Purity of Heart

Our hearts get clouded.

They fill up with sticky, troublesome feelings and images. You know what I’m talking about.

We’ve all experienced those negative emotions- anger, fear, sadness, grief, frustration, anxiety, depression, and many others. Swirling emotions veil us.  They create a wall that keeps us from feeling the way we want to feel.  But emotions don’t just influence us psychologically. They can also harm our bodies.

Dean Ornish, M.D.  is a cardiologist who first proved that heart disease could be reversed. He has also been instrumental in demonstrating the link between what we feel and real illness. If you haven’t seen it, his book, Love and Survival, it is a must read.

Dr. Ornish speaks about the damaging effects of what he calls closed-heartedness.  It’s the cloudiness that I’m talking about.  When we erect a wall that keeps us from connecting with other people.  Clouding of the heart comes because of negative emotions.  It’s when we’ve pulled back from life because we’re afraid to engage.  Perhaps we were hurt, traumatized by some event from the past.  We may have chosen actions that were impure.

By this I mean that perhaps we chose something other than love.  We made the decision to hate or to hurt.  Once we do this the negativity affects us.

How can we heal the clouding of the heart?  One way is to begin a purification process, to begin to create purity of heart.  We can choose to love.  We can choose to give and help. Making the conscious decision to engage in activities that uplift, or are love centered will help remove the negativity that clouds the heart.

Recently on the blog Zen habits a powerful post was written that goes along with this idea of creating purity: http://zenhabits.net/2008/01/one-simple-principle-to-live-by-purity/

Purity of heart is something we can all strive for in our lives.

We can make conscious choices to not back bite, gossip, and spread negativity.  We can also choose deeply to live a life of awareness.  We can decide to give love. If we do this we can achieve purity of heart.

January 16th, 2008