47 - Our Year in Review
“Living with Heart: From Birth to Death” podcast has been downloaded in 49 states and 68 countries. Thank you to all of our listeners. We are very grateful to you and also grateful that so many of you have shared this podcast with family and friends. We hope for many more listeners in the coming year because we deeply believe in what we are offering and how it can do for people.
I have never tired of or even thought I knew all the depths of The Spiritual Root System, even after all the years that I have been talking and teaching about it. We truly are created as emotional and spiritual creatures, created to find fulfillment in relationship. What seems so basic now, to almost everyone, sounded foreign to many, many people in 1991 when I began to communicate the power of surrendering to how we are created.
About 15 years ago, neuroscience research began to validate the material I have been talking about. The material I talk about is ancient, has always been true from the beginning, and is amazingly Biblical.
It is a reliable scientific material, and yet even more, it is faith-based proof of the existence and goodness of God.
We are “heart” people who have the addition of intellect that develops over time after birth. We are born as “heart” people, and we are all created the same way.
This fact sets the stage for the actions of a loving and moral people. When I look at you, I am looking at myself, in terms of being a feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping creation.
This factor allows me to recognize the benefit of practicing the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). As our sameness allows us to develop conscience, we can bless each other.
The more we deny our sameness, the more we harm each other. Of course, no matter what, we are going to still need to seek forgiveness; we are going to harm each other.
We have truly entered a new era, one of the heart.
Everywhere I listen and look, I am hearing more and more about feelings from a relational context. However, we are also in an era that will validate reactivity that is actually an impaired expression of genuine feelings.
The Voice of the Heart: A Call to Full Living truly has become a staple and a classic about the accurate use of feelings, versus reactions to feelings.
Dealing with our feelings truly does help us move from surviving to thriving. By taking ownership of how we are created, we really do become available for fulfillment. Relationship is only possible if we are bringing what makes it possible to the forefront. Survival builds walls. Thriving comes from being “response-able” to live how we are created.
Only through me taking ownership of what life is like for me, both its joys and sorrows, can I relate to what life is like for you.
Empathy (my own pathos/care for myself) can lead to relating and caring about another with compassion (with pathos/ care for another).
We really are assigned to, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23). We are to discern, treasure, attend to, be responsible with, and address the heart, because it is the center of our beings, and that which connects us to all of life, each other, and God. Amazing really!!
Ownership of our actions and attitudes has a lot to do with us having:
• compassion
• willingness to seek and give forgiveness
• having boundaries
Hope and the courage to hope has been a central theme throughout the year.
Hope and hoping is a courageous action. God has given us hope as an “inextinguishable flame” within us. It is what points more than anything to our powerlessness over how we are created.
We are hopeful creatures by nature, or by birth, as in, we are created with it!
The first and second chapters of The Voice of the Heart speaks in detail about the power of hope, as well as feelings, needs, desire, and longings, too.
If I were to summarize the whole podcast as to the thematic emphasis of the year, I would say it has been about returning to how we are created. And once we return to our origins, we learn to live within the context of how we are created, rather than running from or hiding from how we are created.
As we are born, so shall we remain. Therefore, concerning children and parents, children are attachment seeking creatures. We, the grown-ups, need to raise them accordingly.
We need to “root” our children before we attempt to “shape” them.
Children reach out from their “root” system with feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope. It is the parents work to affirm and confirm that they are made well.
As their roots reach up, they need to be drawn to the attachment by being affirmed and confirmed as emotional and spiritual creations.
Parenting with Heart by Stephen James and Chip Dodd goes into details about this process.
Caregivers offer growth support by knowing that they themselves are simply older versions of the same material; therefore, because they know what it’s like to be human, they can offer:
• compassion
• tolerance
• understanding
• patience
As the child grows, they can be pruned (not molded) as they learn how to live their God-created makeup. But first they have to have confidence in their “roots”. Parents offer guardrails, but we really don’t control the outcomes. We cannot mold them; we can only assist in growing them. If we try to control them, we will stifle their God-given makeup.
Kahil Gibran has a section in his book of poetry, The Prophet, called “On Children.” He writes the following:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of
Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they
belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not
your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not
their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of
tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but
seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries
with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your
children as living arrows are sent
forth.
You are the bows from which your
children as living arrows are sent
forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the
path of the infinite, and He bends
you with His might that His arrows
may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand
be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that
flies, so He loves the bow that is stable.
Gibran references God with the capital “His” as the one who desires our good. Gibran writes that God loves the parent who is stable, as in the one who raises a child with hope, longings, desire, needs, and feelings, and also knows that they are not in control.
We want to raise children to be rooted, so they can grow into who God created them to be. If they become deeply rooted, they will grow strong. They will be able to offer their future “shade” and “fruits” to a world in need of both.
We all need to become Portable Sanctuaries like is described in Episode #26.
Living with Heart podcast has shed a lot of light on the power of vulnerability. How vulnerability allows us to be fully human. We face, feel, and deal with how we are created.
We learn how to DO feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope, which requires vulnerability as the starting point, so we can grow into strong, “life-giving” people.
“Living Fully on ‘The River,’” Episode 18 speaks to how this strength through vulnerability can occur.
This whole podcast is not about returning to childhood dependency; it is about facing how we are created so that we grow up to contribute everything we can.
Each one of us is gifted, and there is a world in need of the gifts you and I have to offer.