise (our own Garden of Eden). After this come innumerable other painful experiences that are simply too much for us to process. Moving away from this pain creates fear—fear of feeling the pain that has now become trapped inside us, and fear of experiencing yet more pain in the future. When we split from fear, we usually move into anger, which is really one’s pain projected outward, often onto another. And because anger is not generally acceptable in this culture, we move into numbness and emotional deadness. And this is where most people spend the vast majority of their lives.

As in all forms of natural healing, the journey home to our true self usually requires a retracing process—working our way, often step by step (but not necessarily in any particular order), back through the layers of suppression. This often means that a person will start by waking up to the awareness that something is not really right with his or her life. The person feels a growing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. Eventually the frustration evolves into anger. Sometimes the anger becomes great enough that it causes major problems—like losing a job or a relationship. Or there may be the threat—explicit or intuited—of such a loss. Or the anger may be turned against oneself and manifest as depression. At this point, some people will seek help. Unfortunately, most “helpers” seek only to ameliorate the symptoms and never attempt to find the source of the dissatisfaction, where the only true and lasting healing can take place.

If, however, the person is fortunate enough to find a helper who understands the process of deep healing, he or she will be encouraged to gently open into the anger, to see and feel what is underneath or behind it. What’s immediately under the surface of anger is fear. There is really just one fear—the archetypal Fear created by our separation from our true nature—but that Fear becomes attached to many external situations and becomes any number of other smaller fears.

When you can open deeply into those smaller fears, you can feel the pain underneath them and you finally see The Fear. And when you open fully into The Fear, you experience The Pain (of splitting from yourself). This opens you to the deep angst or despair that’s often referred to as the dark night of the soul, which is the doorway back home to yourself.

These stages come up in a very natural unfolding process—each in its own way and time—when you allow yourself to surrender to your deepest yearning. The yearning actually comes from your true nature or wholeness, and it takes you back to your undivided true self. All you have to do is get out of your own way, let go, stay present, and let the yearning do all the work for you.

That said, transformational work is, of course, an individual matter from beginning to end. Though people may have issues and experiences in common, each person comes to the work with a unique situation, with specific wishes for increased well-being and with his or her own (yet-to-be-discovered) natural healing process.

Because of that, there’s no one way or even preferred way to do Heartwork. Yet sometimes people find it helpful to have some idea of where this work may take them and what its potentials are for personal growth. With that in mind, here’s a general overview of how the process generally unfolds:

Acknowledge that you have a problem, or that something is missing in your life, and get clear on what that is.

Take responsibility for changing your life. Become willing and committed to doing whatever it takes to free yourself from suffering.

With the issues of your life as a focus, learn and put into practice your inner working process.

Go through the “swamp” and glimpse freedom.

Develop your own process through experience, determination, patience and confidence.

Open to new awareness of who you are and what life is all about.

Integrate your insights into your everyday life.

In the course of your work,a number of deep issues may surface that will need resolution. You may:

Begin to really feel: open fully to love, joy, sorrow, fear and anger. In the process of socialization, we are taught to suppress our feelings. We become cut off from our feeling nature and often become emotionally paralyzed or dead. In the process of re-accessing our feelings, we need to go through a phase of learning how to express our long-buried emotions. Ultimately, however, when we have created a powerful enough foundation of awareness, we become able to “impress,” rather than suppress or express our feelings. In other words, we can allow ourselves to fully experience the emotion in the moment—by allowing it to energize our life, by inquiring into it as it is happening and by experiencing the transformation of what we usually think of as a negative emotion into a more positive emotion (for example, anger becoming power, fear becoming love and compassion, sorrow and pain becoming beauty and awe).

Reclaim or heal (love, embrace, accept) your inner child: make contact with all parts of the inner child, see the predicaments clearly, allow any unfelt or unacknowledged feelings to surface, and allow the child to finally get what he or she needs (from yourself, primarily, and then from others).

Make peace with your parents: see or feel your parents as they are and/or were, and experience your own related feelings; forgiving your parents and yourself for all the mutual creation of pain; mourn the loss of the perfect, unconditionally loving parents you never had; and, ultimately, become your own wished-for parents and reparent yourself.

Recognize, claim and balance within yourself the masculine and feminine energies.

Open to the animal and elemental aspects of humanness and reconnect with the natural world.

Claim your deepest resources (your gifts to the world) and accept, with lightness, your “foolishness.”

In relationship, become capable of loving and being loved and be open to seeing, feeling and communicating clearly with both yourself and others.

Do transpersonal work: see that you are more than bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings and open to your innate qualities (including awareness, curiosity, love and compassion, wisdom and discrimination, intuition, inspiration and vision, will and willpower, courage, determination, vulnerability, willingness to risk, authenticity, spontaneity and creativity, passion, forgiveness, joy, peace and faith in yourself and in God or the universe).

Do work of a spiritual nature: learn to live in a state of questioning or not-knowing or being; experience your fundamental separation (aloneness, emptiness, nothingness) and open to and move through despair into a state of oneness (undivided and interconnected with all life); facing death (of the ego or “I”, the know), and come to know your true self.

Live responsibly from a place of openness, honesty, integrity and commitment to creating wholeness in yourself, others and the world. Just as in the emotional maturational process of moving from suppressing emotions to expressing and ultimately impressing them, in this stage we grow from being dependent on others to becoming independent and ultimately to realizing our interdependence with all existence.

Along the way, you see clearly that suffering is created by resistance to pain and that the way out is in. By opening into and moving through your blocks, layer after layer, you enter into increasingly open, and decreasingly painful, states of being. Seeing this, you naturally move toward difficulty rather than away from it, and you gradually come to trust your ability to work through any problem that may arise. Life then becomes an adventure to be lived and learned from.

While you ultimately have to do the work for yourself, it is often helpful to work with someone who has “gone before” and who can provide guidance, support and encouragement on the journey. At some point, you outgrow the need to work with a Heartwork facilitator. Although you may at times need assistance in looking into a particularly difficult issue, for the most part you have truly “graduated” and are empowered to create a full and satisfying life.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the “one thing necessary” may be in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.—Thomas Merton

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.

I know, I have been swimming in them.

All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.

I know, I have been crying out to them.

The sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.

I looked through their covers one day sideways.

What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.

If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

~Kabir

Tools for Inner Work

Who so desires the ocean makes light of streams.

~AHMED IBN-AL-HUSAYN AL-MUTANABDI

What follows are a number of options for proceeding further—if you’re willing. Each of the Heartwork processes I describe in this section gives you an opportunity to go all the way into and through the barriers you have created that prevent you from having the life you really, really want. Find the ones that work best for you. But feel free to come back to the others occasionally to see if they might speak more loudly to you in the future.

First-person accounts written by workshop participants and those who have done Heartwork in individual private sessions follow the description of each tool and appear in italics. An asterisk (*) placed after a contributor’s name indicates that the name used is a pseudonym. The experiences people have had using these tools are as varied as the number of people who have used them, and your experience will likewise be uniquely your own. These heartfelt accounts, however, will give you some idea of how meaningful these tools can be in enriching your process and deepening your inner journey.

WARNING: The exercises in this section are designed to help you open your awareness to, and reclaim aspects of, your being that you may have split yourself off from. This opening and reclaiming will enable you to have more access to the full range of human experience. Some of the processes can be emotionally disturbing and painful. If you are currently seeing a mental health professional for psychological or emotional conditions, consult that professional before attempting any of the exercises in this section. If you experience any moderate or severe emotional discomfort in practicing any of these exercises, it is strongly advised that you seek professional guidance from a mental health practitioner before continuing the exercise.

A Simple Death

Secret sorrows of this heart

The truth of my body received

Each cell a journal, pages filled

With experience left to retrieve

And I, the coward, warrior, fool

To hold the only key

Which unlocks all the tendril paths

To my divinity

How deep and bloodied were the ways

I struggled to believe

When now the only solace, a simple death

Is the truth of my body received

Its course uncharted sings me home

I have only to concede

My fear and anguish, trust and follow

The truth of my body to be freed.

~Hallie Sawyers

Unwinding

Within this fathomlong body is found all the teachings, is found suffering, the cause of suffering, and the end of suffering. ~Buddha

Unwinding is what your cat or dog does when it has too much tension in its body. Pets stretch, growl, snarl, meow—whatever they need to do to release the tension they are holding—and all unselfconsciously. We, too, inhabit animal bodies that know what they need to do to release tension. All you have to do is to get out of the way and allow your body to let go: stretch, moan, groan, cry, wail, scream, shout, yawn. Unwinding is a skill that needs to be relearned. We knew how to do it when we were little, but as we got older we outgrew it (we were told, in one way or another, that it was unacceptable behavior). The sound tracks that comes with the book contains two pieces of music composed specifically for Unwinding by Todd Carter. So put them on, simply feel into your deepest yearning (what you really, really want), and just give your body permission to let go. This relearning may take some practice, but it is well worth it.

My body knows how. All I have to do is just stay with myself; stay with the organic process of what is unwinding out of me. But I sour overnight like milk left out and forgotten. I wake in the dark and a feeling of being utterly lost and alone engulfs every cell. I stave it off and try to slip back into sleep. So the feeling builds and waits for me. There is a moment each morning before I open my eyes when it strikes at every facet of the tendermost me. I come to consciousness writhing and twisting away from this familiar pain.

I lie to myself about it. Not so hard. Not so bad. Not so awful. And so I get up laying lie upon lie over this fire burning in my gut, in my heart, in my soul. Hoping to extinguish it. Bargaining at least to deaden it. Knowing. Knowing the quicksilver pulse of my life beats deep within this pain and unwilling to brave the flames to save myself.

I see my feet in wool socks crossing the kitchen floor. I hear the faraway sound they make from my perch atop the pillar of lies I use to stamp out this fire. I eat. I drink. Everything goes into my mouth with an eye toward killing this pain. Then the pain, not to be outdone, emits a siren call, ransacking the stored emotion inscribed in each cell of my body for reinforcement. And my thoughts turn unbidden to specific hardship. Always something I’ve done to irrevocably hurt. Carved in ready detail, this hurt pushes to the surface of my consciousness to feed the painfire.

I turn from it, averting my eyes from the catastrophe of me. “I’ll get back to ya.” “Perhaps another time.” The liar bargaining her way out of conversation, out of the hearts of those she loves the most in order to avoid the emptiness consuming her.

