Awakening the Heart: 21 Ways to Follow Love's Message

Preface

All a sane man can ever do is give love

– Hafiz

The Message of Love will come. It is waiting for you to open the window of your heart. Love's message appears in many ways. It can come to you as a one off revelation that will change your world view. You see the world from a vision of Oneness rather than a myriad of separate forms. It can come as a progressive and integrative series of patterns called archetypes or it can come as a recurring dream. Love's Message can come as an incidence of suffering such as loss of a job, a death of a loved one, a divorce or a long term illness. It can come as a deep question of existence such as, Who am I? or, Why am I here?

Love’s Messenger has a language all its own. It is the language of poetry, parable, paradox, metaphor, riddle and myth. Love’s Message might come as a line from a poem, a lyric of a song, or as a series of seemingly co-incidental events that are filled with meaning beyond logical understanding. The Message of Love comes in symbols that are revealed in dreams and in images that appear in your everyday life. Love’s Message can come at any time but it often becomes more insistent during mid-life between the ages of thirty-five and fifty years. In whatever way Love’s Message comes, the essential intention is the same. This message is intended to reveal your magnificence. It reveals to you t10 hat you are essentially created for joy. You are not created within this dimension of time and space simply to suffer and endure. The Message of Love brings you the direct revelation that you are not only loved but Love is essentially who you are. This is the revelation you are here to be and to gift to the world.

The Message of Love is felt though an open heart. It is no co-incidence that the heart is at the centre of the body. The heart bridges the personal and universal within you. It bridges that which is bound to time with that which is boundless and eternal. It is the heart that shows us how to be true to our own nature. It is through the heart that we connect to the unique way in which the Message of Love is intended to express though us. It is through the heart that we find meaning and purpose. In feeling Love’s Message through the heart we are able to live the question, What is it you intend to do with your one wild and precious life? This is the question that ends the poem by Mary Oliver entitled Summertime.

There are three steps that you need to follow in order to open to Love’s Message. These three steps are:

1. Setting your intention

2. Paying attention

3. Taking action

Nothing is created or manifested within this world of time and space without intention. This is our primary power. With the power of intention you are a co-creator with the Divine. You are made in the image of Source energy, which is moved by the force of Love to express as Love in form. In the first stage of life between the age of zero and thirty-five years our power of intention tends to be focused on creating a personal sense of self, driven by the desires of the ego. During the period called mid-life we are called by our soul to transition into expressing not our personal intention, but universal intention.

This is a call from your soul to become all that we are intended to become and to claim your birthright in knowing you are eternal. The degree to which we resist this call is the degree to which we suffer and find ourselves in some kind of crisis.

Universal song

sing a song through me

Any song will do

– Rumi (1)

In order to receive Love’s Message the heart has to willingly open to the intention of the universe. Therefore, the first step in beginning your day is to set your intention to be open to universal intention. This is essentially a practice of letting go and letting God/Love. The second step is to pay attention during the day to the ways in which Love’s Message is calling you. You are required, in the words of the poet Rumi, to trade logic for bewilderment. You are asked to trust the wild unknown of your heart over the rational mind. Let this paying attention be a form of relaxed attention. Do not go looking for results. You are simply learning to be open to the flow of Creation and to open your awareness and receptivity. The Message of Love will come. How it comes isn't for you to decide. The ability to receive Love’s Message focuses on receptivity and open heartedness.

The third step is to take action. Love’s Message doesn’t usually arrive as a blinding light on the road to Damascus as happened to Saul, who was then transformed into the new man called Paul. A lot of the time is spent in learning to trust the process and this is, more often than not, a subtle process. The invitation to Love’s Message is facilitated through a daily spiritual practice. This demands commitment and discipline, which are aspects of learning the art of loving. This is the essential art of learning to discern what is an intimation from your soul and what is a dictate of the ego.

Learning to follow Love’s Message allows you to live a life where you are guided to say and do the most appropriate things in the present moment. You live from a state of flow and creative expansion. You live from a mind that is at peace and you have access to the wild intelligence of Presence. Living the Message of Love allows you to give yourself away. You become a spendthrift of joy. Your joy is in expressing the fullness of who you are with purpose and passion. In this way you find peace and true prosperity. You become the realization of Love in form.

You become an expanding expression of universal Love. You are a living paradox. You are the eternal having an experience of limitation within time. You are the boundless having a limited experience within form. You are the play of Creation created for the joy of Being. The only thing left for you to do is to share your magnificence and give yourself away in joy for the highest good of all.

This book is a coming together of many strands of my life in terms of family, community and ancestry. I want to say thank you to many people.

