By Irene Sheard, Aged care worker and grandmother, Goonellabah
We often hear the phrase “opening our heart” but what does it truly mean?
There are a lot of references about the heart such as hard hearted, mean hearted, cold hearted, and of course the one many aspire to, “open hearted”. I have always considered myself a fairly “kind hearted” person who cared about others and made myself available to help others whenever I could. It is easy and convenient to think of ourselves in this way as we then don’t have to change anything and can keep living our life in the same old way, but how true is this perception of ourselves? Could what we think is our heart be an emotional part of us and not the original loving heart?
I have been unfolding this question for some years now by attending presentations by Serge Benhayon, the founder of Universal Medicine.
One of the first things I realised by attending these presentations is that I am already everything that is glorious and loving and that the parts of me that I think I am are only cover ups that I have learnt to live by, to literally cover up my hurts. I then believe that I am this person, whether it be a positive belief, such as “I am loving and caring” or a negative belief that I am “a horrible person who hurts others”.
As I dug deeper into this I realised that my behaviours had developed in reaction to my past hurts and fears and that I wasn’t being as gentle and loving with others as I had previously believed and I especially wasn’t being gentle and loving with myself.
As I explored further I began to feel the harshness and hardness in which I lived. It was quite shocking to me at first, but when I started to make those first steps towards gentleness (a bridge to love) I could then feel the depth of the hardness and how far away from love I was actually living. As I took these small steps I could feel a melting away of the hardness and a more connected way of being. I was able to realise this by observing how I was feeling in my body.
I began to understand the teaching by Serge Benhayon that “The body is the marker of all Truth” and this allowed me, with the support of Universal Medicine practitioners, to feel deeper and deeper into my body and I started to understand its language. I no longer felt a victim of my body and began to understand it was my friend and I began to take notice of its messages.
I started by practising gentleness in my daily actions in life, such as cleaning the house, cleaning my teeth, washing my face, drying my body after a shower, putting on makeup, washing up and putting myself to bed for the night.
My life started to change to a less chaotic way of living where I was able to feel a rhythm to my day and a lovely letting go at night for rest.
I was definitely feeling a more loving sense towards myself, but sometimes I chose to ignore the messages from my body, especially when I felt I needed to please others. I became more aware of my “helping” patterns and started questioning the reasons I did things for others and what energy I actually did them in. I realised the reasons I helped others was that I found it almost impossible to say “no” to requests and that I enjoyed the fact that I could be seen as “a good person”.
This was not an easy pattern to change. There were reactions from the people who had experienced my willingness to “help” in spite of my own needs. These reactions were mainly from family members whom I had taken on as a “rescue mission” for years and believed I could help them live a “better” life. It allowed me to feel important and that I had all the answers, that they weren’t even searching for. Suffice to say this was very exhausting on my body. It tried to tell me by manifesting chronic fatigue, depression and anxiousness. In the past I had only used band-aid solutions to deal with these conditions but now felt I needed to explore the deeper causes.
I then began to feel how many “hurts” I had experienced over the years. This was even harder to feel and admit but as I started to release these hurts from my body it felt lighter and more settled. I learnt that I actually have a choice to allow someone else to so-called “hurt” me, or instead I can bring understanding to the situation and allow my heart to stay “open” and in connection with myself and others.
This was a process that took some time to unfold and is something I still deal with on a daily basis. I started to feel a lot more energetic, a lot lighter and began to enjoy my life and take steps that I never would have imagined I could take when I was so bound by my old patterns of hurt and fear.
Part of this process was to start to take responsibility for my health and I began to have medical checkups, something I had neglected in the past.
In 2016, six years after I was introduced to Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine, I was diagnosed with chronic heart disease. I had four blocked heart arteries, the main ones severely blocked.
This was a shock to me, to my friends and family and even the doctors, who were puzzled as I presented as a healthy, vibrant 71-year-old woman. A very different person than I had been six years previously. The angiogram pictures revealed to me someone who had been contracted for a long time by not allowing love to flow in and out of their heart.