Yet this pain is patient. It abides. And something in the way that it waits cuts through all the armor I’ve built to shield myself. It waits for me like no one has ever waited. Honor-bound to see me through, it waits for me like I long to be waited for.

The longing becomes the edge that splits me open to this pain. I let it have me. Finding the floor. Falling. Rending. Splitting from all that I know, an eerie sound is born deep inside this vortex—my own voice, honed by a lifetime of longing, keening the loss of me. Wolves calling the moon.

Unwinding with this sound comes the familiar face of my longing: the victim. And this time I am not her. I see that no crevice of her pain has gone unplumbed. She’s worn out from the ways I’ve used her, prostituted her pain for an answer to this longing. She wails, “You’ll never stop!” and the man I’ve blamed all my life for this pain appears.

I see my father from the back. He turns and wears my own face. I am this, too. I know now. I AM THIS, TOO. The boundary of my skin won’t contain me anymore, won’t contain this revelation. My mouth stretches to howl unspeakable words. In my voice is a self unfurling itself; sound birthing me home into the heart of the need that rules me. The need that owns me. The need that feeds the pain of both abuser and abused.

Its tide rips out the timeworn markers of all the falsehoods I’ve used to hold it back: Healer in the name of solving my own pain; giver in the name of filling my own need; liar in the name of protecting the emptiness that steers everything I do. I let the unsolvable mystery at the heart of this pain claim me. I hear my voice, only vowel-round: IYEEE…IYEEE…IYEEE. I NEED…I NEED…I NEED.

All I know is need. I am need embodied. In this single moment I see across the ocean of time and choice that have come together, bringing me here, midwife to the need I can no longer hold back; mother to the orphaned child alive within me; owner of the first hurt and author of all the rest.

Shining, whole, honor-bound, somewhere from the depths of me comes my pain transformed. In bearing the depth of my own anguish is born another self. Within my hands, my arms, within all of who I am there is a solace that would cradle the world. I see my truth in liar’s rags and love the broken-whole of me. I am gathered in my own arms. The need I thought would kill me is answered and I sleep. ~Elizabeth Soto*

I see Unwinding as a journey that I have forgotten but my body has not. I use this exercise to tune into my body’s wisdom, turning down the noise in my mind so I don’t hear its chatter and my body is better able to communicate with me. My eyes close, my body moves and does whatever it wants. At some point, I experience a knowing, and my body unfolds its wisdom.

I had a particularly extraordinary spiritual experience with Unwinding one morning at a Heartwork seminar. The Unwinding started my process of seeing all that I AM. I asked God that I may see from my eyes and not just feel and know. God replied that I see from my soul. Knowing this was the truth, and knowing that I am the truth, I started to cry.

This knowingness intensified in my heart and soul, and in that moment my son’s spirit spoke to me from that place. “Mommy, remember who you are,” he said. “I know who you are.” My son then took me by the hand and touched my heart and soul through the truth of his soul. Wisdom came. He then said, “Let everyone know here that words are very powerful and whatever you say and do to the children, we feel it to the core of our being: good or bad—so remember.”

I recalled doing some earlier work when I learned that the part of me who is a defiant angry child would not allow me to take in the love and abundance that God gives so freely. I felt so unsafe while I was growing up and the knowing I had at that time was so scary that I stopped remembering who I was. It wasn’t safe then, I realized, but it is now.

I continued to unwind into my heart and soul, with my son teaching me to remember through his heart and soul and to accept this with great joy and love. I accepted who I was and that I was free to be all that I came here to be. This knowing filled my entire being, and as I felt the presence of God’s love, my son said, “I will always be in your heart, Mommy.” He kissed my heart and soul with the love God gave him to give.

I allowed this to fill my entire being, and it’s still there. I take it in whenever I am in need of it. My son will be going off to college in the next few months, and I am so grateful that I have that special moment that will last for a lifetime. After this meditation experience, I can let go and let my son live the life that he came here to live. I can do this with no controlling, just allowing the will of God to take care of all his needs—and mine at the same time.

~Margie Mensik

Beloved,

presence of being,

every sound

the call of your voice;

every sight,

the beauty of your

incomparable body,

Every touch, every breeze, every blow

your caress upon my hand.

All of you, here.

Giving yourself completely, absolutely.

Arm in arm,

the mirror and the merged,

together we sip

the deep red honey wine of union,

only to discover—

we have wed not only each other

but the whole wide world.

~Richard Wehrman

Soft Body Meditation

The Soft Body Meditation (which you will find here A guided “soft-body” meditation ) dissolves the sense of a separate self by opening you to your inherent vulnerability. As we grow up we learn to wall off experiences from our consciousness that are too painful to deal with, thinking that if we can keep them behind a strong barricade we will never have to feel them. But this is just wishful thinking. The truth is that when we wall things off from our consciousness, we don’t really lock them out—we lock them in! They eat away at us from the inside until something eventually breaks (and in this culture, it’s usually our bodies). The only true invulnerability is total vulnerability! If we are willing to completely experience the pain or fear created by life’s inevitabilities, we don’t get stuck anywhere. We can then feel them fully and let go of them. There is no residue, no accumulation of tension-creating, dis-ease-producing toxic emotional baggage. The Soft Body Meditation allows us to open the body gently and gradually, to allow the armoring to dissolve and the heart and mind to open.

Please note: When working with the experiential exercises that are included by clicking on the following links, it is best to keep one finger on the “Play” and “Pause” so that you can determine the pace at which you go through the steps of the exercises.

Dale’s introduction to the book (1.6 mb)
A guided “soft-body” meditation (13 mb)
“Guided Heartwork” (18.2 mb)
Awareness meditation (13.5 mb)
Unwinding Beginning (24.02 mb)
Unwinding Dawn (12.12 mb)

I have been an anxious person for as long as I can remember. My anxiety affects every aspect of my life, and I am always reminded of its presence. Oddly enough, in the present moment, I am not anxious—I am only anxious once I think about what could happen, even if it’s improbable. So staying in the present moment has become valuable to me, and I use the Soft Body meditation to help me do this.

The first time I tried Soft Body, I could feel my thoughts resisting. As a person who has a hard time staying present, I also have a hard time keeping still. In really focusing on my body and giving it the time and energy it deserves, I realized this was something I had not yet done in my life. My body had been sorely neglected! Sure, I had tended to headaches and similar pains, but when the body is really aching in this way, it means we have ignored it far too long. I had to concentrate on clearing my mind of any thoughts other than receiving the sensations my body was experiencing in each moment. Immediately, I realized that not only was I experiencing a different sensation in every moment, but that in order to fully experience each sensation, I had to let go of the previous sensation. The experience I remember most clearly was this one:

I am lying down, giving full attention to my body and all the energy and sensations within it. I start with the top of my head and listen to hear if that part of my body is trying to tell me something. I am not listening with my ears; I am listening with a part of my conscious self that is deeper than the part whose thoughts easily wander. I pay full attention to what the top of my head is feeling, and I notice that it itches. I don’t reach up to scratch it, but I focus on the itch in the moment and give it the attention it needs. Within moments the feeling disappears and I am ready to move on down my body.

I go from body part to body part, letting go completely of the previous part and giving my total attention to the part I am currently focusing on. As I sweep down my body, I notice different sensations: itchiness, tingling, a feeling of heaviness, a feeling of lightness. I concentrate on each sensation and then let go of it. When I arrive at my lower abdomen, I start to experience pain. I begin to sense that most of my anxiety resides in this part of my body and it will require more time.

As I focus on the physical pain, I slowly begin to experience emotional pain. Concentrating on the emotional pain, I sense that what I am feeling is not pain at all—it is fear. I cannot describe this fear. I do not try at this point to analyze what the fear is or where it comes from. All I am aware of at the moment is that a fear resides in this place within me and I have to find some way to let it go because I have no reason to hold onto it. I start to let out a sound, which gets louder and louder as I “exhale” the fear from my body. The pain begins to subside, and when it is gone, I find myself laughing uncontrollably.

Looking back, I think I was laughing because of the relief I felt in being able to let go of the fear in such a powerful way. I learned that day that our emotions find places in our bodies to live, and that they have a way of taking over our bodies if we let them. As a whole, we are more powerful than the emotions that reside in us. We can manifest peace within ourselves, but only when we feel our emotions in the present moment—and then let them go.

~Ariane Baer

In the Soft Body meditation, my whole body opens to possibility. Answers come for me in the form of heightened full-body physical perceptions. They are like trips into sacred metaphors, and they are real. After the second Heartwork event I attended, while camping by myself, I did Soft Body in my tent every day. I became much more able to sense my surroundings, feeling no separation between me and the sounds of the birds and the wind. In one meditation, I could feel the breeze blow right through me. I could feel every single tiny bone in my hands and feet, as if I were a bird. I could sense the interconnectedness of my bones and my breath, my organs and my flesh.

When I practiced Soft Body in an “I and Thou” Heartwork retreat, I had visions that were incredibly healing for my sense of myself as a woman and my empowerment as a female. As I softened into the sensations of my body, I became a mother wolf, fangs and all. I was a life-giving nurturer but also a fierce protectress.

As I traveled down my body, I felt a powerful, grounding energy growing around me, like vines and tree roots taking hold. Vines wrapped me—not in a threatening way, but as if they were holding me securely. And then a tree-like arm, like the arm of God, began to grow through me. With this upward, surging will to live and to connect with the sky, the arm entered at the base of my spine, grew the length of my vertebrae, through my chest, through my throat and mouth and then, with strong but kind root-like fingers, it reached out through my mouth and embraced my face, cradling it.

I practice a form of yoga that channels energy up the spine using a series of energy loops. With Soft Body, I can feel that channel and the interconnectedness of all the energy loops more profoundly than I had ever felt them before. Soft Body also helped me feel space in my torso in places that I’ve typically had a hard time breathing into because of my scoliosis (a curvature of the spine). I am now bringing more breath to more of my rib cage, front and back. My spine seems to be following the force of the upward thrust of the root, organically unwinding, untwisting, opening. Because I feel my face is cradled, I open up to feeling the whole back of my skull more, and I can breathe more into the back of my body. When I am tuned into this arm/root meditation, it is impossible for me to abandon myself or to unconsciously evaluate myself from the outside. I am at home. I am moving with prana (vital life force)! It’s amazing!

