Allow me to invite you on a journey to your heart-center – that place of Divine Light and Love. In the video clip below, I have created a “Loving-Kindness Meditation” that is meant to be visual and without sound so that both Deaf and Hearing people can view it equally. It’s about 6 minutes long. Sit back, relax, soften your view and open your heart and enjoy. A blog post follows with more questions and insight.
Just click on the arrow in the frame…
When I meditate or pray, I often focus my thoughts on my heart-center and address my prayers to God as “Divine Light.” While this may sound like some New Age mumbo-jumbo, it actually comes from a place of my Catholic/Christian roots.
As a child, I was surrounded by statues, prayer cards, candles, paintings and stained glass with images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Immaculate Heart of Mary. What I loved about those images was that there were always rays of what I believed to be God’s Divine Light emanating from their heart-center — the same source of Light that shines through us ALL.
Those images reflected that the heart-center was clearly the source of Divine Light, Compassion and Love. This is what “Divine Light” means for me, and this is how I pray. That Divine Light at our heart-center is how I see God’s Holy Spirit in each of us.
With these holy, heart-centered images in mind, I have been meditating lately on “compassion” and “loving-kindness” as a form of prayer. It’s relatively easy to hold the sick, the poor, the hungry, the neglected, those suffering in parts of the world or even my family in the loving places of my heart. But the challenge comes when I try to find a place of compassion in my heart for people who hurt, tear down, rape, abuse, destroy, kill…..
I am searching for a way to hold these kinds of people in some narrow crack of my heart that is not already hardened to them, a place where my heart can soften to their humanness, to the horror they must have had in their young lives, to the suffering they cause themselves. Can I find the Holy Spirit — God’s Divine Light — within those who do the most evil things? Are we not all a part of the same source of Light? This troubles me often and my heart is frequently challenged.
How do we find Compassion for those who are vengeful, dangerous, hateful or malicious such as the murderer in the VA Tech tragedy? How do we find Forgiveness for those who persecute, discriminate, start wars, or seek to demean, degrade or destroy all that we are — our language, our culture, our beliefs, our core identity, the very essence of our being?
How do we find Love for those who try to break us by telling us we are not good enough, not smart enough, not right enough, not religious enough, not deaf enough, not hearing enough, not whole enough, not loved….?
This is some of my deepest heart-work. My goal is to expand my ability to be Compassionate and practice Loving-Kindness to ALL.
Blessings and Namaste’ ~
