by Sheva Carr, CEO of FYERA.
This past Monday was Martin Luther King Day here in the States, and I was thrilled to discover this quote in my email inbox:
"The key to making nonviolence a way of life is to accept love as the guiding principle of all our relationships.
Pain and suffering comes into all of our lives; but only love can heal the wounds of the past. Only love can lift us up and make us whole and free.
If you let love rule your heart, there is no obstacle, no barrier, no problem you can't overcome. This is God's promise to every human being and it is the key to liberation for us all.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe and it is also the most available force, because everyone can tap into it."
~ Martin Luther King, Jr
light switch This is the essence of HeartMath, the essence of Fyera! “Love is the most powerful force in the Universe…” The heart is the strongest source of electricity in the body, with each heart cell a power generator, each heart cell its own “battery.” The heart is 60-80 times more powerful than the brain. When we love, and anyone can love, and everyone loves something (I have yet, anyway, to meet anyone who does not, even those most marginalized in our society), our love creates an ordered pattern in the heartbeat. This ordered pattern causes the brain, and everything else in the body, to entrain to its coherent signal. Much the same way incandescent light becomes focused around a common frequency when streamed into a laser, your love focuses every fiber of your being around a common point, and calls universal forces forth to organize around the spine of your clarity. You can literally measure your electrical radiance in hertz per millisecond (or the power output of the “batteries” in your heart) on the emWave PC, a power which dramatically increases in focus and strength in a state of love. What Martin Luther King Jr. spoke from the heart, can now be measured and proven by a little device hooked up to your computer! That’s TRIPPY!
The average 40 watt light bulb in your living room, when turned into a laser, becomes a coherent force powerful enough to burn a hole through the sun from the earth. The average human being, like Martin Luther King, when turned into a laser through love, becomes a coherent force that transforms our world and taps into personal Greatness.
Another favorite Martin Luther King quote is one that I often refer to when teaching our Heart Blueprints Course:
"Not everyone can be famous, but everyone can be Great, because Greatness is determined by service."
When you love, you cannot help but serve, just by your presence. Service is not giving money to starving children in Ethiopia or skid row in LA, unless you love them. If you love them, that is service. And your love serves in both the presence and absence of other resources, because it is the most powerful force in the Universe. As Mother Theresa said, “It matters not what you do, only that you do it with love.” When you love, the blueprint of your maximum potential- your Heart’s Blueprint- has all the fertilizer it needs to grow to full bloom in the internal order in generates in you and around you.
heart eyes I am fascinated by genius, fascinated by human beings who have transcended their mediocrity and stepped into greatness. Human beings who live to their full potential and blossom the unfolding blueprint of the heart all the way, human beings like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King. This weekend I taught a retreat in which we took a field trip to a Museum with original works by Galileo, Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Thomas Edison, Einstein. These were my high school heroes, people who were Great because they looked at the same things everyone else saw (the stars, light, color, trains at a train station), but they saw something completely different because they saw through the eyes of the heart. As a result, they have permanently changed how we see the world, but most importantly each one in their own way changed how we see ourselves. Even those whose theories have since been enhanced, refined, or abandoned for other world views, have left a presence of innovation and creation that is undeniable and Great because they opened our mind’s to see beyond our conditioning and to look fresh with the heart’s eyes.
How do we, as individuals struggling to pay the bills, find the right relationship, get over a cold, get our kids to school on time, find the right diet in a sea of opposing advice, and just get through the day in tact, tap into our personal greatness?
world heart There is a simple user name and password with which at any time, and in any situation, we can login to the laser of our love, the grandeur of our greatness, even in the most mundane messes in life. The access code is care. Care is love in action. Care about someone else, care about yourself, it doesn’t matter, just care, because care creates order in your heart and mind and returns you to the state of love in which the forces of the Universe use you for their expression and service. Care turns the mundane into the magnificent. Care creates value.
Care has its kryptonite, however. When you care about what others think of you, or how you look, or what you’ll get out of the deal, that’s not care- that’s vanity and insecurity. The irony is that when we try to measure up against other great people in history, in the very act of measuring ourselves against or imitating something outside of us, we divest the currency of our attention from our own greatness and transfer it to an account with a lousy ROI called vanity. Vanity and insecurity define success by how the outside world sees things. By definition vanity is insecure, because its success or failure is measured outside of you, by something beyond your internal control. True success, and greatness, is an inside job. The heart experiences success as an expression of your real self, which is love. Love is a source of power, and it puts the power back inside you as the source of love. What do you love? Love what you love, more than you love getting love!
heart power In King’s quote he said that letting “…love rule your heart…is the key to liberation for us all.” Isn’t that interesting that letting your love rule you actually frees you? What love liberates us from is our small boxed in sense of who we are, our “personal identity” that imprisons our life force in a story of what we can and cannot do, or say or feel, how we can and cannot behave. Galileo was more fascinated with the workings of the Universe than he was with the personal identity (and even threat to his own life!) that his perceptions elicited outside him. When we get to the point where we care more about people (or something!), than we care about what people think of us, this is a moment when our love can override our vanity and our greatness can shine through. This is liberation. Learning to rely on your heart as confirmation of your value rather than accolades from outside, frees you to live beyond a made-up sense of identity about yourself in your mind or in culture, and to discover yourself and your value authentically as it shines through your love. This is to live your personal greatness, your heart’s blueprint.