~Kirsche Dickson

You will not exhaust

the love in the universe

if you were to absorb it

from now until the end of time.

Love is all that exists.

Love is the universal communication.

It is the energy that has created the

universe and is keeping it going.

God is Love.

All matter is formed by love.

There is an organic love

that speaks to everyone

if they could but hear.

A leaf holds together for love.

Love can turn the world around

and it does.

What did you think was spinning your planet

if it wasn’t love

and what do you think the fires of your sun consist of

and the cells of your body

and the stars in your sky

and the consciousness in your heart?

It is all love.

There is nothing but love.

Don’t let the masks and postures fool you.

Love is the glue

that holds the Universe together.

The greatest need in a soul

is to achieve that loving of self

which will bring about the unity

wherein the judgments

that have caused such pain

are eliminated.

~Emmanuel’s Book

Just Listening

Perhaps the greatest, most healing gift we can give each other is unconditional presence. One way of working with the emotional material that is released through the previous exercises is a tool called “Just Listening.” This exercise creates a spiritual and emotional environment wherein one person can unburden his or her soul in the sacred space provided by the other’s love and compassionate listening. It is one of the best tools I know for opening to and moving through the deep emotional material that prevents you from having what you really, really want. If used regularly (at least weekly), it will transform your life.

As with the previous exercises, Just Listening is fundamentally a very simple tool. At the same time, it is usually the tool most people have the most difficulty in really getting. It is best by far to practice it with a partner, but you can also do it alone. The goal of Just Listening is simply to let go as deeply as possible into your feelings around whatever issue has come up. While the technique is very simple and straightforward, it is very easy to get sidetracked by expressing thoughts about the issue instead of feelings. This is where most people go “wrong” in using this tool. It often takes people a number of tries before they master this exercise. The instructions below are for doing Just Listening with a partner.

Physically create a sacred space (one that feels comfortable, safe and private) and set aside at least four hours so the two of you can be completely undisturbed.

Partner A lies down (experiment with the position that allows for the greatest ease of opening). Partner B sits next to Partner A, without touching or looking at A, unless A requests it.

Partner A expresses any and all feelings that need to come out, not holding back anything, regardless of content or intensity. Partner A allows this releasing process to unfold until he or she feels absolutely complete.

4. During this process, Partner B just listens. Just listening means hearing Partner A’s words and feeling the feelings along with A. If A is expressing difficult feelings toward or about B, then B listens as if A was talking about someone else and is just there for A. B does not spend even one second preparing a defense or a rebuttal of A’s expression of feelings. This exercise is absolutely not about being right. It is about getting to the heart of the matter (the long suppressed feelings and the beliefs that formed out of them) for each individual. Partner B provides the safety of a compassionate external witness to allow Partner A to explore the uncharted and oftentimes frightening territory within. The only time B may say anything during this time is to remind A that he or she is exploring feelings, not thoughts. One possible way this can be accomplished is for B to gently say to A, “That’s a thought, not a feeling. What are you feeling?” This is the only thing B may say to A, uninvited. B may also not touch or even look at A unless invited to do so by A. This ensures that A’s space will not be violated and makes it safe for A to get as vulnerable as possible in order to go all the way into his or her feelings.

When partner A is done, A and B switch places and roles. Partner B now has an opportunity to explore and express his or her feelings.

When Partner B feels complete, A may have another turn.

When A is done, B may have a second turn.

This going back and forth between A and B continues until both feel satisfied that they have done all they can do for this time.

The Just Listening exercise we learned at the “I and Thou” retreat this weekend was absolutely amazing. I found that after almost seven years with my partner, I actually heard him for the first time. The exercise was to just listen to my partner for ten minutes without facial expressions or feedback of any kind. As I sat and listened to him describe an argument we recently had, I was initially desperate to refute the things he was saying and defend myself against what I perceived to be an attack on something I had said that was, in my mind, “obviously” misinterpreted. I was angry and kept having to come back into presence and remind myself that I was there to listen and hear rather than interrupt and attack. As I continued to listen to him recount the argument, I began to soften and open. I was able to actually hear the words he was saying and feel how they affected him. By being present, my ego wasn’t in control and therefore I didn’t feel the need to belie the words being said. I could actually hear his truth about what had happened. When the ten minutes was over, I was able to respond with kindness and love to a situation that had previously been caustic and inflammatory. We were able to see for the first time how we repeatedly transform into five-year-old children when we have a disagreement. The exercise was so revealing. It really helped me feel connected to my partner in a way I truly never have before. We’ve committed to using this wonderfully powerful tool weekly to continue the work we did at the retreat. This has literally changed our lives.

~Traci Noge

In the Just Listening exercise, I decided to look into feelings of anger that I had toward my son for sexually violating my daughter, his half-sister, who was not quite three years old at the time. The incident had happened about three years previously, when my son was 14. This was a fearful and uncertain place for me to explore because I had a lot of guilt about the degree of hatred that I felt for my own son. But in the safety of the retreat and with the support of my partner, I was able to fully let go into my extreme anger.

I felt it with my whole body and raged with as much force as I could muster. I got in touch with a savage, primal place that wanted blood—and a lot of it. The more gruesome, the better. I wanted to kill my own son for what he had done to my daughter. I became the beast and let the anger consume me and express itself through me for about 15 or 20 minutes, until I was spent. The anger then gave way to tears coming from a place deep inside, as well as feelings of forgiveness.

That I had wanted to kill my own son was a hard truth to own. But it was my truth, and now that I have let it live, I can love my son even more. As Dale says, I can stop killing him in all the subtle ways I had been doing. I can now nurture and bless him in whatever he wants to be.

~David Andersen*

Today we went and did Just Listening. I went into deep grief about our little unborn girl and how after five months when we found out I was carrying a boy after all, I had to bury the idea of having a daughter. I expressed my deepest, most inner thoughts and feelings and how I miss her in my life every single day. I shared the deep sense of loss I feel resenting, ignoring and carrying this huge coffin around with me all the time. We both said a little prayer for our little girl, the idea of my little girl who lived so alive in my heart and in my belly for five months. And then she died, and I had to bury that idea of her alone because Philip was elsewhere, otherwise engaged. I felt as if a part of me died when I buried her.

I said I still grieve her because lying right next to her in that coffin is my inner lost little girl. I grieve for all the lost pink in my life, all the choo-choos and the manicures never shared. I grieve the loss of being there watching her face fall in love for the first time, being there when she gets her first period, brushing her silky dark hair, and reading her Sleeping Beauty at night. I spoke of how Philip left me standing alone in the rain at her funeral. I shared all of it—including my inability to even look at a girl’s clothing shop. All

the hurt, all the pain that lives and breathes in me. Two little girls wrapped as one. My two losses.

Philip was totally with me and I know that he felt my pain very deeply. I was not asking him to fix it for me, just to know that our little girl had a name and that she was beautiful. And that I can see her little face smiling at me and sometimes I hear her whisper, “Wait, just wait.” But maybe that’s in my dreams alone. Our closeness was magnificent. Our intimacy was pure. And after all the resistance I had felt, my feelings now overflowed and I started to feel me in me.

~Donna Berber

Guided Heartwork

The “Guided Heartwork” track gives you an opportunity to directly experience the “classical” Heartwork process of surrendering into and through layer after layer of your false self until you arrive back in your true home. You can do this exercise alone or with another person facilitating your process. In working with a facilitator, you may choose either to share your work or to work entirely internally, signaling the facilitator (with a pre-arranged signal) when you are ready to go on to the next step in the Heartwork process. Please refer to “Facilitator’s Role” at the end of this section for suggestions about working with a facilitator.

The Heartwork process enables you to find your own unique way of looking into yourself. The following sequence, while representative of the stages that generally unfold during the course of a Heartwork session, may vary from person to person:

Getting Comfortable: In doing Heartwork, it is very important that you are physically comfortable. Being able to forget about your body as much as possible will allow you to focus all your attention on your internal process.

First, make any necessary adjustments in your environment. Where in the room would you be most comfortable? Where do you want your facilitator to be in relation to you, and in what bodily position? (It must be one that the facilitator is comfortable with.) If the room is too warm or too cool for your maximum comfort, adjust the temperature. If the room is too bright or dark, change the lighting. Adjust anything that interferes with your maximum physical comfort.

Now find the most comfortable position for your body. You may be most comfortable sitting erect, slouching, lying down (on your back, side or stomach) or in some other position. Ask your body what position it would most like to be in right now, and assume that position.

Settling In: Now close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and allow yourself to relax as much as possible. If you have difficulty letting go of some of the surface tensions, just watch your breath come in and go out for a few minutes until you feel as relaxed as you can be at this time.

In the Heartwork you are about to do, it is very helpful to adopt an open, friendly, curious attitude towards whatever you encounter on your inward journey. This welcoming attitude will allow you to “witness” your process non-judgmentally, making it easier to see whatever is there because you have a more aware and less “attached” mind-state.

Defining the Problem: Now define your problem as clearly and concisely as possible. Or ask yourself, “What is it I would like to change as a result of doing this process?” If you enter into the Guided Heartwork process with no clearly defined issue, you can simply ask yourself, “Of all the issues that are present in my life, which one most needs my attention right now?” and allow the issue needing attention to choose itself by coming to the foreground. Another way to do this step is to ask, “If I had encountered a genie who was willing to grant me one wish, what would that wish be?” If some problem other than the one you had intended to work on demands your attention, even if it seems irrelevant to the original problem, trust it and go with that issue.

Locating the Problem: In the witness state of mind, now look around in your body to find the area where the problem is centered—experienced as blocked energy, stress, anxiety, tension or pain. (“Body” refers to that place where you experience not only physical sensations, but also senses in a more subtle way.) Notice how deep inside your body it sits. You can work with thoughts or mental metaphors, sensations, feelings or visual images in this process.

Clarifying: Keeping your attention focused in this inner feeling-space, describe in as much detail as possible what you experience here. If you have difficulty getting in touch with what is happening in this place, you may find it helpful to ask curious questions, such as: How big is it? What’s its shape? What color is it? What is it made of? What is the texture of its surface? What does it smell like? What is the feel of this thing? What’s it like? What would this part of me say if it could talk? Vivid visual imagery, memories and intense feelings often arise at this stage of the inward-looking process.

