Upcoming events across the web:

• Friday, Nov 6: Open IS Connection Call
• Sunday, Nov 8: IS Community Call
• Saturday, Nov 14: Being With It All @ Relational Dojo

The previous newsletter was "Collective Wisdom" and last Sunday's Community Call was titled "Relating to growth".

The first episode of Conscious Evolution: The Journey Within has been released! Listen, rate, review, and share to support.

Open your heart to reality, and you'll feel the aliveness of... well, the indescribable aliveness of "mountain-top" experiences. You've probably had at least a few in your life: peak experiences, on the edge of overwhelming, touching nature or god or the universe or pure love.

Open your heart to the realness of what's in front of you. To do so is to perceive without squinting or flinching, to be present without judging, to allow everything to be as it already is, to find love arising without choking or forcing it.

This doesn't imply letting go of discernment or treating everything as real as it claims to be. Words, stories, media — indirect portrayals are not themselves the actual things they are claiming to portray.

This does imply building and having the capacity to handle intensity. The main reason we don't live with open hearts normally is that it's intense. There's so much emotional content there, especially coming through other humans. Letting our heart be receptive to the energies of the hurt and hurting people all around us, it's maybe not even a good idea if we don't know how to metabolize our feelings of empathic resonance. The homeless beggar and the hurried executive alike are leaking their fears and needs unconsciously, and societal norms are that we pretend not to notice. Or we close ourselves enough such that we actually don't notice them, not at that level. Being perceived and seen can be disconcerting to folks! Or magnetic, attracting them to attempt to latch on.

So yeah there are tradeoffs and downsides, a real cost to opening your heart. Openness begets sensitivity begets intensity. Intensity can be exhilarating or excruciating or both. The imperative invitation goes... I send it to those for whom all emotions are friends. To those who have the space to hold the energy when it isn't shunted off by a closed-off defensive layer at the edge of our consciousness. To those who have loved their enemies.

Cheers,
James