An Open Heart | Rev. John Riley

Hatching into Extraordinary Marvelousness

Well, Good Morning. Good Morning! Thank you so much, Deborah. Thank you so much. Russell and Ronnie. Beautiful. Good morning, all of you. Extraordinary and marvelous. Eggs. Eggs. Well, if you missed last week, we were, we were inspired by CS Lewis’s quote, we are like eggs at present. Do you remember this? For those of you here, we are like eggs at present, and you cannot go indefinitely just being an ordinary and decent egg. You must be hatched or go bad. So I’m affirming that you are extraordinary, marvelous eggs. Yes. Oh my goodness. I am an extraordinary and marvelous egg together. I am an extraordinary and marvelous egg. Ready to hatch. Well, we were 10 a dozen. 10 I, well, yeah, okay. It’s, it’s expensive. It’s expensive to stay an egg, so let’s become chickens.

Embracing Change with Curious Hearts

Okay, so last week we had this intention, right? We set an intention of leaning into change, of leaning into the change that is, that we are experiencing in our personal life, in our culture and the world around us. Because there are a lot of things that are changing. There’s some things that are going back to the way they used to be, but not really. It’s a little bit different. And the way we move into this new experience of life is by leaning in with curiosity, by shifting our consciousness from ordinary, decent thinking to extraordinary and marvelous thinking. Yes. Yes. And we were using, we, I introduced the, the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, a wonderful book that the board is using. And I introduced this practice of being committed to learning through curiosity, being committed to shifting from that lower self-centered ego awareness to our whole self, our higher self-awareness. And we do that through curiosity.

Journey from the Head to the Heart: Embracing Curiosity and Growth

When things come up, instead of getting triggered, instead of going down that path, we just simply become curious about it and open our minds to possibility. Now we’re either living above the line or below the line, and if, if we’re below the line, we’re being, we’re living from that state standpoint of being closed, defensive, and committed to being right now. Anybody know anybody? It’s certainly not us, but anybody know anybody like that in their lives. And when we shift above the line, we’re committed to being open, curious, and committed to learning and growing. And just that simple commitment, that willingness to be curious, shifts us up above the line. It shifts us immediately into that open cons consciousness, into that higher sense of self, that higher sense of who we are and who we’ve come here to be. And shifting above the line with curiosity opens the doorway to the heart. It opens the doorway to the heart. Now, you may have, may have heard the saying, the longest journey that one can take is the 18 inches from the head to the heart. Anybody remember that one?

Embracing Open-Hearted Living: From Intellect to Emotion

It’s unknown who actually came up with that aphorism. But the idea here is that we are shifting from our thinking, our intellectualizing to truly feeling the emotion, feeling it, feeling it in our heart at a heart level. So shifting from just being up here, thinking about it to being down in the heart. And that can be very difficult for some people. It can be very challenging to get out of that intellectual concept, that intellectual mind and shift into our heart so we can have a greater sense of knowing, a greater sense of feeling and being. So I want to talk today about that idea of being open-hearted. Now, open-hearted is a is one of my core values. And it came to me, I think about six, eight months ago. And it came to me the way everything comes to me after some meditation, after some, some prayer. It’s just, you know, there’s this idea, this word that comes to me, open-hearted. And I didn’t really know what it meant, but I put it on my card Anyway, my values card. And I said, okay, I’m here to be openhearted.

The Power of Listening with an Open Heart

Now what does this mean? How do I show up like that? And what I found very quickly is that it is, the first aspect of it is listening with an open heart. And the way I figured this out is I was in a conversation with a, with a board, not this board, not at this church, but another board that I’m on. And there was some contention in the air, and there was some frustration in the air, and there was some questions about what we were doing, whether it was right or wrong. And I started to get caught up into it. I started to intellectualizing it. Well, what are we really here for? And who are the, who’s the audience that we’re serving? And how can we, and just started thinking about it. And I started getting caught up in the anxiety and the emotions. Have you ever experienced that?

Breaking Free from the Mental Tyrant: Embracing Open-Hearted Conversations

Where you get caught up in the story? And then I remembered my core value, and I just said, okay, open hearted. And that shifted me immediately. My mind stopped. It stopped intellectualizing, it stopped trying to fix everybody. It stopped trying to complain about what everyone else was doing. And all of a sudden I was open and listening from a space of harmony, a space of compassion, a space of trying to understand, of really listening to what’s happening. It was amazing to me that just that one phrase be open-hearted was enough for me to shift above the line. So often in conversation, you may realize or recognize this, when you’re in a conversation with somebody, so often the brain is ticking along. What am I gonna say next? Right? Oh, here’s a good line to wonder when I can get it in. I keep waiting for that opening.