Focusing: Now slowly and carefully move your awareness toward and ultimately into the very center, or point of greatest intensity, of this feeling-space. You may find it helpful to follow these steps:

Start by allowing your awareness to get close enough to the feeling-space to be able to experience the energy coming out of it. (Kind of like feeling the heat a hot stove gives off when you walk past it.) What is emanating from this place inside you that you have spent most of your life avoiding?

Then make direct contact with the “surface” of the space. Can you get close enough to this thing inside yourself to actually “touch” the surface of it with your awareness? What is it like? How does it feel?

Then “move” into the surface layer. Can you find a way to get inside it, to become one with it, to experience what this surface layer that splits you in two is like from the inside? See if you can determine exactly what it is made of. Take your time so you can experience every step of this most incredible journey. In so doing, you will begin to see exactly how you work and who you really are—beyond all your ideas, beliefs and images of who or what you thought you were.

Then move through this layer into the interior while still being in contact with the surface (only now from the inside). What is it like to be inside it? How does it feel? What do you sense in this space? Rest here for a few minutes and let yourself be. Let whatever wants to come into your consciousness arise—thoughts, feelings, images, memories or sensations.

Allow yourself next to let go of your grip on the surface layer and let yourself be drawn inwards, downwards, towards the center or bottom or other end of this yearning space—much like a magnet would draw you toward something. Let yourself go—slowly and with great awareness, allowing whatever wants to be revealed to you to come into consciousness.

Penetrating: As you move inward, you may become aware of reluctance, resistance, hesitation or fear that prevents you from entering into the next space. Work with each barrier that you encounter, gradually softening into the resistance. Or you may find a different way to get through the barrier, such as plunging into it, embracing it, merging with it, being filled by it, looking directly at or into it, caring about or surrendering to it. Ultimately, it makes no difference what means you use; the moment you make the decision to face the barrier directly, the barrier begins to open by itself.

And by the way, don’t assume extensive spiritual practice or years in therapy are prerequisites. Sometimes people who have never done a stitch of inner work in their lives come all the way home in one session. And sometimes those with the most experience have the most difficulty because they think they know what to do. As in all things, it is helpful to avoid expectations as much as possible.

Keep letting go, through layer after layer, until you get all the way to the center, bottom, end or other side of the inner space, or until you have gone as far as you feel you can go at this time.

Discovery: When you pass through this last barrier, you will usually enter into a wide-open space—experiencing a deep sense of peace, wholeness and oneness with the universe. Once you arrive here, or when you have gone as far as you can, rest in this space for a while. Remember what you went through to get here, so that you can find your way back whenever you want.

Look back at where you began this journey. Start with the problem you wished to change, as you originally defined it, and see how the work you have done relates to that problem. See how you created the suffering for yourself—how you moved out of this place of wholeness, connectedness and peace, how you forgot your deepest truth and how you became lost in fear, confusion and delusion. How can you relate differently to this problem when it arises in the future? Let yourself know that you can always return to this place whenever you are willing and that you can take however long it takes to come back again.

Re-entry: Now check to see if you wish to go further in the process of opening more deeply into the center of the problem. If you do, repeat any of the previous steps that would take you deeper, and continue the process until you are totally satisfied that you have gone as far as you can for now.

Closure: Do you feel complete? If not, take the time to say, feel or do whatever you

need to in order to complete this experience. You may need to express feelings, integrate and assimilate insights or simply remain quiet.

Facilitator’s Role:

The most important aspect of the facilitator’s role is the creation of a safe space in which the person doing the exercise may look inward. To best facilitate the work, it is important that facilitators:

Maintain a nonjudgmental attitude. This means valuing equally every aspect of the other person’s work and being and placing no expectations or demands on the person to do something that he or she is unwilling or disinclined to do.

Clearly convey to the person doing the work that he or she is in complete control of the entire process from beginning to end, including setting the pace, determining the timing and direction the work takes, and deciding when the work has gone far enough for a particular time.

Communicate caring by being totally attentive to what the person doing the work is experiencing in the moment. This means temporarily shelving the intellect, which analyzes, labels and compartmentalizes what it perceives. Occasionally, the facilitator may (with the person’s permission or requesting) support, encourage and add energy to the other person’s work by placing his or her hand(s) on the area(s) of the person’s body where the attention is being focused.

Be creative and keep the process moving. Engaging intuition, the facilitator balances probing with silence in moving with the other person toward the center of his or her experience. The degree to which the facilitator is in touch with the center of his or her own being is the degree to which the facilitator is able to guide the person to his or her center.

Maintain an awareness that the thoughts, feelings and sensations that arise are not who we really are. Remaining fully attentive, but not attached to the content, the facilitator communicates to the other person that it is possible to look at and be with what is happening without being overwhelmed.

Be willing to be “real” with the other person—that is, to acknowledge one’s own humanity and refrain from creating an illusion of perfection. The facilitator needs to be willing to admit to, and openly deal with, the “mistakes” generated by his or her own shortcomings. When a facilitator pretends omniscience and sets himself or herself above the other person (even when the facilitator is a professional counselor and the other person is a client), the facilitator reinforces any sense of powerlessness and low self-esteem that the other person may already have.

Sometimes it is helpful for the facilitator to share some of his or her own growth process. If, in the name of “professional distance,” a counselor is unwilling to experience with a client the common humanity they share, both are robbed of the opportunity to share compassion(which means, literally, “to have passion with”).

Be aware that the facilitator is, at best, a catalyst for the other person’s self-healing. In fact, one benefit of Heartwork is that it is reciprocal—providing both the facilitator and the person doing the exercise equal opportunity for looking inward.

Of the many sessions of Guided Heartwork I’ve done, one stands out above the rest for its intensity, clarity, and healing. It occurred during an eight-day retreat, an opportunity to really let go. I attribute the success of this experience to the group energy and the total commitment of my partner to my healing, which struck me at the time as being greater than my own commitment.

For the previous year or so, I had been bothered by chronic hip and pelvic pain, so that’s what I decided to look into. As I lay on the floor and closed my eyes, I sank into the feeling and tried to visualize the pain in my pelvic region. Almost immediately, I saw in my mind’s eye a vivid image of a medieval-looking, gray, metal, mace-type object, covered with spikes. It was elongated, more gourd-like or phallic-shaped. The first hit that I got was that it was not mine. I at once knew that it was the image my mother carried of me while I was in her womb, an image I had in a sense inherited it from her. This made perfect sense to me because years before, a deep knowing had come to me that the great sadness overriding every aspect of my mother’s being was that she was a lesbian and had kept it hidden all her life. She never allowed herself to be who she truly was. As a result, she was the saddest person I have ever known. On some level I believe she hated men, in fact hated me, and did not want a male child growing inside her. This rejection might have been why I was born two months prematurely. Or perhaps I had sensed the rejection and did not want to be inside her and so caused my own early birth. In any case, this mace-like object was the image she carried during her pregnancy and that she then unintentionally transferred to me. I have carried it in my own way as a feeling of guilt for being male and also of shame about any expression of healthy male power and sexuality.

During the session, I next spoke directly to my mother, who was no longer alive, boldly saying, ”Yes, I can be the most evil, destructive force imaginable. Don’t fuck with me. But I am also a gentle, vulnerable and beautiful man.”

A coughing fit then overcame me and I felt the image move up into my chest where I visualized it as a massive constriction made of concrete. I then remembered how a friend had recently told me what a sensitive and gentle person I was and that I must have gotten it from somewhere. The realization then came that this mass in my chest related to my father, and it was all the gentleness, vulnerability, and creativity that he never expressed through his entire lifetime. I grieved this and wept deeply both for him and for myself, and I forgave him.

I see what came to me during this session as “authentic” knowledge—information directly from the source and so deep that it is certain. I know these to be my truths, and they came from looking directly into my own being, with my body leading the way.

I was astonished at the speed at which this session developed. At times the flood of information was almost too much to keep track of. (Previous sessions of Guided Heartwork had progressed at a more gradual pace as I worked through layers to examine what was at the core.) As a result of this session, I was immediately freed of my pelvic pain, and it has not returned in the two years since.

~Alex Brand

I did a guided Heartwork session about losing my power and how that seemed to manifest in a large gray matter within myself. It was like a lump of cement that was connected to work and self-love. When I got in touch with it, I saw that the gray lump was my deadness, and that it is an integral part of me that comes and goes. I realized that my deadness is alive in me. It approaches me with tenderness, real tenderness, and it opens me up, rather than pushing me and shutting me down. If I don’t ever feel dead, then how could I ever know what it feels like to be alive?

~Donna Berber

Where Have I Been?

Walking the garden

Slowly, consciously

Tasting the air,

Seeing the plants and trees,

Flowers and pathways,

Listening to music.

The babbling brook catches my eye.

I stop to listen to its music

And then sit on a rock,

Still, quiet, alone.

The constant flow and sound of the water,

The soothing distinctive sound.

It’s here, each day, all day.

Yet this is a special and rare moment.

I just need to stop and notice,

Allow it all in,

And be soothed and filled.

Where have I been?

In the kitchen,

The evening meal.

The smells and the colors.

Peas and carrots offer vivid greens and oranges,

The vibrant simplicity of nature.

Rich, red, plump strawberries.

In that moment, their taste takes me back

To strawberry fields in a far away place

So distant that I had forgotten.

Bending, picking, packing, eating.

Where have I been?

The stars glisten tonight

Among the wispy clouds

In the magnificent night sky.

Stopping, looking, noticing,

I lean back, shouting aloud,

“Magnificent beauty!”

As if seeing it for the first time.

Where have I been?

The face of my bride

Twenty years later,

Soft skin, tender eyes, beautiful smile.

Reaching out for a gentle caress

As we did when we were dating.

Seeing, really seeing, each other.

A tingle in our touch.

How blessed we are to feel this way.

I think of the days

When I’ve looked and not seen,

Listened and not heard.

And now, as I absorb her beauty,

I wonder

Where have I been?

