Heart Warriors: Dispelling Darkness, Evoking Love in the Fellowship of the Heart

My Morning Pages today is a prime example of trying to pack too many strong feelings into 300 words or so. But that’s okay, because it was my heart, but as a writer, it is incumbent on me to clarify some things and expand on some ideas. Plus, I ended up with no room for the quote I referred to.

Therefore, I will begin with the quote, which I hope will serve as a framework for clarifying my thoughts. Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Shadow work is the path of the Heart Warrior.” (Shared with me by one of my social media friends).

Before I really begin, let me say this unequivocally: I know virtually nothing about this process, and there are practitioners who help folks expose aspects of inner selves that have been hidden or repressed for many years, and by bringing them into conscious light there can be acceptance and healing. Even though I have never been with a shadow worker, I have known the effect of it — and need to know much more, I’m sure. I think I have been able to come into the reality of it based on the last sentence of that quote.

My own heart has led me to consider and expose much of the work of ego in keeping painful things suppressed and hidden. Ego tries to spare us pain. As Jung said, though, people turn to absurd behavior to avoid pain, and the most absurd is refusing to know Self, because in that knowledge, in that awakening, in that enlightenment much is exposed. The risk of accepting and dealing with those exposed selves buried in the darkness of our souls — well, it’s what makes so many continue walking in a shadowed mediocrity, obscurity, and unfulfilled life.

The process of responding to Heart, coming to know Self, and determining purpose forms the core of my novel, The Fellowship of the Heart. The light of Heart love for self results in this process of discovery, and this ends in a fuller, more significant, and real expressed love to all of this Universe. Love, then, is the ultimate outcome of “Heart Warriors,” according to Jung, or of those who enter into the Fellowship of the Heart, according to me. I simply wish to continue discovering self and help others to do the same.

I want this love to energize my novel, but far more than that, my life. Heart love can unleash the breadths and depths of humans in so many miraculous ways. It also works paradoxically. How? Heart brings me to understand some people make conscious decisions to shut out Heart, to not respond to or hear Heart, and they act destructively to others, which will come back to bite them in the ass. So, while I have sympathy, my love says I stand against such when I see and sense destruction.

Like what? Like the current situation in North Dakota in which a branch of the Sioux tribe is seeking to prevent the Energy Transfer Company from constructing an oil pipeline across ancient ancestral land. No, it is not on the reservation, just one to two miles away but destroying artifacts and history of the Standing Rock Sioux. Enough background.

​Love leads me to say the officials, both corporate and governmental, represent the very sort of people who form an oligarchy that has rejected, pretty consciously, heart truth. Those who are seeking, those who plod along, and even those who are prospering but feel there has to be something more — these do not decide to consciously hurt and destroy others.

I use this Dakota Access pipeline event — very active and turning slightly violent this weekend — to show how heart rejection works and how those who have heeded heart take a stand in love. Shining light into darkness, whether it’s in our own souls or into society, may evoke conflict. I cannot understand how powerful, greedy, heartless, control mongers are allowed to use the same principles of oppression today for which we have condemned our forefathers. The principle is no fucking different. The manufactured scenarios of all the financial hardships, loss of jobs, blah, blah, blah could never have been put forth if the possibilities had never been initiated, possibilities based on wholesale destruction with no guarantee of future safety from leakage into the tribe’s drinking water. NO EXCUSE. Anger.

But even in anger, my every exhalation is love — paradoxical, eh? I don’t need to explain love. I don’t need to make my expressed love conform to society’s conventions of what love should be. Love allows me to be passionate and enthusiastic, indignant and accepting, forgiving and angry all, sometimes, in the same context. I love with sympathy and empathy in soul light; love without heeding rationalizations; love with love that produces productive anger — not blind rage.
Acknowledging, choosing, and heeding Heart allows discovery of self, of aspects of self buried for years; it’s a process of love. While I have not discussed the next part of my novel — okay, wait, I have to briefly!

I left Eric feeling sick about things in his life. The light of his heart is piercing some of the darkness that has been oppressing him. I have begun moving on to the second chapter in which I’m showing Anne’s self-deception about her life. Her younger colleagues recognize stirrings in her, but she is not quite there yet.

​That’s it for tonight. My heart helps me stand for love, express love, know love. It arouses me to those acting against love, in utter ego. The answer to darkness comes in awakening to heart. Heart Warriors, unite and enjoy the Fellowship of the Heart!