Free the Heart and the Mind Will Follow

Last Sunday was quite a day. I along with 31 other men had been called through to the Slimming World "Man of the Year" semi-final and finals day. It is quite an honour to be one of the 32 out of some 50,000 male members in this country.

There was a beautiful moment of synchronicity that I became aware of as I switched on my computer and logged on to Facebook before setting off that morning. It showed me a memory from exactly a year before of a journey I had taken with my brother and sister to Devon to attend our nephew Joe’s wedding. During the journey my sister spent several hours selling the merits of Slimming World to me. I listened, tried to evade, but I listened. She was speaking to me because she loves me; she spoke only in and through love. She spoke the language of the heart and I was able to listen with the ears of my heart. I believed that I was always going to be the way I was and to get to a physically healthier place was just too much for me. A price it would seem I was not willing to pay. I believed that the only way to achieve weight loss would be to starve myself. This has not been the case at all, Slimming World and its method of “Food Optimising” is about healthy eating, group support, healthy living and personal responsibility. At its its core is love, it speaks another language of the heart and that day I began to have ears that could hear once again. That weekend was the turning point and I loved reliving the memory of the journey to the wedding as I enjoyed the journey to Slimming World headquarters with my group consultant Janet Cullin. I also loved the synchronicity of it all…My whole life seems to be led by it and the more I am open to it the more it seems to speak to me, constantly drawing me on to endless possibilities. Synchronicity to me is the invisible voice of love always calling to those who have ears that can hear.

It was an amazing day listening to many inspirational men who had embarked on the same journey as myself and were now living amazing lives. I got through to the final and then waited for the final result…Of which I cannot yet reveal as they have asked the finalists to remain silent about the result for at least the next few days…So you will have to watch this space if you want to know who the winner is…

Now during the day the former professional footballer and current TV presenter Dion Dublin gave us an inspirational talk before the semi-finals began. I listened intently to what he said. What stood out was him talking about how every time he was injured and presented with disappointments he had to face and question his beliefs about his ability to overcome them and to carry on with his career. The pinnacle for him being when he finally played for England at Wembley. He compared this to the journeys we all had been on, something he couldn’t identify with as he had always been a fit athlete. That said he did suggest that our journeys must have begun with our own minds, with us challenging our beliefs about ourselves and lives and that it must have taken great courage to keep journeying on. As he said "If the mind is right, the body will follow."  He came across as warm and caring, I really liked him. More than that I believe that he understood exactly the journey we had been on, certainly mine.

As I shared my story in the semi-final and final I spoke about beliefs about myself that had been ingrained from a young age, beliefs that at the time had given me a certain amount of security and stability but had eventually tethered, tied me down, enslaved me. Over the years I have challenged many things that I believed about myself and life in general. I have changed my mind many times. This is never an easy task. It is amazing how these beliefs can cling and at times re-emerge seemingly from nowhere.

I am not done with my changes…Are any of us?

There is a poster in the small schoolroom at Dunham Road chapel that reads “Anyone who is a slave to anything is not free. The first step to freedom is to free the mind.”

It has been up there for a few years now and I have noticed many people comment on it on a number of occasions. A friend did so just the other day as he reflected on how he had been enslaved by his own thinking, even though he would consider himself quite a rational man. I identify with him strongly, as I have said many times before I have become enslaved many times by my own beliefs. The very things that I thought gave me security and the illusion of stability, that gave me an anchor on which I could depend, were actually chains that enslaved me, kept me trapped and stopped me flying free.

Bob Marley once sang “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”

There is real truth in this statement. No one else can set us free from our own self-created mental slavery. If they could wouldn’t that be the worst kind of slavery? The enslavement of handing over responsibility for our own lives to another. There is no freedom in this. One of things I love about Slimming World is that while it offers you a simple method and there is a great deal of mutual support, in the end responsibility is with the individual. It is up to us to live this way, day by day. I see this as vital as it build genuine self-esteem. At its core is of course love and support, but also a development of true love for self also.

So how do we then free our minds from our own mental slavery and live the lives we are born to live? Well I actually believe it takes more than just questioning our thinking. Yes that is part of it, but it isn’t the full picture; yes discernment is a vital aspect, but it is not enough on its own. For me it begins with spirit and it comes alive in and through love.

Everything worthwhile in my life has to come through love. True religious community is built on love and lives through love. The 12 Step Fellowships I have belonged to have at their core the simple principle of love. Slimming World is about love. To me they are all about love, love for self, love for other, love for life; they are about love for self, love for neighbour and love for whatever it is that we experience is at the core of all life, God for me.