~Philip

Awareness Meditation

The Awareness meditation track teaches you to be present with your immediate experience in the moment—to open to the sensations, sounds, images, feelings and thoughts within your field of awareness in each moment—moment after moment after moment. This process strengthens your ability to face the difficult things you encounter on the journey inward; opens the mind to presence (pure awareness) and loosens the ego’s attachment to thoughts, feelings and sensations by shifting one’s identification from the ego to awareness. It dissolves the sense of a self that is separate from the world and creates a sense of inner spaciousness large enough to fully experience each and every experience as it happens, thereby ending the need to repress intense emotional events.

The Soft Body and Awareness Meditations are the two principal meditations that support the Heartwork process—in fact, they are the process. They are most effective when practiced together and, once mastered, can be practiced throughout the day. You can continually return to these two processes, checking in with yourself to see if you are present to sensations, sounds, images, feelings and thoughts and simultaneously letting go of any holding in the body. Practiced together faithfully, these two meditations will transform your life—guaranteed!

The worn shoes

rest on the doorway,

leather cracked and stained.

A thousand miles of wandering

has molded them to the shape

of your feet.

But now

you’ve stepped inside,

removed your socks,

and feel the yellow sunlight,

warm on the polished wood floor.

Wherever you walk now,

you are in your own body.

And whether on green grass

or sharp gravel,

Nothing stands now

between you and

the whole wide world.

—Richard Wehrman

Awareness Meditation used to be difficult for me. Every time I did it, I’d think, “I can’t do this. This is not working for me.” I was sure my thoughts were too diffuse and frenetic or too vague and persistent for me to focus my mind on a part of my body. But what I have learned is that struggling against your thoughts doesn’t do much. Letting them scatter and veer around is OK, as long as one thought (I imagine it as my breath sometimes or one part of my body, like my hands) has a single focus. Eventually then, it clicks and I’m present with myself. It may just last ten seconds or maybe even two minutes. There may even be some flare-ups of wayward thoughts here and there. But once I’ve experienced my body’s calm and focus, any wayward thought seems less like a challenge and more like a passing train—you hear it, and its sound is almost calming. And then it’s gone.

~Chidsey Dickson

In the Awareness Meditation, I reached the spaciousness. I felt like an astronaut floating in the vastness of space, able to do flips and freely float. Then Dale asked us to see our thoughts. I could see them, but I let them pass by. He then asked us to attach ourselves to thoughts, good and bad, to see and feel what happens. I noticed that whenever I did that, walls would come down around the thought to enclose it and I would go from this vast, boundless world to a constrained and bounded one. I noticed that the “walls” were my beliefs, prejudices, and feelings related to and attached to that thought. It happened with every thought I attached to—good or bad. When I attached to an anxious thought, I could feel my body tense up as if getting ready to defend itself. I could see how these barriers constrained me from seeing the truth as they tried to project their perception of the truth on me without allowing open assessment of what may or may not be different.

After the exercise, we discussed our experience with our partners. I expressed my concern to Karen that absolutely every thought I attached to was bounded by these walls and that I was afraid that it wasn’t something that we could change. Within a few minutes, Karen said something to me that would normally make me defensive. But I was open and didn’t take her comments as personal affronts. Instead, I heard what she said as statements coming from someone who was trying to understand more so she could learn. In that moment, I realized that we can indeed separate from thoughts without creating these barriers made of our limiting beliefs. I realized that the reason these thoughts had the barriers was that they were each from a past state of unconscious reaction, but when I could operate in a fully conscious judgment-free mode, as I was then, there were no barriers. It was incredibly enlightening.

~Brian William*

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

It makes a sound like AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It feels like silence and space

A place where I can hear again

Where the longing simply is

And the thread is like gravity itself

Drawing and pulling inward effortlessly

A tear and a smile

A tender calling

Into grace

Falling

Into the arms

Of the one

Who is always there

A silent cry explodes within my soul

As my knees bend into majestic mercy

For the LOVE that is always present

~Donna Berber

Inquiry

Inquiry is a dynamic, open-ended exploration into the immediacy of our experience to more deeply understand the mystery of who and what we truly are. The practice is based on a simple but profound principle: being freely reveals itself to anyone who loves to know the truth of reality and is willing to wholeheartedly surrender to not-knowing and remain open to and curious about truth. To paraphrase George Washington Carver’s reply upon being asked how he discovered the thousands of uses for the lowly peanut, if you love something deeply enough, it will reveal all its secrets.

In Inquiry, one brings together all the qualities necessary for deep understanding and transformation developed through working with the previous tools:

the gentleness, vulnerability, surrender, sensitivity and unconditional love developed in Unwinding and Soft Body Meditation

the interest, curiosity, need to understand, commitment to truth, focus, strength, courage, willingness and deep intimacy developed in Guided Heartwork

the steadfastness, witnessing, presence, openness, spaciousness, awareness and immediacy developed in the Awareness Meditation

The purpose of Inquiry is to see as deeply as possible into the truth of an issue. Inquiry requires—and develops—both a profound openness as well as a laser-like ability to focus your awareness. Without the openness, what you are inquiring into will not reveal itself. Unless it knows it’s going to be received openly, it will remain unconscious, behind the wall you built to protect yourself from it. The intensity of your focused awareness needs to be equal to or greater than the intensity of the wall. These two qualities—openness and focus—must be accessed together if you are to see deeply into the source of the issue. It’s as if you are patiently, persistently and determinedly boring into an issue with a laser beam of “What is this?” and receiving whatever is uncovered or revealed with the tender loving care you would have for your own child if he or she was experiencing what you are opening to—even though what you are opening to may not necessarily be gentle and loving.

You need to develop awareness so that you can stay present to the big picture (spacious, non-discriminating awareness) and simultaneously discriminate the parts (what you are inquiring into) from the whole—much like looking at something in the dark with both a searchlight and a spotlight operating together. If you lose the big picture of presence or pure awareness, you will not be able to inquire deeply into the heart of the matter because you will easily get caught in storytelling and re-telling (how many times do we fruitlessly replay our stories about ourselves and the way the world is?). While you need to be open as deeply as possible to your feelings in Inquiry, take care not to get caught in them, allowing them to turn the process into a deep emotional release. If deep feelings threaten to overwhelm the Inquiry process, in order to stay with the Inquiry, you will need to bring an awareness to the process that is greater than the intensity of the deep feelings. Likewise, take care not to go to the other extreme and suppress the deep feelings through philosophizing, psychologizing, projecting (putting onto others those parts of ourselves that we don’t accept), attaching to the feelings that bring pleasure or rejecting those that bring discomfort. Try to see them as a detached observer would. This ability often takes time to master and comes with the development of powerful presence.

Yet the mind must ultimately be the servant to the heart. In Inquiry, you need to adopt an attitude of openness and curiosity. Curiosity is a heart quality that affects the mind—it comes out of our deepest yearning to know the truth. Inquiry usually feels like you are grappling with something—really needing to understand it. To support the curiosity, you may find it useful to keep a question running in the background of your consciousness: “What is this?” “What’s that about?” “What’s behind or underneath that?” “What does that mean?”—anything that will keep you looking increasingly deeper into the truth you are seeking. Ultimately, you want to be questioning every thought, feeling, sensation and image that comes into your consciousness, using each as a doorway to the next deeper layer of insight and understanding.

In Inquiry, there can be no manipulation, no agenda and no pre-conceived ideas about where the inquiry will lead. You need to get out of your own way and simply be with and surrender into whatever thoughts, feelings or images arise as they arise—just as they are. While you will usually have a starting point, this attitude of surrender and not-knowing allows the process to unfold in a natural, open-ended way. The truth is here and now and you can only see and experience it by looking more and more deeply into what is happening in the moment. By following the intelligence of the soul and surrendering to the deep yearning within, Inquiry takes you through layers and layers of conditioned self—the ego structures and defenses, the self-images and identities and the incessant mental activity of thinking and reacting—and leads you home to an experience of your essential qualities and ultimately a realization of your true nature.

You can do Inquiry with others or by yourself, so experiment to see which way works better for you. You can learn Inquiry only by experience—and lots of it. As you progress with this tool, you will find your own way with it.

The more you practice Inquiry, the more it will become your natural way of being in the world. So whenever you don’t understand something or encounter a difficulty, instead of fighting it or running away from it, you will find yourself automatically asking, “What is this? What’s happening here?” When the commitment to the truth becomes stronger than the commitment to protecting your self-image, you have become free in a most significant way. One of Japan’s greatest Zen Masters, Dogen Zenji, said, “In the end, the final refuge is sustained practice.” Sustained Inquiry has the power to transform your life.

Inquiry Questions: The question that is really eating at you is most likely the best question to begin with. If that or another burning question grabs you and doesn’t let you go, go with it—let it take you wherever it takes you. In addition to asking yourself, “What is this?” or “What is this about?” the following questions may also be useful:

Am I pushing, fighting or running away—or am I letting go into the truth of my being in the moment?

What’s in the way of my being completely present right now?

What do I need right now? (Give yourself what you need, being careful to distinguish between need and want.)

What do I really want? (Surrender into the wanting and yearning.)

What am I experiencing right now? What am I feeling?

What is real? What is the truth?

What is happening here?

In my present situation, what is being mirrored to me about myself?

Who or what am I?

Who do I think I am? Who am I taking myself to be?

What am I pretending not to know?

(Note: While I have practiced my own brand of Inquiry since 1982, my understanding of the process has been deepened and broadened greatly by Alia Johnson, my Diamond Approach teacher, with whom I have been working since 2000. The Diamond Approach is a profound spiritual practice developed by A. H. Almaas that works through the psychological aspects to access the spiritual dimensions of being. Almaas’ book, Spacecruiser Inquiry [Shambhala, 2002], gives a more detailed description of the process.)

It is more important, more thrilling, more satisfying and infinitely more valuable to know the Healer than to be healed.—Anonymous

Not long ago, I had a boss who not only had no respect for me but was downright abusive. In our sessions, Dale often asks me why I stayed in my job. It seemed incredible that I would stay in such a violent situation that has so damaged my self-esteem. For quite some time, I felt trapped, hopeless and powerless to leave.

I started to slip into a mind-numbing depression and had trouble waking up to go to work. My whole body would be in pain, and I dreaded the thought of getting out of bed and getting ready for work. One morning, the dread shifted to terror. The terror turned to a deeper depression. As I lay in bed, part of me wanted to know what was happening and wanted it to turn around. It wanted to know why I had created this painful and frightening relationship. I started to gently inquire into what was behind the depression, and I asked myself why I felt so helpless and hopeless.

