Nirmala's book, Living From the Heart has now been translated into Dutch with a new title of Heartfulness: Leven Vanuit Je Hart. You can buy a paperback here:

http://www.bol.com/nl/p/heartfulness/9200000000037443/

And the paperback and Kobo ebook are available here: http://www.libris.nl/webshop.cfm/SearchResults.aspx?oa=True&zoek=Nirmala&pf=&pr=&ge=&la=dut

DutchLiving

It is also available as a Dutch language ebook on kobobooks.com. Just do a search for Nirmala. (May not be available in every country including the US)

And of course it is still available in English and Spanish as described here:

For centuries, spiritual teachings have pointed us to the Heart as the source of wisdom, truth, peace, and love. We call it the Heart because these deeper realities are experienced most strongly in the region of the physical heart. However, the spiritual Heart is not limited to a location in your body. The Heart is the totality of your connection with the essential qualities and greater dimensions of your true nature as limitless Being. Any full exploration of the larger truth of your Being must include a discovery of the capacities and qualities of this tender, loving, and wise aspect of your true nature.

Living from the Heart consists of three related pieces that explore living from the spiritual Heart. Part One, From the Heart, offers simple ways to drop your awareness into the Heart and thereby shift into a more open, allowing perspective and to more fully experience the world and your true nature as aware space. It goes on to explore dropping awareness into the belly and ultimately into the larger spiritual Heart, which includes the mind, heart and belly. These simple shifts in perspective can profoundly alter your experience of life and its challenges. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you experience; what matters is where you experience it from.

Part Two, The Heart’s Wisdom, explains how the Heart is a wise and accurate guide to the truth. The truth is whatever opens your Heart and quiets your mind. This simple definition cuts through any confusing ideas and beliefs to the direct source of wisdom and guidance available in your own Heart.

Part Three, Love Is for Giving, points to the true source of love in your own Heart. The essence of love is the spacious, open attention of our awareness. Awareness is the gentlest, kindest, and most intimate force in the world. It touches everything but doesn’t impose or make demands. Surprisingly, this awareness, or love, is experienced most fully when you give it to others, not when you get it from others. The more love you give, the more love you experience. It is by freely giving love that we are filled with love.

Throughout, there is a pointing beyond the experience of the Heart and its wisdom, peace, and love to the possibility of recognizing these essential qualities as who and what you are. The Heart with all its joy, satisfaction, peace, love, and wisdom is not just something you can experience more fully; it is what you have always been and always will be. In recognizing your true nature as this fullness of Being, you can ultimately rest from all seeking and effort, and just be who you are.

Purchase English version on Amazon:   Paperback for $11.95    Kindle ebook for $2.99   New: Audiobook version

Purchase ebook version on other stores:  Nook    Smashwords    Sony     Kobo    iBooks

Special Offer: Receive an audiobook version for free by signing up for a free trial on Audible.com

Sample the book:

New: Purchase Nirmala's books and Kindle ebooks on Amazon.co.UK and Amazon's European websites: Amazon.DE, Amazon.FR, Amazon.ES and Amazon.IT

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(Note: this blog post is included in Nirmala's most recent book, Meeting the Mystery, which is available here.)

Q: When I hear people expressing their beliefs, I want to get people to agree with my beliefs or think of me in a certain light. Lately, when I’m approached by someone asserting a strong belief, I see them doing the same thing. Still, an overwhelming desire arises in me to get them to see it my way, but that’s just another viewpoint! When I notice I’m doing that I let it go, usually by not responding or by smiling, listening, and allowing them to speak but not taking what they say personally. Not taking it personally is the hardest thing!

A: Viewpoints are only a problem when they are held rigidly. When we hold our viewpoints lightly, we are more able to recognize that all viewpoints have some truth to them. Then we can share and explore our own and other’s viewpoints and be enriched by them all. This doesn’t mean all viewpoints are equally true, which is the trap the media falls into when they try to present a “balanced” report and so include a viewpoint that has almost no truth to it. But by holding our own and other’s viewpoints lightly and exploring them openly and thoroughly, we can determine how much truth a viewpoint has.

When we hold our viewpoints lightly, we are less likely to feel threatened by other people’s viewpoints and therefore less likely to feel a need to change someone else’s mind. There’s room for all viewpoints. You may also find that introducing someone to your viewpoint is much easier if you first express some agreement with that person’s viewpoint.

The reason people hold their viewpoints rigidly is simply because they are afraid. Holding any idea or belief rigidly is a response driven by fear. There are two movements within life. One is love and the other is fear. All movement is motivated by one of these. Love is the movement or expression of our essence. It includes everything from a sweet personal love for a lover or child to a profound sense of the divine oneness and goodness of everything. Love includes all of the qualities of our Being: awareness, spaciousness, aliveness, and connectedness all rolled into one. Love is our essence. It is what we are made of, and it’s the most real and true thing there is. In contrast, fear is any movement of thought that restricts, constricts, distorts, or limits the flow of love. Fear is a conceptual structure in our mind that limits or distorts our experience of the limitless love that is always here. Love exists outside of thought, while fear doesn’t exist except as a movement of thought.

Like many of the things that seem to be dualities, love and fear are not actually two opposite realities. The apparent duality of love and fear is like the apparent duality of wet and dry: Only one thing exists, and that is water. When there’s a lot of it, we call that wet. When there isn’t much of it, we call that dry. Dryness is just a concept. Similarly, fear is not an actual thing; it is simply a word we use to describe the relative absence of love. Fear is any movement of our ego or mind that restricts or limits our experience of love and thereby gives us a dry experience that is relatively empty of love. The love is not actually destroyed or gone; it’s just not in our experience anymore.

Holding rigidly to a viewpoint or belief is a movement of fear because it limits or constricts the flow of awareness. By this definition, all ideas and beliefs are movements of fear, as they limit or direct our awareness and love. However, this is always a matter of degree, as some movements of thought constrict our experience of love more than others. Furthermore, this capacity to limit or direct awareness isn’t bad or wrong, but the mechanism that consciousness came up with to create the entire world and all its experiences and illusions. To experience something, we have to limit or direct awareness. That is how Being creates contrast and differences. To use a metaphor, in a world made up completely of water, without a way to dry things out, everything would always be soaking wet. In this world where the only reality is love, without ideas, beliefs, and even fears, we would be drowning in love with no contrasting dryness.

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