I have discovered that it is by living in and through love that one is then able to truly question ones beliefs, for love is about more than belief it is about faith, something deeper than belief and it is this that sets one free to live and be in love.

If my life has taught me anything it has taught me that in order to change your mind and therefore change your life requires first and foremost a change of heart, or perhaps more accurately an opening an awakening of the heart.

So how do we bring the heart alive, how do we live in love?

Well I believe it requires attention and application. Love is not soft and mushy. It is not about sentimentality. It requires discipline. It is about raising our heads and observing where love is present in life, rather than merely focusing on what is wrong with both ourselves and our world. It requires us to live in the solution, rather than the problem. It requires us to live fully open to the love out there as well as the love in here. It requires courage, which of course means heart, it means love, from the French word “Cour” meaning heart.

It requires spiritual discipline too. For me that means practising prayer and meditation each day and throughout  the day. It’s about taking sacred moments, so as to connect more fully to the love within each and every one of us and the love present in life.

It requires attention to one another. To support one another and encourage one another when it is needed, without taking over one another’s lives. This is because love requires responsibility for our own lives. For if we don’t we will not bring to life the love present deep within us and we will not be free.

Freedom begins in love and continues through love. To free the mind the first requirement is to live in and through love. Freedom does not begin in the mind, it is much deeper than that, although I was once a slave to the former belief. To free the mind you must first free the heart, this is the first step to freedom. Free to what? Well free to be love…

The key to freedom's gateway is love…Love for self, love for other and love for God…First and last and always love…Love is all that we need…We need it to begin and we need it to continue…

So keep on rocking in the free world all you groovers and shakers out there...It's the only way to be...Yeh, really free...May we always have ears to hear life's redemption songs...

If Only

In “Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow”, a book written while he knew that he was dying, Forrest Church wrote,

“The only way to reconcile yourself, make peace with yourself, make peace with your neighbor, make peace with God, find salvation, is to break through and love — to forgive and to love. You don’t change the person you forgive. You change your own heart. So anything that you can do to reconcile also means that at the end of your life, when you’re given a few months to live, you can look back without regret.

The two saddest words in the English language are “if only,” and they ring with the most poignancy at a time that a person gets word that he or she has a terminal illness: “If only I had stopped drinking; if only I had dared to change careers when I could; if only I had reconciled with my father when I had a chance.”

I agree with Forrest. I believe that “If Only” are the saddest two words in the English language. I would add also that they are loneliest too. How many of us live with this sense of regret for the things we have done, or just as painfully failed to do? How many of us live in isolation from people we have known and loved in our lives because of our pride? How many of us have let past wrongs done, or perceived to have been done, stop us living the loving and connected lives we are capable of?

So why do we find it so hard to seek and give forgiveness? Why is reconciliation so challenging? Why does pride hold us in this sense of regret? Why are so many of us visited in the darkest night with the ghosts that whisper “If Only”

Well because it is not easy. It requires us to rise above and beyond our small selves to a larger way of being. As Sara Moores Campbell has claimed. “There is incredible power in forgiveness. But forgiveness is not rational. One can seldom find a reason to forgive or be forgiven. Forgiveness is often undeserved. It may require a dimension of justice (penance, in traditional terms), but not always, for what it holds sacred is not fairness, but self-respect and community. Forgiveness does not wipe away guilt, but invites reconciliation. And it is as important to be able to forgive as it is to be forgiven.”

No it is not easy, but it is vital. Not only for ourselves but for the greater good also. Forgiveness is about reconciliation it is about bringing wholeness and healing to all. This is why, in my experience, failing to offer forgiveness and failing to atone for our own wrongs and mistakes makes reconciliation impossible and I have come to believe that it is this that breeds a sense of isolation and loneliness, deep within us. It is not by chance that atonement can be broken down to at-one-ment. For it is such acts that bring about oneness in life.

I recently spent a few days away with a group of people exploring the subject of forgiveness. We were together in a beautiful and loving setting and it was an open environment in which we all talked about our struggles with forgiveness of others and of ourselves. I believe that we all gained a great deal from our time together and I hope it renewed us in our efforts to reconcile ourselves with our pasts and those we have shared our lives with, so as to live better lives in the future. One thing that came strongly out of the weekend was this sense that forgiveness is not about forgetting. Yes it is about healing and reconciliation, but not about simply abandoning the past and passively letting go. In fact if anything real forgiveness is a true act of remembrance. It is about growing from the past and becoming increasingly whole people.