Firstly, I thank my twin brother Jeff Cuckson who is my fellow miracle twin. He always knows when I am out of sorts and rings to say hello. I love you, my twin brother.

Thank you to all my family, extended family and my ancestors, especially my parents, Edna Sarah Cuckson and George Edward Cuckson.

Thanks to my grandmother, Sarah Dobbin, without whom none of this story would have happened.

Thanks to all the young people who have graced my life and who are now taking the adventure into becoming all they are blessed to become. Let your light shine.

Thanks to Penelope Cummins for all her friendship and support, especially in the lead up to the wedding. Special thanks for the loan of the child.

Thanks to my long term heart friends from my home town of the City of Armagh in Northern Ireland. These are Michael McCann, and Harry and Marie Scott. When we are together we just make each other laugh out loud. I love you all dearly.

Thanks to Cliff Keshimardana Kirk. I love you, brother.

Thanks to Michael Roberts, my English teacher at Armagh Technical College, who gave me the opportunity to be one of Sexy Sam’s Singing Sailors. He may never know how he helped me connect to my X Factor.

Thanks and blessings go to my many communities:

To the Together One Voice Choir and its director Valerie Whitworth, who brings us together in harmony with her passion and focus. It often astounds me where we go together when we are singing. Energy flows up my spine and separateness is transcended.

Thanks to our wonderful community of drummers led by Debbie Bierne of Rúach Rhyhmns who gets us all grounded and dancing and constantly affirms, I love you guys, and she does. We love you, too.

Thanks go to my friends at Bards in the Woods, especially John Wilmot for his absolute commitment to showing us how to enjoy our forests, and for his stories, poems and pasties.

Blessings go to the members of the Enniskillen branch of Toastmasters International, especially Gordon Williams. They have encouraged me to find my own voice and begin to believe that I could speak into the world the Message of Love as it moves through me once I learn to stand still.

Special thanks go to the guys at MacNean Speakers and to Jude and Alan Portbury for their support. Thanks also to Mandy Currans and Brenda McMullan of the Education Center at Loughan House for their support in bringing us all together.

Thanks to all the musicians who are such a joy for me to be around and sing and play with, especially Del Rickard. We groove together and it's a union of two becoming one sound. I love you, brother.

Thanks to Assumpta Clancy, Pat and Vince who grace our little community with song, rhyme and storytelling at McHugh’s in Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim. It’s a tradition that is being lost and so important to continue.

Thanks to all my Earthsong Camp buddies, especially Diarmuid de Faoite and Lizzie Shortall.

Thanks to all the healers in my life who have played their part in supporting this endeavor: Morag Donald, Siobhán McMahon, Emer Thornbury and Joanne Lawrie.

Almost finally, thanks to Barbara Cuckson Smith, my partner of many decades who became my wife during the writing of this book. This was a very special day. We have helped heal the orphan in each other and are now moving into the blessing of elderhood for me and croning for her. I love you so.

Finally a blessing upon the man who, though his transmission of grace, has made this book possible. His name is Jeddu Krishnamurti. Without that blessing this invitation to experience Love’s Message would not, I think, have been possible. Certainly it would not be so authentic.

And the absolutely final, final blessing to all the poets, storytellers and heart song singers, especially Hafiz of Shiraz. Hafiz has one wish. It is my wish also. He says, I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

Tony Cuckson

Corrogue, Dowra

Co. Cavan Ireland

How to Use this Book

What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably

- Sri Aurobindo, Indian nationalist, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

I recommend you use this book with imagination and commitment. Commit to what the poet W. B. Yeats, in his poem, These are the Clouds, refers to as companioning your greatness. Imagine you are The One here to make a real difference in the world. You are The One the universe needs to bring harmony within Creation. Know that you are here to make a unique contribution to the revelation that is the magnificence of Love’s Message. In reality, this is why you are here. You are here to know you are Love. This is the true meaning of the Biblical phrase, So God created man in his own image, in the image he created him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1;27 KJB)

You are The One who, like Jake Scully, the hero in the movie Avatar, (2009) (2) is required to have his eyes opened. (Third Eye Seeing). This is awakening to seeing through the heart. You are Neil Anderson, (Anderson translates as Son of Man) who is The One who makes the difference in The Matrix (1999) (3). You are Dorothy, our heroine in The Wizard of Oz (4) (1939) who discovers what it means to return home with a deeper understanding of Love. You are The Sleeping Beauty here to awaken from the Tower (the intellect) and return to earth (embodiment). On returning, you are married (union of opposites) and you live happily ever after. (You know how to live within the experience of eternity). This is the journey we are all invited to take into awakening the heart. Use this book as a treasure map for the journey into learning how to be The One within the One Life. Learn to be your True Self who is awakening into wholeness. This is the journey into a union that you are both, paradoxically speaking and in reality, never apart from. It is the existential union of the human with the Divine within you. This is the journey of awakening to whole-heartedness. It is a staged journey with ways, stages, levels, signposts and steps.

