On my recent trip to Santiago, I visited a friend who moved to Portugal at around the same time I moved to Spain. For the past three years, she’s been working at a local hotel as a maid. Her duties include cleaning rooms and delivering meals to hotel guests. When I asked her if she was happy with her job, she looked at me with resignation and said, “It pays the bills, but I feel dead inside. I’m feeling depressed and I’m always tired. It’s also starting to affect my family.”
Before leaving Venezuela, my friend was working full-time as a veterinary assistant. She was also building a graphic design portfolio and dreamt of establishing a design firm when she moved overseas. Her biggest passions in life are working with animals and expressing her creativity through graphic design.
The feelings of depression she feels are an expression of the deep sadness she feels because she isn’t doing what she loves and set out to do. These are feelings I can empathize with. There was a time in my life when I took a corporate job where I constantly felt enslaved by duties and responsibilities that were very far removed from who I am and what brings me joy. My heart just wasn’t in it. I felt trapped, scared to leave, and sad. As a result, I drowned myself in alcohol, sex, pornography, and endless pursuits to escape my deep feelings of dissatisfaction.
The Pain of Being Out of Alignment
Feelings of depression and deep sadness are often your heart’s way of letting you know something major is out of misalignment. In an attempt to numb the emotional pain we feel, many of us become addicted to substances, habits, and unhealthy behaviors that only provide a temporary escape from our misery. Over time, these habits become addictions and begin to affect our health and relationships, negatively affecting our mental health and the quality of our lives. These are the hidden costs of not following your heart’s desires. They are the price we pay for living out of alignment.
Going After your Heart’s Desires
What is the solution, then? How do you overcome these feelings of sadness and depression? How do you let go of the addictions you’ve accumulated along the way? More importantly, how do you overcome the fear of going after your heart’s true desires?
The short answer, using Steven Pressfield’s words, is: You need to put your ass where your heart wants to be.
In essence, if you want to get stronger, you need to get to the gym. If you would like to become an actor, you must go to acting classes. If you aim to become a guitarist, you must buy a guitar and start playing. You can’t follow your heart without action.
You might be wondering, ok, but how do I actually move into alignment with where my heart would like to be? How do I follow my heart’s true desires?
The Two Paths You Can Follow
In my experience, there are two ways you can go about it. One way is using pure grit and willpower. This requires a tremendous amount of energy, commitment, and accountability. The problem with this approach is it is not sustainable in the long term. This is the way of the mind, for it’s primarily driven by mental power.
But there’s another way. I call this the way of the heart or the path of Heart Mastery. This path invites you to first go deep into your heart first so that you can explore your core values, life purpose, and soul desires. From this heart space, you can now create a vision for your life that is an expression of who you really are. Then, you need to tap into your heart-based power to overcome all inner and outer obstacles keeping you from taking action.
Your Heart, Love, and the Will of God
The Path of Heart Mastery requires you to first tune into your heart, and through your heart, with the vibration of love – the nurturing, caring energy, that nurtures and supports all life. When your vision is in alignment with love, it is also lined up with the Will of God. And God’s Will is infinitely more powerful than our limited and conditioned human will.
Our egos, addictions, and self-imposed limitations are all human creations. If you are to transcend them, a Higher Power is required. As you “let go and let God”, new pathways begin to open, and you start developing new superpowers. A new identity begins to emerge. And as your identity changes, your life changes. This is what makes this path so powerful and sustainable over time. The Path of Heart Mastery is the path of the miraculous!
If you’d like to explore the Path of Heart Mastery, and you’d like to do it with me as your guide, I’d like to invite you to join me in the next Heart Mastery Course. To learn more about Heart Mastery or to enroll, please visit the course’s information page.
From my heart to yours,
