Soften your heart

Today while meditating, I felt my heart soften. It was the usual process, I felt myself diving inwards, sinking into my body. I acknowledged the various thoughts jumping out at me - the things I needed to do, the things I wanted to do, the things I felt proud of, the things that made me ashamed.

I left them behind, and sank deeper still. I felt my heart beat, and I felt a wave originating at the very base of my lungs seeking to breathe in rhythm with my heart. I felt both slow, and calm. And then, very gently, I felt a part of my heart soften. I wonder if it’s an indicator of calcification lol.

But as it softened, I felt a wave of love for the world. This is a place of beauty. If our time must end soon, we need to acknowledge the magnificence of what we were brought into. I felt my body soften along with it, releasing tension around impending doom, around my own personal inabilities, around those I know. All I felt was a wave of love, gratitude and compassion. The wave felt like a tingling in every particle within me. Flowing outwards towards the universe. A symphony of joy cascading outwards in ever increasing waves, before peaking at a point of silence. Thanking the universe for granting me this brief gift of time.

In that moment of stillness, I realized not everyone feels this love. For some, the world’s beauty is obscured by pain, by fear, by the inability to feel such warmth. It dawned on me that this absence of love, this inability to connect with it, may be our species’ greatest tragedy—perhaps the true punishment we face if we destroy ourselves. Yet, in this fleeting moment of awareness, I could only offer compassion, not judgment, for all that we are and all that we fail to be.