The best map I have explored in detail for saying Y.E.S to Life is the map of the seven major chakras. This map I refer to as, The Way of Y.E.S. The word Y.E.S. is an acronym. It stands for, Your Energy System. In order to awaken to whole-heartedness be aware, at least intellectually to begin with, the way in which your energy system works. Learn how to allow it to be in flow within your body/mind.

The intention of this writer is to write a series of books covering each of the seven major chakras. This series will have the over arching title Following Love’s Message. Each book stands on its own. It is a ‘holon.’ It is part of a greater whole in the same way that a cell is part of a greater whole called an organ. In the same way that an organ is part of a greater whole called the body. This book and others in the series serve as a complete map for this journey. Each book is laid out as a guide to the journey to of companioning your greatness. The broad outline of this book, and others in the series, will be as follows:

The Map of the Journey

This is the map of your energy system as outlined by the seven major chakra system. I have chosen to start this journey from the centre. It is the heart chakra that is at the centre of the seven major chakra system. It is the bridge between the lower three chakras representing the personal and the higher three chakras representing the universal. The heart is not only central to the body it is central to the experience of unity. It is through the heart that you unify the personal and the universal within you. It is through the heart that you come into the knowing of Oneness. You become the knowing that you are The One. Knowing is not simply knowledge. It is a new way of seeing and being in the world. It is seeing beyond opposites. It is living life knowing that you are never apart from the Presence that is the One Life of Love. It is knowing that Love is who you are.

Preparation for the Journey

In this section you are given an overview of the way in which to approach the journey into the experience of wholeness. It covers the mental, emotional and practical approach to the journey.

Signposts along the Way

There are twenty-one ways to follow the path of Love’s Message. These signposts include the language of the heart that is poetry, storytelling, metaphor and symbol to name a few signposts.

Steps along the Way

The steps are practices that allow you to begin to embody the Message of Love in the way, or in ways, in which the energy of the Universe uniquely expresses through you.

The Return Journey

This journey of return shares the personal experience of the author in saying Y.E.S to companioning the potential within. It shares with you what life looks like for the individual who has stage of awakening to wholeness through balance and alignment of the heart chakra.

The journey into awakening the heart is a journey of trust. It is always about your willingness to say Y.E.S to the way in which the Message of Love is uniquely expressing through you. This Y.E.S is known through a feeling of expansion. You learn what it feels like to be in flow. The Message of Love is not a dogma. It is a present moment embodied experience. It is an expanding state of union that you live and Love from. This experience is felt through the body and not in the tower of the intellect.

Let me share with you a secret. You will be reluctant to say Y.E.S to allowing the realization of your magnificence. Expect this but do not fight this resistance. Simply witness it. This book, I hope, will allow you to understand to some degree why you resist Love’s Message. In that sense, it will allow you to be kinder, more understanding and more compassionate toward yourself. By extension and expansion this kindness is extended to others and to the wider world. In this way, you take important first steps along the journey in awakening the heart and saying Y.E.S. to companioning the greatness you are created to be in Love with and to be embodied as. Instead of falling in Love you begin to stand in Love. You are becoming the Message of Love in form. This is the beginning of awakening the heart.

The Preparation

Healing Balance and Alignment

Your life is a sacred journey. It is about change, growth, discovery, movement, transformation, continuously expanding your vision of what is possible, stretching your soul, learning to see clearly and deeply, listening to your intuition, taking courageous challenges at every step along the way. You are on the path... exactly where you are meant to be right now... And from here, you can only go forward, shaping your life story into a magnificent tale of triumph, of healing, of courage, of beauty, of wisdom, of power, of dignity, and of love."

- Caroline Adams

The word ‘heal’ derives from the root word ‘whole’ and is, etymologically speaking, related to the world ‘holy.’ In this book, as in other books in the Following Love’s Message series, the emphasis is on inviting awareness of that which is whole and holy within you. It is the direct feeling of this experience and learning how to center yourself within this whole and holy experience that heals you.

You are not whole to the extent that you feel separate from Love and the way in which this eternal creative force moves through you. Your experience of healing and wholeness is your remembering and feeling of reunion with the One Life that you are a part off, but never in reality, ever apart from. This remembering is experiential re-membering (union). It is not simply intellectual memory. This healing may or may not heal you of physical ailments. It will, however, make you aware of the primary reality of wholeness beyond the limitation of the body within this time and space dimension.

