The world will try to convince you to close your heart – that you should always protect yourself, and avoid pain and emotion and learning and growing. One of our great duties in this life, then, is to approach it with an open heart. Though we know struggle is coming, we must receive it with open eyes and open hearts, and work toward transcendence.
Living with an open heart is not going forth without fear. Open-hearted living is knowing what to do with fear. Fear, like all our emotions, is here to help us. We must learn to use it constructively. Peter Levine says what we experience as fear is just a strong biological impulse to fight and defend ourselves when we sense danger. He also says we have an equally strong impulse to restrict or hold ourselves back when our self-protective instincts are activated so as not to cause further damage. This is a “constricting” impulse. When we “over-constrict,” we enter self-imposed paralysis. We shut down. Too often, we stay in these states of paralysis and disconnect from life and all its color. We disconnect from our emotions and from other people.
If we can be present and trust our bodies and our minds, we can encounter what threatens us and find something new. A constructive and creative response to threat is finding the perfect balance between aggression and restraint, or learning to live in and navigate the tension of those two opposing forces. We don’t always do it gracefully, but if we are working in the tension, we are moving in the right direction.
The fear is, many times, merely saying, “Pay attention.” It is telling you to be on your toes more than it is telling you this thing will destroy you. The anxiety is priming you for threat, but more so just pushing you to perform at a high level, or to be focused precisely on the task at hand. Moving into conflict or facing a big challenge requires that you have your wits about you. We can run from these opportunities, or accept the opportunity to do something difficult.
Engaging with these challenges is living with an open heart. There is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, and there is always a way out of what seems like an impossible situation. There are no dead ends. Hope is what gets you there. There is hope living inside which you can apply and bring some creativity to the situation. Go toward the darkness or the evil or the pain or the risk because you were made to do that.