I was offered a procedure where the cardiologist would drill the blocked calcium from my arteries and insert metal stents to hold the arteries open. The blockages were so massive that the procedure ended up taking over three hours, an unusually long time.
It took me some time to come to terms with and accept this diagnosis and the subsequent procedure as I believed myself to be super healthy by this stage of my life, but because I had learnt to “read” what my body was telling me, I was able to understand that my heart was now showing me how contracted and harsh I had been living for so long.
I now have an opportunity with open arteries to live in a more “open hearted” way.
This process continues and expands as I learn to be more honest with myself and others and not live with the pressure that I need to be a “nice, caring” person so others will like me.
It is all here within my own heart, I just need to be open to listening to the true energy of the heart, not the false, emotional one that can overlie it.
I wonder what my other organs have in store to tell me?
Read more:
Medicine and Serge Benhayon 
Irene I always get so much from your story, particularly the openness and honesty with which you share. “I learnt that I actually have a choice to allow someone else to so-called “hurt” me, or instead I can bring understanding to the situation and allow my heart to stay “open” and in connection with myself and others.” This is very powerful, it offers us the responsibility to bring understanding and remain in love, or react and withdraw in hurt, something I have done many times – and whilst it is understandable, the hurt is actually not worth it. The hurt becomes a poison within our own lives, and we can then reduce the full expression of ourselves, and change our way of living with unsupportive behaviours.
I can so relate to taking on the ‘rescue mission’ as a child I was always trying to reconcile the differences in my family. I realise looking back that I was trying to be the ‘good’ child. The need to be good runs very strong as it is used as a form of recognition. Being ‘good’ in a large and unruly family you stand out and hence you get the recognition that is so craved.
Every part of our body is giving us feedback if we care to listen. I really appreciate listening because I’ve already learnt so much. There’s never not something to learn.
It makes sense that when our arteries are unblocked we can love more … exactly like a river that is cleared so it can flow and very inspiring that with this you actually feel you have more capacity to love more than ever before.
Irene, I loved this statement, ‘I no longer felt a victim of my body and began to understand it was my friend and I began to take notice of its messages’. This is the relationship we need to get to with our bodies, then we can hear it more often. Our body is our friend and if we are uncaring towards it, then it will only end up letting you know that it’s not happy with you. Build a strong relationship with the body, and it will be by your side, simple…
What I can feel is how much pressure and imposition we are actually putting on ourselves and our body when we develop and live from a pattern of behaviour in reaction to the hurt and the fear.
Totally agree with your comment Fumiyo when we live in reaction to life to the hurts and the fear we have about life then we live in contraction. Living in contraction affects everything we do and has a compounding effect so that by the time we reach a certain age we are ready to give up on life, which is why so many older people become stuck in their ways. It may take a few lifetimes to clear the ill energy the contraction has on our bodies but when we can do this the body feels so free, light and expanded.
Irene thank you so much for sharing your life, there are so many gems of wisdom here in your blog and I deeply appreciated your honesty, much of which I can relate to. “I no longer felt a victim of my body and began to understand it was my friend and I began to take notice of its messages.”, when we think of illness as random it’s easy to consider ourselves a victim when a health condition arises, rather than it being a communication. For me working with Universal Medicine brought the understanding of the body, its divine particles, and our place in the Universe, that we are part of a larger scheme of things and that our body is supporting us to evolve back to our divine origins. Our choices and behaviours are either aligned to the soul or not and our body is able to constantly communicate the truth to us either way.
This is such a good example of how our bodies physically respond as a direct result of how we feel.
Sandra, spot on. Our bodies react by cause and effect. Like anything materialistic, if left untreated, will break down eventually. Attend to it earlier or care for it, it will keep going. Just like a car, oil it, put the best petrol, service it, and the quality will be felt, and it will drive better. Our bodies are no different.
