The Way of the Heart

The Way of the Heart is a process. It is a Way. It is a technology. It is a course of study. It is an approach to living. It is a plan for life. It is a possibility for being human. It is a blueprint that may be extended to a society.
The Way of the Heart is a way of life that seeks to integrate what author Ken Wilber calls the value spheres (the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; or Art, Science, and Spirituality). It is a way that not only asks you to integrate the arts, sciences and spirituality, it also asks that you to be willing to do your inner work. It asks you to be willing to do your psychological and philosophical work. It asks you to bring the lessons and gifts of this work to every area of your life. Life Mission is a foundation of this process. It is important to give time to this quest-ion, and to hold this as a question that you live with. It is important to hold this question as an ongoing question that may be evolving so that it will remain alive for you. It is a question that will reside just under the consciousness of all of the choices you will make in your life, if you want to accomplish what you have come to do.
In The Way of the Heart it is important to bring to this process of creating the mission tangibly in the world, an integration of the value spheres. In this Way, the work of your Life Mission will be your highest art and spiritual practice. It will be your highest art and spiritual practice consciously and with intention. In the Way, it is important to have an intention and to hold your attention on your intention. It is important to bring to this an awareness of your partnership with Spirit. It is part of the process of this Way, that the work on your Life Mission is spiritual practice for you.
It is important to note that Life Mission is about all of your life. Therefore it will be about more than your career. It may be about your work in the world outside of your career. I do believe, however, that there is most often a way to actually make a living doing your Life Mission.
Beyond the career, the Way of the Heart is also bringing the gifts of art, science and spirituality to relationship, health, business, politics and activism, and every aspect of your life. This is a Way of making all of your life conscious practice.

What if every action in your life could be connected to the conscious intention of you heart?
What if the movements in your life became your artful expression?
What if you found something that connected enough with your heart that having discipline was now a matter of devotion to something that you loved?
What if the different aspects of your life worked together like movements of a symphony?
How would you feel about living in a way that you could sense that life is asking you to give everything you have, and is going to let you know it knows when you are not?
What if you felt so strongly about the high story (history = hi-story= high story) of your life, that everything in your life became something for the movement of Spirit in the world?

The vision of The Way of the Heart is a world where every person holds as self-evident that they are here for a reason, and that it is important to create it in the world. The vision of The Way of the Heart is of a world in which our purpose for being here is considered important enough to devote time to it. This is a world in which it is considered important enough that space is made for each person to explore his or her Life Mission before determining life direction. The vision is to support each person in taking responsibility for his or her Life Mission. It calls each person to claim their gifts in their unique way, and to use this in a way that it is in service to the world.

The vision for The Way of the Heart is that it is in service to the Great Sacred Mystery.

The mission of The Way of the Heart is to create the systems, structures, and networks that support people in defining and achieving their Life Missions. The Way of the Heart's mission is also to do this in a way that integrates the Arts, Sciences, and Spirituality, into a conscious approach to achieving Life Mission.
The mission of The Way of the Heart is to assist people in becoming Human beings and to be in service to God and Humanity. The Way of the Heart is in service to the servers of humanity. The mission of The Way of the Heart is to create in the world, a community in service to the implementation Divine spark within each human being, for the purpose that each came to manifest.

Webster's New World dictionary gives nearly 30 definitions for Way. Most of these would account for some aspect of Way as used in The Way of the Heart. It is a means of passing from one place to another: if in this case it is passing from one kind of view of living your life to another. It is also a route or a course in the same sense. It is a specified course that asks each pilgrim to design his or her personal relationship to it.
It is hoped that The Way of the Heart will become a customary manner of living. It is a means to an end, a direction of movement, a range of experience, a state or condition, a method or plan, a relationship which is taking place, a framework on which to build, a desire or wish and much more.
A Way is the "container" of the inspirations of mastery of any tradition. It is the tradition itself. When the accumulated wisdom of one or more individuals is passed on in some form it may be called a tradition. Within a tradition there are methods and skills that are passed on. When someone masters these to such a degree that they transcend the tradition then something is attained that was not taught. The source of this is said to be inspiration, or Spirit breathing new insight.
It is the accumulated wisdom of this inspiration, coming from mastery of a tradition, which will become the Way of that tradition. It is mastery that gives the ability to surrender the skills, and in the moment transcend the tradition. This leads to the life and dynamic growth of the Way of that tradition. The Ways are in some respects the crystallizations of the biographies of the masters of the tradition. The Way then becomes the container in which new insights and approaches can be accepted and integrated with all that is good about the tradition. In the absence of a Way, there will be no progress in the tradition for those practicing it.

