Heart chakra development tips?

[Infinite]

Group question: How can we live from the open heart?

(Carla channeling)

We are known to you as those of the principle of Q’uo. We greet you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We thank each of you most profoundly for gathering and calling us to share our thoughts with you at the gathering. It is our blessing and our privilege to share these thoughts with you. As always, we ask that you remain careful in what you take in from that which we or any source might say, for you are the guardian of your temple. You will recognize the truth that is your own. The rest you may leave behind without a second thought.

You ask us this day concerning how to live with the heart opened and vulnerable, and we say to you that this question is central in attempting to make the choice of service to others or the choice of service to self that this incarnation that you are now experiencing is so much concerned with. There is always an abundance of ways in which we may speak of the ways of service and the ways of polarization, and yet nothing is more direct a way of addressing the issue of polarity than to speak of the open heart. Those who wish to serve the Creator by serving others are those who truly wish to open the heart. Those who wish to follow the path of service to self find a closed heart necessary in order to polarize negatively. Now, as we speak of polarization in consciousness it might be helpful to think about polarization in more familiar terms.

If there is a weight hung in space it is, first of all, going to respond to gravity and will hang directly downward. If the pendulum that this represents is very heavy it might take a great deal to get it to sway from side to side. And the first time that the effort is made to swing towards one or the other extreme will most likely be barely sufficient to break the lack of momentum of the downward hanging pendulum, and there will be just a slight movement. What happens with most entities, and this includes those who seek most earnestly after truth, is that [with] the effort made to polarize towards a radiance of being, a generosity and an openness of being, there is an equal and opposite reaction that contracts against fears and makes separations betwixt one thing and another in order to feel more safe. This brings the pendulum back so that there is a slight movement towards service to self. And the pendulum never gets very far in either direction.

What you hoped to do as you attempt to work with you own consciousness in order to accelerate the rate of evolution of your own spirit is to be enough consistent in opening and radiating love that the pendulum begins to move more and more towards the extreme. The more polarized the reactions, the more obvious it will be to you when you make an error. And this means that it can be very poor judgment to become involved in gauging one’s polarity or assessing one’s progress. You have heard that a watched pot is slow to boil, and the over-concern with how one is doing in polarizing will actually be a brake upon the very activity that you had hoped to emphasize.

So the first thing that we would suggest to those who wish to open the heart and to live in the open heart is to refrain from attempting to give the self a spiritual grade. Avoid thoughts of how you are doing. They will come regardless of whether you encourage them or not, but it is your choice if you are wise to allow those thoughts to come and go, for within the illusion that you have worked so hard to enter it is almost impossible to be aware of how one is actually serving. One must simply serve in faith and allow that faith to be sufficient.

There is within your earthly condition a great array of choices which face you every day, every hour even. And it is easy to begin to look at the things that occur and to think these things have no spiritual nature. “These things are of the world and do not need my attention but only my activity.” And yet we say to you that all things are full of the Creator and by this we mean every stone, every bit of earth, every iota of the wind that blows, and the rains that fall, every diaper changed, every dish washed, every chore, every onerous task, all of these things are instinct with the magical, utter life and that life is love. And the life within you is love also.

When one is attempting to live with the open heart every missed step seems to be a difficulty, and this is because the attempt to live with an open heart is neatly and fully circumscribed about by the perils and tests and round robins of a very active spirit that watches over each with the firm intent of offering the maximum amount of helpful catalyst. When this catalyst hits the sensory input of your being the earthly, normal thing that one does is to contract around that thing, assess it, and decide what to do concerning it. These actions tend to close the heart. This is not to say that the way of the open heart has no input from intelligence or thought but, rather, to emphasize that much of one’s care in assessing incoming data has much to do with the lower energies of the body, and as one gives these concerns priority the self tends to continue acting from a place within what this instrument would call the head. And, using that terminology, we can say that the spiritual life of third density is a journey from head to heart.

And we have noted before that the energy that comes into your being is infinite, but that there are ways in which each of you, by the choices that you make, contract and narrow and limit the amount of energy that can come into the body and move up the spine. The first center—we will simply summarize—has to do with issues of life and death, breathing, eating, the sexual polarity. These are the concerns of red ray. The concerns of the next ray, the orange ray, are those that the person has with himself or herself, and the person in relationship with one other person, the dynamics betwixt self and self, and self and other self, without reference to groups, but just one person and another. These are the concerns of orange ray. The concerns of yellow ray, this being a yellow-ray density, take on a good deal of centrality of importance. This is the heart, shall we say, of third density—the relating of self to groups, the opening of self that will in fourth density become the social memory complex when thoughts are shared, private thoughts simply skirted about, seen, appreciated, respected and left alone. There will be other lessons to learn in fourth density, but this lesson that you now work upon, of opening the self without fear, this one you will work upon until you are able to feel that contact with other selves as an identity of one to one, heart to heart, and love to love.

Now, those issues of red ray, orange ray, and yellow ray are neatly designed and most tidily packaged to maximize your confusion and to limit the power that you may bring and allow up to the heart center, the next one after red, orange and yellow. Each time that you put yourself down, each time that you are harsh, each time that you feel so isolated and alienated that you deny your brotherhood with all that is, you close down a little bit of that channel which is bringing in infinite creative energy to your body, and each time that occurs there is less energy into the heart. So, basically, those who have not worked through the issues that confront them at these three levels—self, self with another, and self with its groups—each time that you allow these issues to come and to be feared you have shut off some of the power that you need in your heart in order to live the life that you wish to live.

