Reconciliation of the heart - part one

“I'm so tired of living this life. Fooling myself, believing we're right, when I've never given love with any conviction of the heart.” Kenny Loggins

Songwriters, poets, authors and artists often express themselves from a place of heart. We tend to look upon works of art with awe, curiosity and mystery. Some things are simply beyond words. We call this the heart. We listen to the heart from a different place than our ears. We feel with the heart. We know when something feels congruent, yet we often override the voice of the heart due to past conditioning.

I feel very fortunate to have been a teenager in the 1970s. I was frequently found listening to the music of Kenny Loggins; Carole King; John Prine; James Taylor; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Dan Fogelberg; Jackson Brown; John Denver; and Joni Mitchell; only to name a few. The Vietnam War stirred the hearts of many Americans. It was a time of revolution and an evolution of consciousness.

The 1980s led us to our inner child. The revolution outside ourselves in the 1970s moved us to look at the injustices that had been occurring in our own families for many thousands of years. Twelve-step groups for addiction and support groups for childhood wounds became a common experience. All of these resources had the potential to open up our wounds, and subsequently our hearts.

However, as we moved into the new millennium, the pace of our lives quickened and we wanted everything FAST. Internet speed, fast food, and even our self-help and psychotherapies needed to be speeded up. Solution focused therapy, EMDR, and bullet points in magazine articles. The faster, the better, is all we really wanted. Somewhere we dropped the ball on our inner child. Going back to our childhood and healing old wounds is just not fast enough for us.

Nonetheless, today we still sing out about the injustice of war, as well as the earth’s rapidly depleting resources, children being shot in high schools and colleges, the stock market collapsing, terrorists groups such as ISIS, a challenging political climate, and natural disasters occurring at an alarming rate. There are so many parts of pain still in the collective unconscious, and so many parts of pain still inside each of us. Today in our fast-paced world it is even more important and crucial that we begin to reconcile our hearts.

Studies have shown that we carry the memory of our ancestral trauma in our DNA. No wonder some days we have no idea what might be bothering us. We may simply feel a malaise and don’t know the cause. Something is calling us to heal. Something is saying hello in there, please send me some love and healing today.

Reconciliation of the heart to me means-- an honest inventory of our inner and outer lives, coupled with a willingness to be vulnerable and look at the parts of us that we have hidden out of fear. Psychologist Carl Jung called this the shadow, a place in the unconscious where we hide the parts of ourselves that appear negative to the conscious mind. We fear that they may be evil and bad, so we keep them hidden in the dark. When we fail to recognize these shadow aspects, they may cause us to feel and/or act in ways that we don’t consciously understand. Willingness to look, commitment to change and tenacity to go the distance are the keys to reconciling and healing our hearts.

Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part series based on Dr. Ashley’s upcoming book Reconciliation of the Heart. Next month, Dr. Ashley will share ways to reconcile the heart and return to love. For more information on the book and a retreat Ashley is hosting at The Niwot Inn Oct.28-30, email [email protected], call 720-565-3388 or visit pattiashley.com.