Practice 11

Heart Creation

Congratulations on making it to Practice 11!

In order to develop love—universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it—one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad.

- Chogyam Trungpa

I like this axiom I saw once in a film: “When choosing between being right and being kind, choose kind.” This is what love would have us do, what our souls would have us do. The ego would always chose being right over kind because it cares about being right, being viewed by others as right, and thus will often try to create a fear around the kind choice because ego’s all about reputation. Well, it could choose kindness too, but only if it wanted to be perceived as kind. We are faced with these sorts of choices every day—with our partners, with our co-workers, with ourselves, and the kind of choices we make creates the energy that will exist because of those choices.

A willful ego, or a willing soul.

There’s this great Native American parable about two wolves that illustrates this natural tension between ego and heart will:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” 

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” 

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

You are a creator being, and whether your perceive it or not, most every act you commit in a given day is an act of original creation. Each creation is either neutral, feeds the soul-consciousness, or it feeds the ego.

Nobody else carries the perspective you carry, and no one else has had the life experiences you’ve had, and therefore no one can create what you can—from the ‘little things’ such as your thoughts to the ‘big things’ such as how you treat others. These are your creations and their legacy is the ripple effects that will travel through lifetimes, doing and undoing unforeseeable/unknowable things.

This reality isn’t meant to scare you into a sort of reconciliation with a burden of responsibility, instead it seeks to connect you to the center of creation that provides the best sense of creating the best possible effects and outcomes in your life and in the interconnected field of the collective. Feeding the good wolf means not creating on the behalf of the defended, separate, superior, judgmental interests of ego-consciousness but instead tuning into what the heart wants to create—connection, compassion, understanding, kindness, healing, etc.

Have you created something in the past you wish you could take back? I think we all have, but taking a moment to review that creation—ask yourself, where did it come from? Was it perhaps born from a place of ego-damage and a subsequent ego-retaliation or was it from the heart? I think it’s rare that we would use our fantasy re-do’s for past creations of the heart. So now’s our chance to look a little deeper into where we are coming from day-to-day, moment-to-moment, and perhaps deepen our responsibility for our creative acts.

This meditation will help draw you deeper into the field of energy created by your heart-space that, when we tap into it and let it become us, will help us create a soul-driven legacy built of infinite ripples of loving intention.