Your work on this planet is to learn how to be in Love with who you are created to become. The Force that creates all things is the Force of Love. Do not confuse this Force with the images portrayed in the latest romantic Hollywood movie. Hollywood (meaning ‘holy wood’) portrays love as a primary experience between two individuals who, most of the time view themselves as separate. For the most part they also feel separate from others and separate from nature and especially separate from the deep self. Love is a state of Being. It is a state of union and wholeness. This is your sovereign state that you are invited to rule from. When you live from that state of union your purpose is clear. You are living in alignment with Love’s Purpose. Feeling in alignment with Love’s purpose becomes your joy. How you express that primary purpose in this world of form is secondary.

In reality you are not broken. In the primary reality of Oneness there is no one to heal. You have never been separate from Love and you will never be separate from Love. As certain religious teachings declare, Separateness is an illusion. This doesn’t help very much unless this feeling of non-separation is experienced as an energetic reality moving through you. Most everyone walking this planet feels very much absent from Source energy. They feel there is something missing from life but can’t quiet grasp what the missing ingredient is. For some it is felt as a kind of unease. For others this sense of separation moves into a deeper kind of separateness called disease.

In order to overcome this sense of separation many people turn to some form of religious belief. Adherence to a fixed system of belief offers many people some degree of comfort. They make an intellectual choice to believe in God but they do not know, and often have never lived within, the experience that this word ‘God’ points toward. Rather than be a living embodiment of this wondrous state religious hierarchy invites them to become a believer. You are asked to accent to a belief in the possibility of going somewhere after you die where you may, or may not, experience wholeness as a reward for good behavior.

In this book healing refers to that holy experience of is the felt union of the human and Divine within. You are here to know this as your glorious birthright and not simply believe in it as some form of reward for belonging to the in group.. It is a wonderful thing to feel well in body and mind. However, if you lose your feeling connection with Source then, as the poet Rilke declares in his poem Holy Longing, you will be in trouble.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheTranslated from the German by Robert Bly

In this book the words ‘healing’ and ‘feeling’ go together. The emphasis in the series of books Following Love’s Message is on feeling connected to the creative force of Love. The author Colin Tipping, writing in Radical Forgiveness: A Revolutionary Five-Stage Process to:- Heal Relationships says it this way, If you don’t feel it you can’t heal it. It takes tremendous courage to be willing to feel the pain of separation in its myriad forms. To heal we need to engage in conscious suffering. This is not something that comes naturally to anyone of us. The psychologist Carl Jung said, Neuroses is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

Rather than engage in conscious suffering we zone out by engaging in myriad distractions on offer in the outer world. Most of the time we are each engaged with the primary neuroses on this planet. This is normal everyday insanity of ‘over thinking.’ To get away from this endless stream of unconscious thought many of us turn to self-medication. Rather than learn to go beyond the incessant chatter we call out mind we try to go a little out of our mind in other ways. Such is the way of addiction in its countless forms.

In this way we go on the life journey called The Voyage and Return. In this journey the main character in the story takes a journey of suffering without finding any sense of meaning or purpose in doing so. At the end of the journey they feel just as separate from Love as they did at the beginning and very often more so. This is the journey taken my many people on this planet. Taking this journey without finding meaning and purpose often leads to bitterness and cynicism in the second half of life. Healing, therefore, is the experience of the return to Love, not as a nice idea to believe in, but as a primary reality to live from. Healing is the feeling of Love flowing through you as you are embodied on this planet. It isn’t a reward you get for doing good. It is the primary reality of existence. Belief in this possibility as a reality can be a starting point for the journey. In this way, you acknowledge the possibility of realizing the greatness within you. Belief is a signpost pointing the way. Do not, however, cling to the signpost and refuse to follow The Call to Adventure.

Belief in wholeness and what is holy within you is so much easier than taking the journey into Knowing and living from the wholeness within you. To know what is holy within you are required to feel and heal what it is you do not Love within yourself. How often do you get to hear this wonderful Call to Adventure that is falling in love with who you are created to become? The last thing many people wish to do is feel the pain of any kind of separation. The medical intuitive and world renowned writer on chakra healing, Caroline Myss, states that most people spend around 70% of their energy repressing the negative energies inside themselves that have been labeled not acceptable.

There is nothing wrong with you although, like so many, you feel there is more than enough wrong with you. Many of us spend our days chanting an unconscious mantra. This is the mantra not good enough. Most of what you think is wrong with you is learned from your environment prior to the age of seven years. You did not learn to feel not good enough from Source energy. Your feeling connection with Love’s Message will always allow you to know that you are forever good enough. You are made in the image