Horst Hammitzch wrote in Zen in the Art of Tea Ceremony that:
"In early Japan, education and upbringing demanded that one should take up some Way, practice it, and become 'of that Way'. In medieval times it was not only a repository of given skills but also of general principles, truths and teachings.
The Way represents a tradition, running through many generations and embodies a sum of experiences that have risen out of actual practice and are of enduring importance for the Way in question.
Still, tradition in this sense is not the passing on of something settled and finished. It is the transmission of the whole, the sum of experience and still growing elements. For further development, this still growing element is an essential element of its wholeness. "Hammitzch also wrote that:
"The Way is the tradition of any art. 'Arts' in the Far Eastern sense, cover everything that is of value for the development of a person's character, developing inner-self and intellect and whole person maturity".
In the West, the "Way" might have been called the "Guild". During medieval times sending your child to study under a master of the Guild, may have been very similar to sending your child to study with a master of a Way. Both would have been considered Art and Spiritual practice. In the west the "Trades" may have been another name for the Ways. Instead of the Art of Archery the apprentice may have learned the Art of Masonry. There was, of course, a tradition of apprenticeship within the arts per se. The arts were at this time considered a trade or a guild.
Practices become Ways when practice is done not merely for the immediate results. The Ways are Spiritual training. The Ways are meant to lead to recognition of the transcendent life, like hearing the voice of your beloved in the din of a crowded party. Within the expression of everyday activities this is recognized as the boat that carries us to the far shore of transcendence and returns to embody sacredness in each aspect of our life.
The Way is the spiritualization and aesthetic of life, incorporated systematically within the activities and moments of ordinary life. The Way of the Heart is bringing this viewpoint to the manner in which your Life Mission is lived.
The Way of the Heart is recognition of a Way of considering life and your part in it as a sacred pilgrimage that incorporates all the definitions of a Way that I referred to earlier. It is a route or course, a direction or movement, a state or condition, a method or plan, a relationship which is taking place, a framework on which to build and much more.
The Way of the Heart is bringing this "view" to every aspect of your life. This is bringing to the application of your Life Mission, in your day to day experience, a particular approach that is high art and spiritual practice. It is saying that there is a high story that you are living, and the manner in which you live your Life Mission is as important as the creation of it.
It may be that you remember why you have come, and have gone about creating the manifestation of this in the world. If this is being done without the presence of some kind of relationship to Spirit and consciousness something may be missing for you in the end.
It may be that you have created in your life a relationship to Spirit; opportunities to express creatively, and even have some sense of the alchemical nature of science (and why that is important in your life). Even if all of this is true for you and you are not doing what you have come to do, what is the point for you?
The Way of the Heart is a Way of living that brings all of these together in your life. It is the integration of all of these important elements the heart is calling for in our lives.

Imagine you have just finished years of internship and college. You now are finally one of a circle of colleagues deeply involved in the search for the breakthrough that will answer a question hundreds of years old. Imagine you have held this question just on the edge of your awareness for years and intensely for the last eight months. Now you are reading a magazine, not even remotely related to your field and it triggers a cascade of associations (and perhaps a rush of emotions). You suddenly know that you know that you know. You have found it at last. You jump up and raise your arm and fist in the archetypal gesture of victory or self-congratulations. Then you run to your computer or journal to write it out before it slips away. You have found the elegant, just right, solution. This is the art and beauty of science.
Imagine you are very young and you are watching shooting stars, or fish under water, or animals newly born, or the waves rolling in from the ocean, or a dragonfly, or a butterfly, or standing on the top of a skyscraper looking down at the world in motion, or climbing rocks, or watching bees gathering honey or.... And you ask yourself, "Why?" and "How does it all work?" and "What's it for?" and a million more questions. Science seems to you to be a sacred art before you would even have the words to describe that. You are filled with awe for the majesty, elegance and beauty of it all. You are profoundly grateful to the One that sent you.
Imagine you are still very young or perhaps a bit older, and you are simply in your life and suddenly the world comes alive and the landscape just lights up. The trees suddenly have lines of energy running between them. You feel one with the world and profoundly at peace. If you are older, you remember you felt almost like this at times when you were very young. You might have been watching someone you have known for years and suddenly they light up, and you see the countenance that has been behind this face you have watched for years without ever seeing. Now you will never be quite able to settle for the way the world has been described on the street. You know there is a mystery to the world and you want to discover its secrets. This is the profoundly Great Sacred Mystery of Science. A "Way" of connecting to that sacred source that gives rise to this world we are seeking to understand and describe.

