Your Heart Was Made For This
Jul 22, 2023 12:00 pm
Dear friends,
I'm so excited to share that my new book is now available for pre-order, Your Heart Was Made For This: Contemplative Practices to Meet a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.
I've been working on it for two years, and can't wait to share it. Below is an excerpt from the introduction, which gives you a little taste.
I wrote the book to explore some of the pressing questions I've been grappling with for years: How do we meet the immense changes in our world? And what role can contemplative practice play?
Your Heart Was Made For This offers a roadmap for deepening contemplative practice and explores how it can guide our responses to the suffering in our world.
It'll be out just before Thanksgiving. You can get 30% OFF when you order with the code "HEART30" at Shambhala.com.
I hope you enjoy it.
In kindness,
Oren
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From the Introduction to "Your Heart Was Made For This: Contemplative Practices to Meet a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love."
The Buddha long ago taught that we can shape our inner lives: “Whatever the mind frequently thinks upon and ponders, that will become its inclination.” Our thoughts, feelings, and intentions grow into habits and over time settle into our character. Contemplative practice roots itself in this power to mold the heart and thus renew ourselves. Today, we call this “neuroplasticity.”
If we do not shape the heart, the world will do it for us, and the world does not have our highest welfare in mind.
The tide of modern society floods us with incessant pressures, demands, and desires. On a personal level, urgency, confusion, and fear spin us in a blur, grind us down, and sap our energy. On a global level, war, social unrest, and a growth-driven economy sweep through our communities, setting us on a course for violence and ecocide.
It takes steady, continuous effort to swim against these currents, make choices based on our values, and turn the tide together.
We are living through a mass extinction of our own making. The climate crisis, the rise of fascism and the erosion of democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing trauma of injustice and oppression rooted in colonialism—these are our present reality.
How do we meet our challenges and choose wisely? To truly meet something is to encounter it with awareness, enter into relationship with it, and respond appropriately. How do we respond when we contact pain, sorrow, and injustice? Do we become broken, embittered, lost, or frozen? Do we lash out in anger, fear, or hatred, adding fuel to the fire?
Or are we able to find the balance and clarity to meet the suffering of our world with tenderness, wisdom, and skillful action?
Responding effectively depends on training the heart and developing inner resources. We may not recognize it, but we are always practicing something. If you practice feeling anxious, stressed, and agitated, you etch those grooves deeper. If you practice patience, kindness, and ease, with every moment you grow stronger. In fact, these heart qualities can become your default orientation so that, when hardships arise, you draw not on old reactions but on new strengths.
The Buddha taught, “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. But because it is possible, I say to you: cultivate the good, the beautiful; let it guide your life.” Like an ecosystem recovering its innate balance, when we stop adding pollutants and seed the proper species, the process of awakening begins to flower in our hearts.
Nourishing the heart is joyful. Remembering our potential and aligning ourselves with our deepest vision for life can happen in any moment, and can be filled with lightness and beauty. This is contemplative practice. If we are to adapt and grow, if we are to survive and create a better world, we need inner resources to meet our challenges.
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