I took a deep breath, and a memory came flooding back from when I was four years old. My mother used to wake me at 5:00 each morning and drop me off at a babysitter’s place, where I would stay until it was time to go to school. All of the children in her care were verbally and physically abused. She was very rigid with us and any small diversion from what she wanted was punishable with a public spanking—without clothing. I was paralyzed in terror the whole time I was there. This memory was so real to me that I actually felt as though I was really back there again. I became nauseous and the terror

of being small and frightened and helpless overwhelmed me.

I told my mother the babysitter was hurting me, and I begged her not to take me there. But she didn’t hear me, and after awhile, I gave up asking for help. I shut down and suppressed my needs and feelings. I became a depressed child, subjected to the babysitter for years—until she was shut down for abusing children!

After this Inquiry experience, I cried for that little girl who needed help and could not get it. I had tremendous compassion for her and decided that I could not expect someone who had been abused in that way to be functioning effectively. The next time my boss was abusive, I gave notice.

~Madeline Stewart*

I was feeling a little stuck and so I started to look at that, and I came across my solar plexus and the buzz that lives there, that is always on. I let myself feel the charge that went through my whole body. After awhile, the hole in my center closed up and I went deep, deep into bliss. I also encountered my snake, and I realized he is part of what keeps me awake at night—constantly, vigilantly guarding me. He’s a kind old snake, as old as I can remember. We have started a dialogue, and we agreed that he can start to just ease up a little. He is tired. He’s been working so very, very hard for so long, guarding my (inner) little girl. He has known that I haven’t been ready before.

Later, I discovered more about the purpose of my snake. He’s a guardian of my grief. When I asked him what he needed, he said, “Play with me.” I asked, “How do I play with you?” He answered, “Enjoy yourself more; have fun in what you do; be present when you’re doing it; lighten up; don’t take yourself so seriously. You can do it all, have it all and be it all.”

I know I have work to do with my snake. I know that I need to befriend him and stop being afraid of him. He wants to play. I feel that this process will take me a little further each time I allow it.

~Donna Berber

I’m looking into the anxiety that permeates my daily experience. It lives throughout my entire body but seems to be centered in my belly. In making contact with it, I immediately become aware that I use anxiety to mute my fear and make it more manageable. I approach this fear in my belly gently, and when I make contact with a layer of sadness directly underneath the fear, the fear disappears. What am I sad about? I have to be very gentle with this inquiry, because I know that whatever is in there is frightened, vulnerable and not willing to expose itself.

My breathing begins to relax and the tension in my belly starts to release. My body stretches and then sits up straight. I become more alert. Warmth fills me. Then I begin to experience nausea, and the sadness becomes stronger. I rock back and forth, as if to soothe the sadness. It feels like grief. I sit gently with the grief, wondering what it is about. In touch with the grief, I notice that all the anxiety is gone. This feels like the deeper truth. I sigh and yawn. It is 4:30 in the morning. I feel deep exhaustion from decades of pushing myself to avoid dealing with this grief. What is it?

I focus more intently into my body where the grief is centered. I get very still with it, and I am aware of how everything begins to settle down. I sit patiently in the silence, and it feels like the silence is nourishing my entire being. The image of a woman-friend who is the manifestation of Mother Earth’s love comes to mind, and I am touched by her deeply healing warmth. I am more aware of my breath and the nourishment it brings.

I am feeling very peaceful now, and it occurs to me that what I am grieving is the loss of this peace that is my natural state. Why would I repeatedly leave this state when it feels so very good, so right? I sit with this question for a long time and nothing comes except my teacher’s voice saying, “I never answer why questions!” I pick up the inquiry again later on. I become aware that what keeps the anxiety running is the fear that I won’t do something that needs to be done and that something terrible will happen as a result. So I’m always pushing myself to make sure everything gets done. And of course, that’s impossible.

So I’m never at peace, except when I’m doing some kind of inner work like this that brings me into presence. This realization saddens me even more. It seems like a hopeless situation, much like being on a hamster wheel that’s endlessly turning. Again, I realize that when I’m present, I’m not feeling driven. It’s only when I’m not present—when the unconscious is running the show—that I feel so anxious. So all I need to do is remember to get present. I make a commitment to take time throughout the day to get present—at least a minute or two every hour. That feels like a good start.

Later still, I realize that although this resolution will make a big difference, it doesn’t get at the root of the issue. So I pick up the thread again and ask myself why am I so afraid I will forget to do something vital, and what am I afraid will happen if I do? All I can get is this sense of impending doom, that something awful will happen.

Then I recall being 16 years old, riding in the car with my father, when he turned to me and told me I was a disappointment to him. I was shocked, devastated. My father meant a great deal to me, and for him to tell me that was the worst thing that he could have said. I also remember taking an oral final exam in school and could not answer the question. I remember feeling so humiliated. I was a good student and thought of myself as the smartest student in the class. The experience severely damaged my sense of who I was. I realize that I now live in continual fear of ever feeling these kinds of wounds again.

I see that I am trying at all costs (even running myself into the ground) to protect the image I have created of myself as a committed, competent, reliable person with great integrity. That’s what my anxiety is all about. So I guess the real question for me is, “What do I really want—to be inflated with a false sense of self, or to be simple and real?”

~Lawrence Abraham*

Freeze Frame

Freeze Frame allows you to use the material of your daily life to access the deeper issues that keep you from having what you really, really want. Try to set aside some time every day (ideally in the evening) to review events and see where you created some level of dis-ease in your being. It is usually best to begin with the issue that you had the most intense reaction to. Often the biggest issue relates to your loved one, and so the technique for working with a partner is included separately below. Here are the steps:

Review the incident needing understanding in as much detail as possible, as if you were watching a video in slow motion, paying particularly close attention to what you were thinking and feeling, especially immediately before the moment you felt the upset.

Replay in your mind the few moments immediately before the upset, this time in very slow motion, paying even closer attention to what you were feeling.

When you get to the exact moment where the upset happened, freeze the frame at precisely that point. Keeping your awareness focused directly on this moment, allow yourself to be totally open and vulnerable (what I call “taking the hit”) and see what that touches in your consciousness.

At this point, you may use any of the previously learned tools that feel appropriate to take you as deeply as possible into the source of your discomfort.

For use in relationship: In any conflict, both individuals are 100 percent responsible for the creation of the problem. Freeze Frame creates the possibility for two (or more) people to look together—from the same side—at an incident that caused a painful rift in the relationship. Both can then take full responsibility for creating the problem and each can see how and why he or she created the issue to begin with. This ends the blaming and the “who’s right, who’s wrong” dance. For Freeze Frame to be effective, both parties need to be committed to discovering the truth in themselves, as opposed to defending a position.

Partner A relates the incident needing healing to Partner B in as much detail as possible, paying particularly close attention to what A was thinking and feeling, especially immediately before the moment A felt hurt by B.

Partner A replays the few moments immediately before the hurt, this time in very slow motion, paying even closer attention to what A was feeling.

When Partner A gets to the exact moment where the hurt happened, A freezes the frame at precisely the point where the blow was dealt. A does not move A’s awareness away from this moment in time, but instead drops his or her defenses, stays totally open, takes the hit, and sees what it touches in A’s consciousness.

That pain, if allowed, will eventually take Partner A back to an earlier (usually much earlier) pain that needs healing. A will see how he or she co-created the pain so that A can open the door to heal the old wound. (Have you ever noticed how we recreate the same pain over and over in our lives until we finally stop running away from the pain and see what it’s trying to tell us?)

Once partner A has seen into the source of his or her pain, he or she can look at Partner B in precisely the same “freeze the frame” moment and see and feel where B was coming from. In this place of open awareness, the heart contains only compassion, understanding and forgiveness.

Partners A and B reverse roles and repeat the process.

(Please note: For more relationship tools, see the “Do It Yourself” section of the Heartwork Institute website, http://www.awakentheheart.org.)

Using Freeze Frame has helped me look closely at how I anticipate the future and hold resentments about the past and it allows me to let them go. I had been causing myself tremendous pain by holding onto the emotions long after the actual, physical pain was gone.

Reliving a moment of physical abuse, I was able to freeze the moment just before being slapped in the face. The reality of that moment was that there was no pain. My mind was programmed to anticipate what was coming, which manifested as fear. I could see the anger in the eyes and facial expression of the one about to hit me. Advancing one frame later, the hand came closer, and my fear then turned to anger—mirroring the image before me. I advanced the frame again. Flesh hit flesh. In that moment, there was physical pain, but it paled in the light of the emotional pain. My mind went wild; fear and anger combined and I turned it inward. Afraid to strike back, I felt small, inferior, and I blamed myself for being in this position. This pattern has stayed with me for years; each time a man raises his voice to me or curses in front of me, I anticipate physical abuse and am bathed in fear.

Taking away both the anticipation and the aftermath, I was able to stay present with what was really happening. As I stayed with the frozen frame of flesh touching flesh, I was able to get to the point of no pain. Suddenly I could feel my body relaxing, tension leaving my shoulders, the tightness around my mouth and my throat lessening. All that was really there was flesh touching flesh—everything else was just my mind spinning its own story.

~Marcie Gass

My boss was talking about his newborn baby, and I was really enjoying hearing about her. I mentioned that my mother was coming to drop off a gift for her, and quite suddenly he quite harshly stated that he was not allowing anyone near his baby for two weeks and that I was to tell my mother not to come. I felt very hurt and even ashamed at being scolded.

Then I started to feel angry and was getting an attitude. Recognizing that this was my usual response to these types of situations, I made a conscious decision that I did not want to continue to feel hurt every time I felt confronted unexpectedly. So I turned to Freeze Frame.

I started with my initial feeling, which was intense shame and embarrassment at being scolded publicly. That led me to remember my mother saying quite often that, “we are not the beautiful people, therefore we do not belong and do not get to go to all the places that beautiful people can go.” I felt really angry about that, and I put my anger onto my boss, saying to him in my mind, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you are better than us? Do you think my family is going to pollute your home and defile your precious little baby?”