Unmasking Authentic Conversations

15 minutes later, I bring it in. Oh, that was 15 minutes ago. Nobody even remembers the conversation. You know, the key to comedy, right? Anybody ask me? Go ahead, ask me what’s the key to comedy timing? Yeah, there’s no timing. But that’s what we’re doing. We’re sitting and we’re thinking, how am I gonna show up? What persona am I gonna put on? How should I act? How should I look? You know, we’re putting on a mask in this conversation, and it’s all driven by this thing in our heads, by this thought tyrant, if you will. We’re thinking about how we can fix that. Oh, I know exactly what’s going on in that person. This is what they need to do. You should, I can’t believe that they’re doing that. They’re talking about this. Again, you should leave him, you should leave her. You should go to a different doctor. You should, you know, not go to a doctor. You should do this, you should do that. All of these things come out because our brain is doing what our brain is supposed to do. Think and give you ideas. And we’re stuck in the head so much that we can’t get into the heart. How can I fix it? How can I act?

From Self-Centeredness to Heart-Centeredness

We start judging people. You know, I can’t believe that Nick Bosa is now the highest paid defensive N f L player in the history of the N F L. And we have him for five years. Yes. See, that’s what our brain does, right? It gets distracted. I can’t believe, I wonder how the Niners are gonna do this year. I’m a big Sharks fan. But yeah, that’s five years out anyway, all because we’re in our head and we don’t get down into our heart. So listening with an open heart, being truly present with someone, it’s deep listening. It’s not listening with any dialogue going, going on in your cuckoo head, right? It’s soaking in the conversation so that you can allow creativity, allow possibility to emerge, to allow that sense of knowingness to come and then connect with one another. Connect with one another. Heart to heart. Being below the line is in terms of being open-hearted, is when we’re self-centered, ego is in charge, or we’re committed to being right, being the star, being the center, and not really caring that much about the other person. ’cause It’s all about me. When we’re above the line and we start to listen with our heart, we become a friend.

Navigating Emotions on the Path to Wholeness

We, we allow the deep wisdom of Spirit that’s within us to flow. We allow ourselves to be present to one another and be a present. And that’s the first aspect that I came up with. The second one, the second aspect of being open-hearted is that we have a deeper relationship with our own feelings. A deeper understanding of what is going on within us when we’re openhearted. It’s developing our emotional intelligence, if you will. Now, the fifth commitment in the book, the fifth commitment of one who is leading and living from that higher state of consciousness is to feel all of the feelings when you get into your heart. All of a sudden, there are all of these things going on in there, all of these feelings that pop up that sometimes we’re just not used to dealing with, right? We, that’s why we go into our head.

Embracing Emotional Wholeness: The Power of Feeling All Your Feelings

We turn off that part of ourselves so that we don’t have to deal with all of that emotion. In the book, they say feelings not only add to the richness and color of life, but are also an essential ally to successful leading, to successful leadership, to successful spiritual living. Because it gets us more in tune with the whole of us. It, we starts to open the door to this idea of wholeness within us. And so commitment of number five is feeling all the feelings. We know that we’re below the line when we are resisting, judging or apologizing for my own feelings. Now just notice when you’ve done that or when someone’s done that. I’m feeling sad. Sorry, I’m just sad. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get in your way. Sorry, I’m feeling a little upset. Sorry, I’m feeling frustrated. Then we tried to repress. We try to avoid and we try to withhold them.

The Journey from Emotional Repression to Liberation

That’s the natural progression when we’re below the line and not willing to feel those feelings becoming above the line. Shifting above the line, according to the book, is when I am committed to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion, they come, I locate them in my body, and then I move, I breathe, I vocalize them so that they release all the way through so I’m not stifling any part of it, and I’m not also, I’m also not reacting to them. I’m allowing them to express themselves. So the practice of feeling the feelings, what they say in the book is, first what I say, be open-hearted. Become aware. Be aware of where you’re at. You notice what you’re feeling. Notice when feelings arise, it’s okay. Just notice them. You can ask the question, what am I feeling now? Go ahead, ask the question. I’ll wait. Thank you, Joe. You might be feeling intrigued or curious, thirsty. You might be feeling thirsty. You might be bored and dis distracted. We all get there. Sometimes we might feel inspired. We might feel inspired and hopeful. So the question is, locate those, understand what the feelings are and then locate it. Where is it in your body? Where are you? Because there’s sensations in the body always.

