the heart aroused

The Heart Aroused “It seems that to find the real path we have to go off the path we are on now, even for an instant, and earn the privilege of losing our way. As the path fades, we are forced to take a good look at the life in which we actually find ourselves.” This thought from the author and poet David Whyte brings up important concepts about our lives. Sometimes taking a step back and observing our own nature is all we need in order to better understand ourselves and where we are going. However, it seems that along this path we spend far more time worrying and fretting about our fears than what it required to confront them and deal with them. Whyte draws a very curious and intelligent connection between our soul and work, reaching every aspect of it so we can better understand our desires and destiny in life. As we begin to think about where we fit in the world, why we are working and where we are, the state of our soul and the direction we are heading, we begin to ask questions. And the first question deals with our heart desires, the things that make us get up every morning and celebrate life. This book made me think deeply about my future in the working world and how would I take his advices to combine my personal desires with work (school). At first, it was a challenge task for me to think and reflect about my soul, but as I read the chapters and answered the discussion questions proposed in the end, things were making sense and my personal questions were been answered.

The first lesson learned comes right from the first chapter where Whyte invites the readers to understand work and the word destiny in life. He points out something that we don’t really think much about which is that we spend far more time in the workplace than we do with our families or anywhere else. So if we don’t ask ourselves how our work or school in my case now, germane to our personal destiny we are leaving something very important behind. “The soul life of a person is always larger and greater the more we come to know it. We go to work. But it is our soul we put into. Work is a series of events. The soul turns those workaday events into experiences.” In other words, what we carry inside will always be greater than any materialistic reward, and the more you know yourself, your desires, and what makes you happy the better you will become. And by doing that, it will carry on to whatever endeavors you may have in the outside world. This thought from chapter one basically defines the very first application I will take with me to work, school, and mainly my personal life, which is to find a purpose in everything I do and that this purpose will always be similar to my heart’s desire. In Beowulf, Whyte uncovers the key to confronting office conflicts. Like the poem's courageous hero, readers will travel to the belly of the beast of a problem and emerge with a solution. However, besides the corporation moral of it, the story of Beowulf along with Whyte’s reflections thought me something special. “Why not go down, at home or at work, into the lake, consciously, like Beowulf. Don’t die on the shore. The stakes are very high; the stakes are your life.” Going to the bottom of the “lake”, requires a risky path and to take risks you have to be fearless. A good example of that is school, where most of students fear failure without even attempting to risk. Another theme that Beowulf’s story teaches us is that courage and faith are true paths to victory, while cowardice leads to destruction. One of the better translations refers to a great wound “opening” in Grendel's arm as he tries to flee. It is not so much that Beowulf is tearing the arm off, but rather that Beowulf is holding Grendel and his own cowardice leads to the injury that kills him. Next, consider the fight with Grendel's Mother. Beowulf takes with him a sword. His reliance on his own courage and the "pure" strength that nature or God has imbued him with is waning, and he is placing reliance on a material tool. His battle with the mother does not go nearly as well as the battle with Grendel, and his life is put in mortal danger several times. Also, when the battle is over, the sword is destroyed. Finally, in his battle with the dragon, Beowulf attacks with sword and armor, and though he is able to slay the dragon, it costs him his life. Once again, this indicates that hiding behind the material is a path to destruction. In The Heart Aroused, fire was more than just a bright light or heat. It was something special, an attribute of human being that I never gave much attention to it until now. David Whyte ignites an image of fire as “the touchstone of human creativity and passion.” But like our earliest ancestors, while we love the warmth and nourishment of the fire, we also fear its destructive wake. Whyte cautions us to let the interior fire burn: “A certain vitality smolders inside us irrespective of whether it has an outlet or not. When it remains unlit, the body fills with dense smoke. … But refusing to give room to the fire, our bodies fill with an acrid smoke, as if we had covered the flame and starved it of oxygen. The interior of the body becomes numbed and choked with particulate matter. The toxic components of the smoke are resentment, blame, complaint, self-justification, and martyrdom.” (pg.92) In other words, the more we neglect this inside vital force that the fire represents, the more we are overcome by the “smoke” that will cover up our creativity. I learned that no matter where you are, school or work and what kind obstacles you have in front of you, if you keep that fire burning and the creativity flowing, you can overcome anything that might come your way. An eight-century Zen master named Kukei summed up how powerful creativity is in a few words and I will take that with me forever. “Move your hand, take a breath, make a sound. All things change when we do.” Change is powerful. As we change and grow, we gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of life which then translates to how we see others and the world around us. Ideas such as love and compassion are no longer terms of art, but a way to live. Soon or later we will all realize that our voice is a unique and powerful part of our professional identity, which says more about us than we can ever imagine. Understanding the essential qualities carried by the voice and learning to send our voices out into the world, school, and workplace more fully is another lesson I learned from The Heart Aroused. For example, I tend to keep my thoughts and opinions to myself, I hide my voice because I’m too afraid of what might others think in the other end. It wasn’t until reading this book that I notice how powerful our voice can be, just as our eyes, the voice too is a window to the soul. “Our voice, then, is a powerful arbiter of our inner life, our power relationships with others, and a touchstone of faith in the life we wish to lead.” (pg.143) As a student, sometimes you feel forced to say yes when you really want to say no. And too often, we don’t realize how powerful our voice is until we speak up. And by doing so, you lit that “fire” inside of you that you probably didn’t realize you possessed. It is a great feeling to say something and be accepted for it, however, it is when you are judged and denied by it that you grow to maturity. After all, our voice is as important to our identity as anything we possess. Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge was also another great story in the book and remarkably discussed by Whyte. The story was a good example to illustrate how the mind, despite its sincerity and commitment, can totally miss the “gift”. Our imagination often takes the curved path rather than the linear way. Such risk and openness inherits the harvest of creativity, beauty and spirit. As soon as Fineagas looked at young Fionn's eyes, he knew what had happened. He sat there disappointed that the destiny he had pursued so deliberately had at the last moment turned away from him to be received by an innocent young man who had never even dreamed of such a gift. In my opinion, this story can have many different morals, it just depends how you look at it, however, the lesson I will take from it is that if we want something really bad we must create for ourselves a clear, distinct image of the desired result and that you cannot just search for knowledge, as the act of searching creates its own preconceptions of what form the knowledge will take. Finally, the last reflection discussed in the Heart Aroused was from the Coleridge and Complexity chapter. Perhaps one of the most intriguing. “The way to build a poem, a life, or a lifestyle, and useful system is to fold meaning into the simplest elements and allow complexity to emerge from their natural self-generation.” This is in the simplest and yet most fascinating form of saying that the smallest things in life matter and it builds up into this complex world we live in. As Whyte mention in the user’s guide, a world where having faith in our own imagination means remembering our own life. In conclusion, the Heart Aroused definitely tricked me, in a positive way. In the beginning I couldn’t understand much the purpose of this book until I answered the questions for reflection in the user’s guide. Those questions and the class discussions not only enhanced my reading but made me think deeply about the real meaning that this amazing poet and writer was trying to put across to us students, employees, business owners, and simply humans with desires to succeed, innovate, mature, prosper, and most importantly celebrate life every day. Certainly, I didn’t think someone could use poetry so well to bring to life the experience of change itself.