Trusting the Heart When You Feel Contracted and Dry

Here is a comment someone sent me in an email in response to my previous post about the recipe for Truth, where I suggest that an opening or resonance in the heart is the most important ingredient in knowing something is true, just as chocolate chips are the most important ingredient in chocolate chip cookies:

I have been suffering with a lack of chocolate chips in the areas of my life work, finances, and moving to a new area.  Although I felt into this article I still could not reach the chocolate chips to move myself forward.  I just felt the dough. I feel off purpose or stagnant, like my pot is boiling dry and I'm not sure how to expand deeper into me.

Here is my response:

Trusting the Heart is particularly challenging when you feel contracted and dry. But that is the right way for a small or incomplete perspective to feel. When life seems off purpose and there is no Heart resonance with what is happening, the invitation is to be with the experience of contracted dryness just as it is. Sometimes it just isn’t time for the truer direction to appear, as the bigger mystery often has its own timing, which doesn’t always fit with our agenda. Sometimes there is something more to be seen about our resistance and conditioning, and often we are only willing to look at our conditioning when that conditioning is no longer working for us. The dryness and difficulty may get us to finally pay attention to something that needs to be seen.

When the Heart is contracted, it is still working perfectly to show you the nature of your experience. The real art of inquiry is to give space and curiosity to the tightness itself, instead of trying to push through to a bigger truth. Our conditioned reactions are showing up to be seen, accepted, and loved. Once this conditioning is seen, it naturally falls into proper perspective. These small truths don’t need to be gotten rid of, but just seen as small. There’s room in our awareness and in our Heart for all of life’s experiences, including very small and limited perspectives.

While questioning the truth of our limited or stuck places may be challenging, doing so can also be profoundly liberating. The discovery that even an experience of dryness and stagnation is something to be valued and explored frees us from the compulsion to try to fix or change our experience. There are insights and treasures to be found in every aspect of our experience. We can explore our experience, not to get a better one, but to fully taste and digest the treasures found in every experience.