Transforming Emotions from Turmoil to Triumph

That’s why whenever we, we hear all the statistics, when we’re angry all the time, our body starts to break down. We get frustrated, we get ulcers. All of those things happen. So locate the sensation in your body. Breathe and allow those bits and pieces of your body to do what they do. Just allow it to be. And then move the energy, right? The emotions are just energy within us. So move it. And whatever you do, kind of match the tone of the energy. So if I’m really angry and frustrated, I’m gonna turn on a great song and start rocking out. I might go on a hike, you know, something to move the energy in the moment. It’s really, the way I like to look at it is it’s like a boiling water, right? The pot of water. The water is your emotions. The flame are the stories, the beliefs, the myths that you’ve starting to tell yourself the thoughts, the below the line thinking that start to bubble up and heat the water until it’s bubbling, until it’s roiling, until it’s boil, boiling anybody boil before in their life. And it will continue to go until the water is gone, till it dissipates, till we burn out.

Finding Emotional Balance: From Boiling Point to Inner Peace

All we have to do though is turn off the heat, turn off the story, shift out of those habitual stories, shift out of those, you know, false ideas about yourself. Those lack those ideas of lack and limitation. Those ideas of not enough, of not being enough and, and certainly they are not enough. And we shift out of that by curiousness. And as soon as we do that, we shift back into our heart. You take, it’s like you turn off the the flame and how long does it take the boiling water to come back to room temperature? As long as it takes, but it’s not gonna keep going up. If you don’t give it the fuel, it’s gonna naturally cool down and you will naturally cool down. And the scientists say, if you just allow that, I don’t remember the names of the scientists, but I’ve seen a couple of different researches that say it takes about 90 seconds for the emotion, for the chemicals, for everything to just drain out of you, to allow yourself to become present again.

Opening the Door to Wholeness

So feel all the feelings, give yourself permission to feel all the feelings and notice where it is in your body, and then allow it to just be without any story and it will pass through you. And then go back to the heart. The third aspect of being open-hearted, that for me is just so important and powerful, is that being open-hearted opens the door to your spiritual wholeness. It takes us out of our separation of mind and ego and higher mind versus ego. And it brings us immediately to the heart and opens the door to the rest of us, to our body senses, to all of the different energy centers. Well, whatever you’d believe, however you like to put it. But it starts to open the door to our spiritual wholeness. And it’s the path to integrating the whole of you into your experience. That’s what wholeness is about. We’re whole. We’re one in Spirit where one in God, where one God is in you, like the ocean is in the wave. And that is all part of you. And this is the whole of you, my ego and all.

Silencing the Tyrant Within

So when we go, when we come open-hearted and start to sink into that spiritual energy of the divine love, as I like to call the harmonizing energy of Spirit, we begin to sink into that. It quiets the inner tyrant of the mind, the inner tyrant of the self-serving ego. That part of us that is here, that is only really interested in, you know, acquisition, possession and control of things. And people that’s only interested in hoarding and fortifying and dominating what’s happening in their life. That self-focused ego that puffs itself up at the expense of others that’s closed, defensive, and committed to being right, that is committed to resisting, judging and apologizing for my feelings that is re committed to repressing, avoiding and withholding our feelings. It’s not if it’s when, so don’t worry about raising your hand. It’s just when we find ourselves there, when we find ourselves there, that’s the time to take a moment, take a breath and say, be openhearted and interrupt that tyrant in your mind.

Balancing Head and Heart

I had an experience where a couple days ago where something happened and I was angry and just boom right there. And in my mind, you know, I was going around, they should, and this should and this isn’t right. And, and I’m like, oh my God, I’m a little two year old again. Remember those terrible twos? That’s what happens within us. That’s the tyrant. That’s the part of us that’s, that’s just trying to, that self-centered ego that just wants everything the way they want it. And as soon as I said, whoa, get open-hearted again, it stopped as soon as I said it. Our spiritual wholeness is that idea that, that we are one mind, body, and Spirit. So you have heard it said, the longest journey one can take is 18 inches from the head and to the heart. And what I have come away from that in the past was thinking, yeah, I’m gonna leave the head behind and just live from my heart. But it’s not about that either.

The Sacred Connection: Embracing Mind, Heart, and Spirit

Remember, the, the mind is curious. The mind is then open to see the wonders of God, to see the wonders of Spirit, to see the, to wonder at the, the grand experience of life, to be present to all that is to see and hear that still small voice, and then to move and put it into action in service to that higher consciousness. It is holding all of us sacred. For we are all magnificent, extraordinary, wonderful beings, exploding and, and evolving into even greater sense of awareness of self, a greater sense of wholeness, and therefore greater sense of community and, and connection with each other and the world around us. Felix, would you bring up our affirmation? I’m going to read our affirmation and then invite you to affirm it with me. And as I read it, just take it in, allow it to soak in, listen with an open heart. You know, don’t worry if the words don’t match up with yours. You can put in your own words, but just listen with your heart, with an open heart. I claim the presence of divine love within me. I listen, speak, and act with loving kindness.