May we say that the conversation preceding this message was, we felt, most enlightened, for each was speaking of the being as opposed to the doing. You see, it is the love with which you do things that radiates; it is not the things that you do. Among your peoples this has been much misunderstood, for people look to see if there is some service that can be their spiritual gift to the world. They are looking for a dramatic role to play, to teach or to heal or to prophesy. And yet these things are forever secondary to the primary mission of each of you upon this particular planet in this particular density at this time. The mission before each of you is simply to address all of that which comes to you with an open heart, just that. And yet just that is the work of lifetime upon lifetime, for how can a person in a heavy illusion such as you now enjoy be fearless? It is not within the physical body to be fearless. It is not within the earthly brain, that choice-maker, to be fearless. Indeed, only the foolish are fearless, and yet the teacher known to you as Jesus the Christ has said that it is only to the foolish that the wisdom comes. It is only to those who live as little children that the kingdom is inherited.

How can a sensible, sane person, gazing upon a rather dangerous world, feel no fear? This is the crux. Here is the center. Just here, where fear shuts the door of the heart, here lies the opportunity to learn. This instrument has moved past the death experience and returned. Consequently, this instrument’s life since that experience has been relatively fearless. We bring this up to emphasize that what each fears in an archetypical sense is the cessation of being. When one feels threatened those emotions which do not have intelligence but are simply instinctual rise up to defend and protect. And it takes a great deal of care and discipline and perseverance to teach the self to lay down its arms and to be peaceful with the self.

Each of you has the issues of all the world within you. This instrument is concerned for the peace of the world and prays for it often, and yet if this instrument prayed for peace within itself, it would be the same prayer. Indeed, it is our humble opinion that the most efficient way to bring the world to peace is to learn peace within the self, for as you think, as you are, so your universe in toto is also, for your consciousness is as a field and each bit of fear that you are able to let drop, each time that you find your heart expanding, the consciousness of your planet is being lightened. There is no lag time between the open heart of self and service to the planet, that lightening of the consciousness of planet Earth. You came among these entities of flesh and bone. You took that flesh upon yourself and buried yourself in a world of shadows because you wished to make a difference. You heard the sorrow of those who dwell with you now. And you wished to stand among them as a witness and as one who was a channel for love. This is your great chance. These are the days you hoped and prepared for, and now the time is upon you, and how quickly, my friends, it is going. Is it not?

You have sped through childhood and adolescence and adulthood, and each is thinking to the self that, “Well, it’s all downhill from here.” And yet we say to you that as the physical vehicle hews less and less to the electrical body’s blueprint, so the heart, so much more experienced [than] when new to the planet, has its time to open and flower and blossom. You see about you so many entities who have maturity but without joy. Who have wisdom but without love. Who have become bitter rather than sweet, and tart rather than mellow. Learn from these people how not to be, for these are the entities who are forever attempting to move out of the gravity well of neither service to self nor service to others but just back and forth, good days and bad days. You are hoping through your life to bear witness to a love that loved you first. You are hoping to be as the keepers of lighthouses, that your love, that love that flows through you, not from you, may shine upon that sea of confusion in which all are swimming and might warn entities of those rocks of despair, and anguish, and hopelessness.

There is suffering involved in each door you open in life, wherever you look, in whatever land, in whatever subject you find that those who would be true servants have made tremendous sacrifices, even unto giving up the life for others. You find people in each situation whose heart has remained open regardless of the circumstances. And you feel the strength of inspiration from those entities, those people who make the news for a day or two because they have leapt into the water and saved five people before they drowned or went into a prison and released the prisoners, paying with their lives. And these stories touch deeply within your being and let you know of the depth and profundity of love that you have within you and [that] resonates and exalts and expresses the light and joy for knowing the beauty of those spirits and their great gifts.

But we say to you that there are many, many millions more whose sacrifices and suffering you never see, for they suffer emotionally, and mentally, and spiritually, bearing witness to love, being givers of light regardless of the circumstances that would fell a lesser being. And each of you has opportunity after opportunity to meet situations without fear, to open to any catalyst whether it seems positive or painful. The faith to remain steady is to be prized for there is in steadiness a vision, clear sight, and in persistence of openness, healing and forgiveness. And these do not come from you, for from you can come very little until you run completely out.

These things must come through your channel. You simply have to allow that channel within not to get clogged up with the lower energy concerns. If we could leave one thought with you this day it would be not to despise your lower self but to love, support, respect and make allowances for the instinctual behavior, the needful behavior of that being that you are, part animal, part angel, and rather a hash between the two, holding you together. Love, care for, and nurse this physical vehicle of yours. Know that this is the building wherein the Creator now lives, and the ground on which you stand, or upon which you sit, is holy ground; not somewhere else, not when you were better, but now, exactly as you are. This is your moment of holiness, and all moments are potentially sanctified, and what sanctifies but the recognition of love in all things.

We do not want you to think that we consider this easy. We do not. We remember most keenly being in third density, living without the memory of things as they really are, and having only that yearning of desire and that movement of faith to rely upon. In this you are wise to encourage relationships with those who have the same concerns, for the gift of one entity to another, both being spiritually concerned, is the gift of the clear mirror that lets the other self see what it is doing, how it is coming across. You cannot see yourself. You must depend upon others to help you, and this is profoundly the work of third density.
[...]

Source: http://www.llresearch.org/transcripts/is..._0119.aspx