It’s day 5 of the retreat, perhaps day 6. Honestly, I can’t remember those details, as they’ve been buried under the much more poignant memory of my crying self. All I know is that so far, every day has been a struggle to feel the Heart, to come back to myself.
Then, one night, as we are going through our Q&A and our guide answers a question on relationships, I hear something that stops my mind in its tracks:“The Heart can never be betrayed”, he says. “The mind and its expectations and hopes can be betrayed, but the Heart and the Love are never betrayed.”
Something about these words hits me quite deeply, but if the Heart could never be betrayed, where was all this pain coming from, and why did it feel so solid? If the Heart couldn’t be betrayed, why had it been buried so deep under all those layers of self-deprecating thoughts, negativity, and doubt?
Truth and Heartbreak
The answer was so obvious, yet painful to recognize because it meant that during all these months, I had allowed myself to forget.
Coming into the retreat, I already knew that it was going to have a very specific flavor: heartbreak. As the days went by, my theory was confirmed. By day 1, I had established the effortless practice of crying after every meditation, the undemanding “sadhana” of replaying events and conversations, thinking of all the ways in which things could’ve been different, all the ways in which I didn’t deserve what I got, and the well-known struggle between where I’m at and where I think I should be.
In fewer words, an unwavering devotion to everything that has ever gone wrong.
Since coming into the spiritual path, I have been a firm believer in suffering as a path to liberation. But this time, things felt different. The suffering I was experiencing in its current stage just seemed to solidify my belief in a separate self and the righteousness of the mind.
I found myself very confused by this impenetrable quality of my mind. In previous retreats, I may not have been diving deep into the ocean of consciousness, but at least I felt more open and more connected.
With every day that passed, I felt equally grateful and confused. Even when the heart hadn’t re-opened yet, I knew I was in the right place for this blossoming to take place. There was no other place I would have rather been.
Well, there or in my bed, especially when we would reach the later hours of the day and the retreat was still going on. But experience had already shown me that every session is an important piece of the retreat puzzle, and it was exactly in one of those nighttime talks that I heard the key phrase to open the prison that I had built for myself, a prison built from all the false beliefs I had been feeding so diligently.
Even when every lecture so far had been filled with truth bombs, the story of suffering I kept telling myself seemed to be the fort that could hold any “attack” that was set against it. It seemed that I needed a specific set of words to break me open.
The Truth Is Too Obvious for Us to See
A quick study of my case conducted by any fool would come to this self-evident conclusion: I just didn’t want to let go. I felt entitled to my pain because I had concluded that I had been betrayed by life. That’s exactly it—“I have been betrayed.”
I suspect God was laughing at the drama of it all while at the same time, out of incredible mercy, sending me a loving reminder. Did Claud even utter those words, or did I just imagine them because it was what I was so desperate to hear and remember?
As the phrase “The Heart can never be betrayed” kept repeating itself in my head, I eventually allowed myself to fully listen to its deeper meaning. I inquired within and remembered that which is never, has never, and will never be betrayed. With that, all self-pity dropped away.
For so many days, I had been sitting on my mat, asking myself how the touch of the Heart could have been lost so easily, why stillness and the inner sweetness felt in the remembrance of God were no longer available the way they used to be.
But the truth is that I had simply not been making an effort to remember, honor, and recognize. I inevitably felt the results of my attitude as I sat there through meditation after meditation, dealing with the pain that I had crystalized by my neglect.
I had gotten lazy, because I thought my love for God was a given, because I knew how utterly undeniable the touch of the Heart is. But this is the paradox of the path. Our truest nature it’s so incredibly obvious that it is impossible to see it if you are not looking with the right eyes.
The Heart Is Your Loyal Companion
Whenever you feel you are not finding what you are looking for, it’s never because it isn’t there. It’s always a matter of the right attention, of the right nurturance, of the willingness to let go. Because yes, the mind and its twenty thousand different personas will be betrayed beyond account. They will suffer, and rage, and feel confused.
But the Heart will remain as the loyal companion, as that whispering but encouraging voice that is heard as the most assuring self-affirmed voice there is, when you gift yourself moments of silence.
All the pain I was experiencing was that of the ego meeting a death.
The death of a dream, of a sense of normality, the chance of fitting in. But to say that it was only the mind and its protections that were hurting didn’t mean that this suffering didn't deserve the compassion and tenderness that pain requires to heal.
It just meant that compassion was encompassed by the recognition of that which could never be betrayed, that which could only be broken open by pain but never broken down.
Comments