A healthy heart is naturally open. No effort is needed. It is a state of true freedom. When your heart is open, you are able to connect with anything and form total unification with it just like that. It is as though you live in an infinitely large open space and you can be anywhere instantly without running into barrier or needing to stop or turn. Life is a continuous free flow when your heart is open in this pure way. You will experience no obstruction. This is not because you live in a perfect world and everything goes as you wish. You live in the real world as it is. However, you can be fully unified with reality, with everything that happens in life because your heart is open.

What does it mean by ‘being fully unified with reality’? It means total acceptance and accommodation of the ever-changing reality. Think about how often have you gone through a day without feeling sad, disappointed, afraid, worried, anxious, irritated, annoyed, angry, and more. Life seems full of events that don’t go with our expectations and wishes. Look deeper. Can you see that these feelings arise when we refuse to accept and accommodate what happened? Something has happened and become reality and yet we think it shouldn’t have happened. Our attachment to our expectations is so strong that it turns the new reality our enemy. We resent or even hate it and want to push it away. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t see it just to make us feel better. This is based on the assumption that there is only one way everything should go and that is ‘my way’.

Some people say, it takes time to adjust to the changes. It is true. However, relying on time to take away our pain has its price to pay too. The pain often doesn’t go away; it just finds a deeper place to hide. And the thing is: there is endless supply of things not going with our expectations and wishes. Do we just keep finding space for pain to hide?

Life is to be enjoyed and the world is full of goodness and beauty. When we live with our heart closed and strong attachment to our expectations, life gradually becomes an enemy and the world a very unfriendly place. Every change could become a potential threat, and every situation something to be afraid of. And yet we wonder how come it is so hard to keep the heart open. It is a vicious cycle that we get ourselves trapped in deeper and deeper.

To get out of this trap, we can first try to shift the perspective we take when looking at reality, from whether a change meets my own expectations to whether it goes with the law of the universe. There is a big difference between them: the former is to serve only my own interest and the latter is to benefit all. When something disappoints you, or causes any unpleasant feelings, ask yourself how it could be turned into something that serves all, yourself included. When your heart is open, the world evolves around the law of the universe, and so do you.

Yuan Tze