I have come to see this in my own life almost like clockwork. When I care, my creativity flows easily. When I care whether other people perceive what I do as good or bad, I get stuck. When I write these HeartStart chapters out of care for you, the reader, that you have a better week for what you have read, they roll off my finger tips with ease. When I am tangled by the hopes you’ll like them, or they’ll be a great book one day, or I’ll get e-mails back congratulating me on what a great writer I am, I trip and stumble over my own words and cannot seem to get it right. Care creates flow, vanity creates blockages.
wood fire When my heart is preparing me for a new level of service or exploration, my vanities pop up like kindling for the fire to fuel and light the way. A sure fire signal that I am about to take another leap forward in my evolution is when the old chorus of insecurities start whispering in my ear- “You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re stupid. You’ve done nothing with your life. You’re…” fill in the blank. This inner critic is not bad. It’s simply showing me where I have created a fixated story about who “I” am, and is asking me if I am willing to put that story on a funeral pire bonfire of the vanities to light the way to see beyond myself and my little sense of “I.” Will I light the log of vanity on the fire for fuel, or will I buy into it and carry the burden of a heavy piece of wood with me everywhere I go? The heart helps me let go of the burden of who I am not.
President Obama’s story is a true inspiration to me in this regard. When he graduated from Harvard, he had the opportunity to accept a prestigious job in a law firm that would have sung out to many people’s vanity. It offered high pay, and would have given him status by external measuring sticks, etc. But he felt it would be a distraction from his desire to organize communities out of care for the people in them. He cared more about people than about what people thought of him. As a result, without any ambition to rise to this role, he has been awarded the mantle of one of the most respected positions in the world, as the President of the United States. What excites me about Obama’s win is not that he is the first African American President, but that he is the first president I have observed in my lifetime who has arrived at the White House not through personal ambition but out of care for people. He is the first person I have seen in the Oval office who is there not out of vanity, but out of personal greatness. That is radical.
As King said, “Not everyone can be famous…” and not everyone can be president, “but everyone can be great.” Take a moment to care more about life, than about who or what your care makes you or gets you. The irony is that when you do that, it makes you great, in whatever role your greatness is destined to play. Lazaris calls it grace. He says grace is doing what comes naturally to you as flight to a bird. Often the things that make you great seem so simple to you that you overlook them, because your greatness is in your grace, not your ego, not your trying to impress. Your greatness is in your heart.
The bottom line is that you are love. And when you love what you love more than you love GETTING loved (Isn’t it silly to try to “get love”?! Like trying to get what you already are!), then your greatness shines through. The good news is that this can be learned, it can be practiced, and you can get better at it. People see me now and think it came easily to live this way, but with humility I tell you it did not. I was a teenager with a temper. As a child my vanities fueled the show. I wanted to be the center of attention all the time, and when I did not get my way I was violent. At 13 I karate chopped my own bed in half in a rage (and I never took karate!). At 8 or 9 in a fight with my brother I smashed his head into our fish tank and desperately watched my fish die because the water drained out of the broken tank so fast. It broke my heart, growing up, that my sense of self importance overrode my love for my fish, my brother, the bed made by my father’s own hand. I did not have the tools and technology I have now to know that there was a simple shift, a simple way I could educate my body and mind obsessed with little me to focus instead on caring for what I loved. And that in fact, the peace of mind that I had hoped would come through getting my way would come instead from getting out of the way so my true care could come through. King is so right, so true. “The key to making nonviolence a way of life is to accept love as the guiding principle of all our relationships.Pain and suffering comes into all of our lives; but only love can heal the wounds of the past. Only love can lift us up and make us whole and free…”
Writer’s block? Finances not flowing? Relationships in the toilet? Stress? Come back to what you care about, let care be your compass, let love be your fuel, and nothing will stop you, nothing will stand in your way. “If you let love rule your heart, there is no obstacle, no barrier, no problem you can't overcome…”
If you would like support to live your life from this care, to tap into this Universal force called love, please join us for one of our programs.
“They pride themselves on being able to understand and analyze my work, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is only necessary to love.”
-Monet, on his critics
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
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