I realized that this was not the root issue because I was still placing anger and blame outside myself. So I tried to zero in on the precise moment my reaction began. I sat with it for a little while and was able to discern that my initial reaction was intense pain and heartache—deep loss and longing. I had become a little baby myself in that moment that my boss came at me so fiercely. I felt the pain of not being protected when I was so vulnerable in the way he was protecting his newborn. I realized I was feeling the loss of not having that fierce protection from those I needed it from the most. Furthermore, I was able to see that I had not developed the Protector in myself, and in that moment I had abandoned my “little baby” the way I was abandoned when I was little.

The experience taught me that I have grieving to do about the pain I feel from not being thought of as precious and worth “defending to the death.” I learned that I recreate this pain a great deal in my life. I learned that I need to be my own protector and to know that I am worth defending and that I do not deserve to be treated harshly by others or by myself.

~Gracie Taylor*

When I attended my first Heartwork retreat, I had been seeing a counselor for several years to help me with the pain of loving and at the same time hating and fearing a family member. I had always considered him to be special, but almost each time we were together, he would make some critical comment about me or tell an out-and-out lie (usually in front of other people) that would hit me like a Mack truck.

I was fearful to be around him because I was always waiting for the next hit. Bottling up my emotions, I walked on eggshells. I had not been successful in letting go of the effect he was having on me, so I saw no other way but to learn how to let go of the relationship itself. That was my goal for the retreat.

When Dale taught us Freeze Frame, I found it painful to visualize and relive these scenes with my family member, but I focused on him and froze the frame just before he delivered “the hit.” But what happened next surprised me. When I looked at his face and into his eyes, what I saw was an unhappy person—a person in pain. I could see that he was so unhappy and broken inside. I felt so sad for him, and I realized that it was his pain and unhappiness that was causing him to do and say all those horrible things. None of his actions had anything to do with me. For the first time, I was able to see him from a loving place. I was able to understand and forgive him. It is still hard for me to take the hits, but I no longer need to let go of the relationship. I learned to let go of how I felt instead. When a situation with him arises, I can Freeze Frame his eyes in my mind, and I am free.

~Natalie Steck*

Winter Morning

Awake

In the 5 a.m. dark before dawn

I burrow deeper under the covers

I don’t fall asleep

I’m awake.

I lie there

Curled in a warm pocket.

When I rise

The house still sleeps.

I treasure the early morning

Silence now is mine.

I set up the coffee pot,

Grind the beans,

Inhale the distillation,

Start the coffeemaker.

The dog stands by the door

Impatient for release.

I unlock the front door,

Admit the frozen morning,

She charges out—an eighty-pound shepherd

I refuse to walk—

Too much power to restrain

When she lunges out the door.

Moments later

Before the coffee is brewed

Insistent barks break the silence.

Consider the sleepers.

Gird myself to confront the cold:

Wool socks, red fleece-lined black jeans,

Sweater over turtleneck,

Pull on hat, lined gloves,

Insulated winter boots,

Down-filled parka.

Ready.

From the top of the wooded slope

So still I hear the soft crashing

Of ice floes in the river below.

Tree shadows darken the snow

Luminescent in the moonlight.

Dog motion in the trees,

I summon her, “Jesse,”—

In Hebrew, “God exists.”

But intent she pays me no mind,

Pretends not to hear her name.

I whistle, the whistle I practiced as a child,

To call other loved dogs.

She only wanders further into the woods

Terrorizing the darkness that delights her.

~Frances Rapport

Heartwork In One’s Daily Life

What follows are brief descriptions of some auxiliary exercises that many people find helpful on their inner journey. The first exercise is useful in learning how to stay in the moment. The others help to bridge the gap between more exclusively inner work and “outer work,” or being in the world.

Continuum of Awareness: This is a technique taught in the Diamond Approach wherein you simply verbally report to a partner whatever you are experiencing moment-to-moment—sensations, sounds, images, thoughts, feelings, energies, etc. There is no particular focus, just an intention to feel your own subtlety and innerness. The attitude is one of delicacy. The partner tries to be there with deep attention, following the other’s process in a simple, delicate way.

Sleep Meditation: In addition to the Soft Body and Awareness Meditations, this exercise is very useful to help fall asleep or fall back to sleep. Simply get in the most comfortable position you can find, and then don’t move a muscle. The reason this works is that most of the time, we can’t sleep because your mind is overactive. By paying attention to your thoughts, you feed the thinking process and keep it going, thereby assuring your sleeplessness. But by focusing your attention on your body (which you must do in order not to move a muscle), you starve the thinking process, and the thoughts slow down and eventually die altogether. In addition, by paying attention to your tired body, your body will naturally let go into sleep.

Walking Meditations: Books have been written on the intricacies of walking meditation, but for the purposes of this book, I will keep the instructions very simple. In Heartwork retreats, I teach the following three walking meditations:

Soft Body Walking Meditation: Walk attentively in a circle or back and forth, taking steps only when the body is completely “soft” or open (see Soft Body Meditation for more details).

Awareness Walking Meditation: Walk attentively in a circle or back and forth, taking steps only when you are totally present (sensing, looking and listening).

Soft Body–Awareness Walking Meditation: Walk attentively in a circle or back and forth, taking steps only when the body is completely soft and you are totally present.

Conscious Eating: Be attentive to the entire process of eating your food—from the creation of the meal all the way through the digestive process. We rarely even taste our food, let alone notice things like when our appetite is satiated or when we are physiologically (as opposed to emotionally) hungry. In this exercise, the point is to be totally aware and conscious of how the food tastes, what temperature it is, what the texture is like, the sound of your fork scraping on the plate, etc. Living in awareness includes all of our activities—walking, eating, breathing, and so forth.

Do Nothing Meditation: This is the simplest but most difficult of all meditations. Doing nothing means doing nothing. You cannot try to do nothing, because trying is doing something. This is a meditation you need to simply leap into. And leaping into it takes you beyond your ordinary self into a state of presence.

Other activities that increase your ability to be present and also coax essential aspects of your being to come forth include listening to music, dancing, communing with nature, speaking with awareness and, ultimately, doing your work in the world with awareness.

Epilogue

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ~T.S. Eliot

I sincerely hope Heartwork has been of some use to you on your journey. Of course, the book is only as valuable as you make it. Remember: You create your own reality. So what reality do you want to create going forward? If you found the tools in this book useful, by all means use them! They can help you re-member on a daily basis who you really are on a deeper and deeper level.

For more information about becoming involved with Heartwork, please visit the Heartwork Institute’s website at http://www.awakentheheart.org.

Blessings to you on your journey.

Dale L. Goldstein, LCSW

Good Books for Heartwork

The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler (Penguin Putnam, 1998)

The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1992)

Awakening the Heart, edited by John Welwood (Shambhala Publications, 1983)

Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press, 2005)

The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, by Debbie Ford (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)

Diamond Heart Series, by A. H. Almaas (Shambhala Publications, 2000)

Diamond Mind Series, by A. H. Almaas (Shambhala Publications, 2000)

Embracing the Beloved, by Stephen and Ondrea Levine (Doubleday, 1995)

Emmanuel’s Book, compiled by Pat Rodegast and Judith Stanton (Bantam Books, 1985)

Focusing, by Eugene T. Gendlin (Bantam Books, 1981)

Getting the Love You Want, by Harville Hendrix (Harper Perennial, 1988)

A Gradual Awakening, by Stephen Levine (Anchor Books, 1989)

Healing into Life and Death, by Stephen Levine (Anchor Books, 1987)

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell (Princeton University Press, 2004)

The Illuminated Rumi, translations and commentary by Coleman Barks (Broadway Books, 1997)

Inner Journey Home, by A.H. Almaas (Shambhala Publications, 2004)

Inner Work, by Robert A. Johnson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989)

Journey of the Heart, by John Welwood (HarperCollins, 1996)

Keeping the Love You Find, by Harville Hendrix (Atria Books, 1993)

A Little Book on the Human Shadow, by Robert Bly (HarperSanFrancisco, 1988)

Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Riverhead Books, 1997)

Meetings at the Edge, by Stephen Levine (Gill & MacMillan, 2002)

Men and the Water of Life, by Michael Meade (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993)

New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, 2004)

No Boundary, by Ken Wilber (Shambhala Publications, 1981)

No Enemies Within, by Dawna Markova (Conari Press, 1994)

Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg (PuddleDancer Press, 2003)

Of Water and the Spirit, by Malidoma Somé (Putnam, 1994)

Ordinary Magic, edited by John Welwood (Shambhala Publications, 1992)

Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert A. Johnson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993)

A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield (Bantam Books, 1993)

Personal Mythology, by David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner (Penguin, 1989)

The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, 2004)

Practicing the Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, 2001)

Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach (foreword by Jack Kornfield) (Bantam Books, 2004)

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage Books, 1989)

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (New Directions Publishing, 1957)

Start Where You Are, by Pema Chödrön (HarperCollins, 2003)

Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell (HarperCollins, 2000)

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994)

Toward a Psychology of Awakening, by John Welwood (Shambhala Publications, 2002)

The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, by Mike Hernacki (Berkley, 1988)

When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön (Shambhala Publications, 2000)

Who Dies? by Stephen Levine (Anchor Books, 1989)

The Wisdom of No Escape, by Pema Chödrön (Shambhala Publications, 2001)

Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Ballantine Books, 2003)

The Work of This Moment, by Toni Packer (Shambhala Publications, 1990)

Parting Words

Coming and going, life and death:

A thousand hamlets, a million houses.

Don’t you get the point?

Moon in the water, blossom in the sky.

~Gizan, about to die

Love for Sale

I have become

a merchant of Love,

selling piecemeal from

the trunk of my car.

Hundreds pass me by each day,

so afraid of my ragged joy.

But for those who risk

my Wild-eyed strangeness,

I have a bargain

they could never guess:

Their stopping was my payment,

and in return

I fill their hands

with Rubies and with Emeralds;Sapphires dripping

like blue fire—

They cry “Enough!”

yet still I pour

the Jewels of my Heart—

falling through their fingers,

gathering like

Spring’s blossoms,

Drifted

around their feet.

~Richard Wehrman

Fire

Flames twist together in a passionate dance,

slicing through the blackness they seek to chase away.

Sparks fly into the inky night air,

flaring momentarily in showy scarlet bursts

and then fading to nothing.

The heat embraces me,

seeping into my pores,

as the light flickers across my face,

illuminating what dark corners I might seek to hide.