Many of the scientists who have shaped the destiny of science have shared that it was just such a "white light" experience that started them, inspired them, gave them a passion to seek, kept them asking questions.
You may never have the opportunity to work on a paradigm shifting research project, surrounded by colleagues absorbed with the challenge, working with the latest technology has to offer. Still, your search to understand your life and describe its nature and activities is science. When you confront the emergent shoreline of the chaos and complexity of your life, it is science. When you seek to navigate the uncertainty of your life, this is science. When you seek to find the most elegant solution to the equation of your life, this is science.
When you invite the Divine to join in your experiences, to join in your reflections on how this life works, to show you its mystery, then your life is sacred science.
When you remember you are a part of that Divine Creative Matrix from which all is born, and call that presence to your experiments, the science of your life is high art and beauty.

I invite you to embody the dream by imagining that your whole life is sacred beauty science (spirituality, art and science integrated).

A consideration: While you can create a life in which you make time for the arts, reserve space for spiritual practice, integrate science in its best sense, and contemplate your Life Mission, it may be difficult to move to any depth without having done your psychological homework. Psychology comes from psyche or soul and if you haven't done the soul-making work, whose Life Mission would you be doing? Where would you find the energy to care? Where is the self who will engage with art, science, and spirituality?
Psychology is conceived as a necessary activity of the psyche (soul), which constructs vessels (selves and world views) and breaks them in order to deepen experience.
The modern field of depth psychology is an interest in the unconscious levels of the psyche that deepen meaning of the soul. Psychologist James Hillman sees all psychology as depth. If you begin with soul, this will mean that psychology will inherently go deep and be therapeutic (in contrast to the branches of psychology that deny the existence of the soul).
The inheritance of Descartes' separation of mind and body, machine world of living subjects and dead objects, has had the effect of our locating psyche entirely within. You go inside to locate self, feelings, dreams, etc. Recent thought in cognitive science and physics would seem to indicate our psyche will include and be nested within the field of huge systems. By removing our soul from the world, we miss half of our soul's experience on a conscious level and the world (of which we are a part) is becoming more dysfunctional.
To fully engage The Way of the Heart, this soul making work is foundational. Robert Bly has said, "You have to go down before you can go up". The ashes work must be done. Also required is the fearless descent into our shadow. Bly also described in Little Book of Human Shadow coming into this world with a 360-degree personality. Every time who we were wasn't okay, we put that part in the bag behind us along with our life force and gifts. We will need those gifts for the "Way". This work also introduces us to our strong No, and the part of us that for every good and creative act wants to balance that with a little chaos and destruction.
It is important to face ourselves and reclaim all of our selves and our story, so that our pain, our fear, our suffering, our shadow, etc., can take part in creating a new Hi story. We can then to deeply into The Way of the Heart.

Philosophy is the discipline devoted to the study of the fundamental questions of everyday life. As a discipline, it aims to give sensible and coherent answers to these questions. These are meant to guide you to a higher or better way of understanding yourself and the world so that you will have more wisdom.
Philosophy is the study of wisdom. As a "repository of wisdom", it constructs and deconstructs our world. It makes our world "rational, relative, Socratic, realistic, stoic, cynical, skeptical, romantic, humanistic, idealistic, etc., depending on the 'school' of philosophy in play."
It has, along with spirituality, influenced how we make ethical decisions, and view good and evil. It is nested in the foundations of how we construct our beliefs about the arts, sciences and spirituality. This, in turn, sits in our mostly unconscious precognitive decision making process involved in our business and money choices, social construction, views on ecology, the way we play, move through sports, and how we view all of our relationships.
In the "modern" world (another philosophy), we are told science and mathematics are "empirical" and separated from subjective feelings. We sometimes forget that how we assemble the "facts" and even the facts we choose to see are governed fundamentally by the underlying, often unconscious, unquestioned philosophy we have adopted as "truth".
This "truth" is worth conscious examination. Active engagement with philosophy might involve an exploration into where these "schools" of philosophy have come from and how they have formed our world view. It is worth asking which "Philosophy" you would choose as a conscious act to create your world and your Way of the Heart.
Philosophy is actually the love of wisdom from the LATIN "philo" meaning love and "Sophia" meaning wisdom. It is perhaps meant to include the sense of wonder that leads us to ask, "Why am I here?" or "What are we meant to do?" or "What's my Life Mission?". What "philosophy", for the love of wisdom, would be welcomed by your Way of the Heart?