This is going to be hard to explain, but I want to try. Listening to heartbeats is something I do now. I listen to my own, I listen to other people’s: Tunga’s, my mom’s, my close friends and family. Sometimes I feel them, sometimes I watch them, sometimes I hear them. I have to be still to touch them, very attentive to see them and very quiet to listen to them, but they are worth it.
From what I understand the original word for God in Hebrew was not a word in a traditional sense. Yah and weh were breathing sounds in the language. It was sacred, so sacred a word that it was hardly ever said and yet said with every breath. I like the idea that you live out your beliefs about God with every breath. What if you had to express what God meant to you, not in words (which I think can’t come close) but in actions? Every time you breathe you have been given one more moment, one more chance to show what you think is most important in your life. Will you breathe and love, will you breathe and worry, will you breathe and give in to any number of distractions that take you away from your heart. When you breathe you have a choice.
When we talk about a person’s heart, saying for instance that someone has a “good heart”, we are talking about a part of us figuratively to mean something outside our normal mind. Something in us allows the mind to work and for everything else to function. It is fragile and special, but most of all it is quiet. Our heart beats in us every moment but we rarely hear it. Our lungs breathe but we barely notice. The point of tuning into it, to truly being aware of it, is to focus on what is really happening around us from the most basic point of life. Meditation is useful because it helps us see reality, not our ideas about it. As the mind quiets down, as it is told to quiet down, the calmness of that quiet process of life inside starts to come through. We are living and we will die. Our bodies are changing, always changing. Our heart is beating, but it will not beat forever. It might not even beat this next moment. Our lungs are breathing, but they will not breathe forever. Everything changes, it is always changing. Breathe, listen and choose how you are going use every moment.
