Photo by Don Pierce
This waypoint may take several days as you deepen your ability to understand and share the feelings of others. To open your heart, practice two forms of meditation:
The rational process of analysis
The cultivation of empathy with your chosen object—whether a being, person, place, or thing
Along the Heartwood Path, you will often be guided to focus on empathy. Settling your mind on an object requires more than thoughtful analysis; it demands positive, sustained empathy cultivated over hours. This empathy fosters compassion, replacing fear or hatred, and leads to enduring calmness.
To let empathy bring fulfillment and happiness, first understand causes and conditions. Just as trees grow from seeds nurtured by soil, water, and warmth, emotions arise from inner conditions. Changing your inner causes changes your inner conditions. For example, transforming stinginess into generosity improves your outer world. Negative emotions like anger hinder your effectiveness in the external world. Training yourself to recognize and replace negative emotions (like vanity) with positive ones (like humility) is essential.
Virtuous actions arise not from fear of consequences but from a genuine desire to end suffering. This motivation is the path to saintliness.
Eliminating negative emotions requires listening to trusted teachers, contemplation to gain certainty, and meditation to absorb the subject deeply. Compassion demands ridding yourself of greed, jealousy, fear, hatred, and other afflictive emotions through these practices.
Greater understanding strengthens conviction, which fuels fervor and excellence in action.
HumaNatureConnect Activity
If today isn’t for unstructured nature time, try this guided practice:
Read the Text: Use your literary, mental, and reasoning senses to explore happiness and sustainability. Engage all your natural senses while spending meaningful, enjoyable time outdoors on your way to Gladandgreen Junction.
Find an Attractive Natural Being: With pen and journal in hand, visit a natural area and choose a natural being that draws your attention.
Appreciate and Give Thanks: As you admire your chosen being, breathe in appreciation and exhale gratitude.
Consent: If you find yourself continuously attracted to an aspect of nature for at least ten seconds, consider this your consent to form a connection that supports your optimal functioning.
Engage Your Natural Senses: Use at least one radiation sense, one feeling sense, one chemical sense, and one mental sense to deepen and diversify your perception.
Activity: Make a full-force offering to a wounded Dream Figure for healing purposes:
Look for the positive “silver lining” in the wound, illness, or affliction of the imaginal Wounded Healer.
Discover what the wounded Dream Figure needs to heal (Aizenstat, 2009, p. 225). Then, if possible, give the Figure what it needs.
Nocturnal Pilgrimage
Before sleep, reflect on how you will become more empathetic. Sleep and dream without moving from your sleeping position as you begin to recall your dreams. Use your journal to tend to your dreams.