But I can hide nothing from this fire—

Nor any other—

because even when the eager wood is consumed,

and the flames no longer leap,

and the searing embers have cooled

to feathery gray ash,

the fire has not died.

It has not left.

It has not disappeared.

It has instead penetrated my body

and found its way to my heart,

where it dances still.

~Katy Koontz

Dale Goldstein

Dale Goldstein is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, psychotherapist and workshop facilitator who has actively explored the uses of meditative and psychotherapeutic tools in the process of helping individuals, groups and organizations to heal since 1966.

Dale attended the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, where he received a Master of Social Work degree in 1969. In 1971, feeling a deep lack in his life, Dale moved to Rochester, NY, to practice Zen under the guidance of Roshi Philip Kapleau. In 1980, he changed to a self-inquiry/awareness meditative practice with Toni Packer, with whom he worked for eight more years. Since then, Dale has worked with various spiritual teachers, including Alia Johnson, a senior teacher in the Diamond Approach, with whom he has been working since 2000. He is currently engaged in the Diamond Approach Teacher Training Program.As a result of his own inner work, which included many years of psychotherapy, Dale saw a need to combine psychological and spiritual work in one comprehensive system. In 1981, he created Heartwork, a gentle yet powerful path for personal/spiritual transformation. Since that time, Dale has been the director of the Heartwork Institute, Inc., home to his private counseling practice and a variety of seminars and workshops that he facilitates nationally.

Dale has written a monthly column entitled “Transformational Journeys” for the World Times, the international “good news newspaper,” and New Health Digest.
[My life has been] shoshaku jushaku (one mistake after another).—Dogen Zenji

Richard Wehrman

Richard Wehrman was born in St. Louis and attended the Washington University School of Fine Arts, where he studied painting, printmaking and metalsmithing. While living in Missouri, he worked as a silversmith, freelance illustrator and graphic designer. His award-winning paintings have been exhibited at the St. Louis Art Museum, the St. Louis Artist’s Guild and Washington University.

In 1973, Richard moved to Rochester, NY, with his wife (illustrator Vicki Wehrman) to study and practice Zen Buddhism with Roshi Philip Kapleau at the Rochester Zen Center. Concurrently, he began a long career as a designer, illustrator and eventually president of the Bob Wright Creative Group. There, he produced award-winning work recognized by the Society of Illustrators, PRINT design annuals, Communication Arts Art Annuals, Graphis Annuals, the New York Art Directors Club and the ADDYs. His illustrations and paintings have been exhibited at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester Nazareth Arts Center, the UNESCO International Poster Show, the Memorial Art Gallery and the Society of Illustrators Gallery in New York. He was chosen as a Rochester Communicator of the Year for illustration and has received a gold medal from the National Society of Illustrators.

Richard is currently absorbed with discovering what it takes, at this late date, to become a real human being. Most of the time, this takes the form of simply getting through the day while causing as little harm as possible to himself and others. In whatever time is left, he creates poetry and graphic art. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Heartwork Institute and lives in (what he hopes will remain) rustic, semi-rural East Bloomfield, NY.

THE HEARTWORK INSTITUTE

The Heartwork Institute, Inc., is a not-for-profit educational organization founded in 1982 to assist people in finding their own paths to wholeness. Heartwork is a way of living that helps individuals find their own natural unfolding or healing process so that they may realize their interconnectedness with all life. The Heartwork Institute, Inc., offers a broad range of programs from individual, relationship and group counseling to personal (one or two people) and group intensives, retreats and workshops which vary from one to ten days in length. The Institute also offers one- to two-year transformational programs. Clients can do counseling in person or via the telephone.

Heartwork is a process of letting go with awareness into the truth of one’s being in the moment. In Heartwork retreats, participants gently open through layer after layer of the “false selves” they have created that perpetuate their suffering. In this way, they access the deeper layers of soul and spirit—ultimately coming to directly experience their true nature. Retreats often have themes, such as “Letting Go,” “Forgiveness,” “Transformation,” and “Who Am I, Really?”

In Heartwork Intensives and Weekends of Heartwork, we establish a comfortable balance between individual work, small and large group work and group discussion of content and process. In these breakthrough life-changing events, we use a combination of meditative, psychotherapeutic and experiential tools to move through the internal barriers each of us has unconsciously created that prevent us from having what we really want in life. In addition, after all the participants have gotten what they came for (and more), all are given the opportunity to go deep inside themselves and find and claim those aspects of their being that they have not yet owned—the lack of which prevents them from being fully empowered to fulfill their life purpose. Experiencing the deep connection with others that occurs when a group of people come together committed to openness, honesty and getting what they really want forever opens each of the participants to what is possible in relationship.

Everyone essentially wants to love and be loved—but we all build barriers to protect ourselves from being hurt. These barriers not only fail to keep pain out, but they also prevent us from getting the love we really want. Heartwork relationship workshops, which we usually call “I and Thou,” thoroughly immerse participants in the use of the Heartwork relationship tools most vital to learning how to move through these barriers and create and sustain growth and intimacy in a relationship. In Heartwork, we view relationships as primary vehicles for personal and spiritual growth because it is in relationships that most of our personality issues are revealed.

All Heartwork experiences teach participants how to move through self-created barriers in order to open their hearts and minds. From this openness, each of us can find the peace, joy, freedom, aliveness and compassion that is our deepest truth and indeed our birthright. Ultimately, we become enabled to live deeply in this truth, in our life purpose, while in intimate relationships with others.

In addition to the official events offered by the Heartwork Institute, Inc., a great deal of support is offered unofficially and informally by others in the Heartwork community. These people generously share their support, encouragement and guidance based on their own experience with the Heartwork process.

RESOURCES

For information about Dale Goldstein’s teaching schedule: www.awakentheheart.org/events

For information about the Heartwork Institute: www.awakentheheart.org

Book available in a stunning Hardbound edition: www.amazon.com

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(888) 340-9865

awakentheheart@gmail.com

www.awakentheheart.org

Note: We intend to publish numerous versions of Heartwork. The editorial content of these versions is exactly the same, but the downloadable internet and coffee table versions in both soft and hard cover feature Richard Wehrman’s amazing full-color illustrations. Please visit the Institute’s website above to see images from these illustrated versions. The website also offers prints, greeting cards, and other items for sale featuring Richard’s artwork.

The Heartwork Institute, Inc., is a true not-for-profit organization and operates through sponsorship dues and the generous donations of time and money of people whose lives have been improved by Heartwork. For more information on how you can help out, please visit our website.

Credits & Permissions

The author gratefully acknowledges the following permissions:

Front matter

Part I

Part II

From both I Heard God Laughing and The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild & Sweet Poems of Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Copyright © 1996 by Daniel Ladinsky. Published by Penguin Publications and used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.

Letters from The Cosmos, by Carol J. Swiedler. Copyright © 1993 by Carol J. Swiedler and Edward B. Swiedler. Published by Clermont Press and reprinted by permission of Carol J. Swiedler and Edward B. Sweidler; (800) 229-1433.

No Man Is An Island, by Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1955 by The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani. Published by Harcourt, Inc., and reprinted by permission of the publisher and The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.

Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Volume Two, 1910-1926, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright © 1948 by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Part III

Pathwork® Guide Lecture Material. Copyright © 2000 by the Pathwork Foundation. Reprinted by permission of the Pathwork Foundation. (Pathwork® is a registered service mark owned exclusively by the Pathwork Foundation.)

The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, by Ghalib, edited by Stephen Mitchell, translated by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 1989 by Jane Hirshfield. Published by Harper Collins and reprinted by permission of Jane Hirshfield.

Part IV

Part V

Photography & Art Credits

The illustrator gratefully acknowledges the following permissions:

The Blue Marble, image of the Earth from space. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli. Complete credits available at: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2429.

xii).

rights and permissions of http://www.morguefile.com.

Sunrise, copyright © by Manuel Silva, mjas@morguefile.com. Used under rights
and permissions of www.morguefile.com.

Border design modified from artwork copyright © by Aridi Computer Graphics,
Inc., www.aridi.com.

Used under rights and permissions of http://www.morguefile.com.

The Blue Marble, image of the Earth from space. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli. Complete credits available at: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2429.

Used under rights and permissions of http://www.morguefile.com.

Spiral Galaxy M101, Hubble Space Telescope Image STScI-PRC2006-10a, NASA and ESA. Complete credits at: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/10/.

Saint Francis (from the Black Madonna Shrine, Eureka, MO) and glass sphere,

mjas@morguefile.com. Used under rights and permissions of http://www.morguefile.com.

Bent trees, modified from an image provided by Dreamstime.com.

Dwarf galaxy NGC 1569: STScI-PRC2004-06. Credit: ESA, NASA and P. Anders (Göttingen University Galaxy Evolution Group, Germany. Complete credits available at: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/06/image/a/.

The Blue Marble, image of the Earth from space. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli. Complete credits available at: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2429.

poxy@morguefile.com. Used under rights and permissions of http://www.morguefile.com.

Sundial image, modified. Agency: Image provided by Dreamstime.com.

Image of woman, modified. Agency: Image provided by Dreamstime.com.

Galaxy M101, Hubble Image: NASA and ESA. For complete description and credits see:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/10/image/a/.

Sunset from photography copyright © by David Ellis, Dellis3d@sbcglobal.net
Used under rights and permissions of www.morguefile.com.

“Everything that has a beginning has an end.”—Buddha

“The end of one thing is the beginning of another.”—Anonymous

Table of Contents

Part I

Introduction to the Work

About Heartwork

Getting Started

Part II

A Heartwork Experience

Heartwork in One’s Daily Life

The Journey Continues

Part III

Heartwork Stories

Brief Therapy Encounters

Intensive and Retreat Experiences

Transformational Life Stories

Part IV

The Evolution of Heartwork

Part V

Now the Real Journey Begins

Epilogue

Good Books for Heartwork

Parting Words

About the Author and Illustrator

About the Heartwork Institute

Sound Tracks

If your eReader doesn’t allow you to download these links directly to your device, please go to http://www.awakentheheart.org/book to download the mp3 tracks.

Dale’s introduction to the book (1.6 mb)
A guided “soft-body” meditation (13 mb)
“Guided Heartwork” (18.2 mb)
Awareness meditation (13.5 mb)
Unwinding Beginning (24.02 mb)
Unwinding Dawn (12.12 mb)