There are no baby steps to opening our hearts to others unless we let others in.
This makes so much sense to me, closed heart – blocked arteries! Feeling my own heart reading this blog I can feel a hardness where an openness could otherwise be. This has changed dramatically over the years but there is definitely more hardness to melt.
Aimee I agree with you reading this blog again I can feel the hardness in my right shoulder and right arm. I’m bracing myself against the world, to me humanity is crying out as the intensity of life is unbearable. We know there is more to life than what we are currently living but we have seemingly lost the access to what we know is there but cannot at this moment find. The world is going through a huge shift and it’s to allow these seismic shifts to take place and to not feel that one has to jump in to save the world, it is already saved by the shifts taking place.
I like this phrase: to have an ‘original loving heart’. It introduces something great and ancient about being human.
I liked that too Shami, and the distinction between our original loving heart and the emotional heart.
The way we are in life, has a profound effect on the physiology of the body.
It definitely does Sarah. Reading and being aware of what our bodies are showing us is medicine.
Open heart, open arteries it makes sense, and you can feel the lightness expressed here in living this way.
The more we start to live in a natural way, following the lead of our body, the more we can see all the ways that we’ve disowned, abandoned and disconnected from our body.
How amazing it is that they can go into our hearts and unblock the build-up. It paints a picture of how we not only harden ourselves to keep the world out from hurting us but we physically build a wall inside our arteries and that is the end result of living that way. The sad thing is that this is such a common procedure these days.
Yes indeed… The term open-heart surgery sometimes it’s incredibly appropriate.
I know someone who had open heart surgery and since the procedure has become a completely different person. They are literally so much more open hearted to the world. They used to be shut off from everyone keeping us all at arms length, the transformation we could say is a miracle.
It’s amazing how the body keeps speaking to us and grabs any window of opportunity to let us know how it has been dealing with the choices we have been making all along and bring healing. It’s like it really knows the exact moment when we are ready to face more responsibility, or the lack of. Its timing is just impeccable.
Opening our hearts for others starts with an open heart and deep self-care for ourselves first.
I guess someone reading this might think ‘but how do I listen to my heart?’ Well for me it’s by turning down the volume of what my head is telling me. And it’s strange at first, to trust what you feel – what your heart is telling you – if you’ve been used to using your head to think, analyse, measure, etc yourself through life. But it is very natural and feels this way too.
Nick I agree with what you have expressed, by a lived experience. I was working on a work project and I started to get a headache. It felt as though I had gone very mental to get the task completed. I took myself off for a walk in the park and just allowed myself to feel the beautiful surroundings which brought me back into my body. It’s interesting to observe how much our bodies hurt when we use mental energy to get through life and that for the majority of us how unaware we are of this fact.
So many of our behaviours are tainted by something that has happened in the past – I often remember something from my childhood and think to myself: “my god, am I still holding onto this?!” the answer is usually yes, if we don’t renounce the energy of that which holds us, it will forever remain within our bodies.
Getting to the heart of the matter of treating ourselves with the same gentle and tender love as we would a precious infant.
It is quite surprising that there are forms of being accommodating and helpful that are indications of a closed heart yet these forms are very common. A beautiful blog, Irene.
Thank you, Irene, reading this today has really helped me.
We can keep telling ourselves that we are loving or kind hearted but it is when we are offered a reflection of true love that really questions our relationship to ourselves. It is then a case of whether we choose to be inspired or react emotionally with a vengeance to that which we are not living.
Gentleness (a bridge to love). So true but where are we taught this or shown this, I have never heard this said other than at Universal Medicine, yet it is one of the key principles of understanding and being able to feel true love
I don’t think you are alone in not letting love in and out freely so it feels like your story carries a message for us all.
We think we are being loving when we help others – from acts of kindness to listening to their problems and offering support, yet are we forgetting that to love and care for another we need to love ourselves first, and from that love our heart opens like a beautiful flower coming into bloom.