Again as Sara Moores Campbell said, “No, we do not forgive and forget. But when we invite the power of forgiveness, we release ourselves from some of the destructive hold the past has on us. Our hatred, our anger, our need to feel wronged – those will destroy us, whether a relationship is reconciled or not.”

Our varied struggles with forgiveness showed how difficult it was to truly reconcile ourselves with our pasts, with ourselves and with those we have shared and share our lives with. Forgiveness is not easy. It is easy to say perhaps “I forgive you”, but those are just words, it is far from easy to truly mean them though. We cannot just simply will ourselves into it and it certainly isn’t an overnight matter. The key, as in all things, is to be open to it. Here lays its power and its love. Here lays the key to be freed from that aching loneliness of regret and the ghosts of “If Only”. Not only for ourselves but for the good of all. I have come to believe that all our lives depend upon it

Again to quote Sara Moores Campbell,

“…we cannot just will ourselves to enter into forgiveness, either as givers or receivers. We can know it is right and that we want to do it and still not be able to.

We can, however, be open and receptive to the power of forgiveness, which, like any gift of the spirit, isn’t of our own making. Its power is rooted in love. The Greek word for this kind of love is agape as “Love seeking to create community.” This kind of love is human, but is also the grace of transcendent power that lifts us out of ourselves. It transforms and heals; and even when we are separated by time or space or death, it reconciles us to ourselves and to Life. For its power abides not just between us but within us. If we invite the power of agape to heal our personal wounds and give us the gift of forgiveness, we would give our world a better chance of survival.”

At one point during the weekend we discussed the limits of forgiveness and whether there were any. A friend said that he didn’t know how he would react if someone did anything to his son and many people agreed with him and then I shared an example of this and the power forgiveness. I recounted my dear friend Claire’s reaction to witnessing her son being killed in front of her on a crossing. The driver did not stop at the crossing and took Ethan’s life. A power from within or beyond her compelled her to forgive him there and then. I know from watching her piece her life back together since that if she hadn’t have done so there and then she could not have survived herself or if she had she would have lived with an aching bitterness for the rest of her life. Not that the last nine years have been easy, she has been to hell and back many times, but that power, the power of love, has held her through it all and I believe that it was that same power that compelled her to forgive the driver of the car that day on the side of the road. A love that passeth all rational understanding, but one that can hold and sustain us through whatever happens in life, if we would let it have its way and bring it to life in our being.

Forgiveness is a true act of Love, in the purest Agapeic sense of the word. It is an act of the heart, it takes real courage, Remember that courage comes from the French word for heart “Coeur” In the Hindu sacred poem “The Bhagavad Gita” you hear this reflected “If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive, If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.” You see it reflected in the dying words of Jesus on the cross “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This same loving courage was expressed in the way that both Martin Luther King and Gandhi led their movements of non-violent resistance. These were powerful loving soul forces that inspired healing and reconciliation taken up by the likes of Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa and “The Truth and Reconciliation Hearings” that took place there following the end of Apartheid. It can be the same with our individuals lives and our individual hearts. At some level I think we all need to reconcile ourselves with someone or something, even if it is just our own pasts.

This is why I have come to believe that forgiving is not about forgetting at all. In fact what it is really about is remembering. Actually it is more than that, forgiveness is an act of remembrance. It is about bringing the memory alive and creating something from the past. Reconciliation is not just something that occurs between us, but also within us. In each of our hearts and minds and souls. If we can make something from our past hurts we can create meaning from even the hardest moments of our lives and bring a new wholeness and openness to our lives. In so doing we won’t live out our lives with that aching lonely feeling of regret and be visited by the ghosts of “If Only”. In so doing we will leave something to pass on to those who follow and our lives will have truly proved worth dying for, by the love we have left behind.

Below is the full version of Sara Moores Campbell's reflection on "Forgiveness" quoted above

“Forgiveness” by Sara Moores Campbell, from “Into the Wilderness”

There is incredible power in forgiveness. But forgiveness is not rational. One can seldom find a reason to forgive or be forgiven. Forgiveness is often undeserved. It may require a dimension of justice (penance, in traditional terms), but not always, for what it holds sacred is not fairness, but self-respect and community. Forgiveness does not wipe away guilt, but invites reconciliation. And it is as important to be able to forgive as it is to be forgiven.

No, we do not forgive and forget. But when we invite the power of forgiveness, we release ourselves from some of the destructive hold the past has on us. Our hatred, our anger, our need to feel wronged – those will destroy us, whether a relationship is reconciled or not.

But we cannot just will ourselves to enter into forgiveness, either as givers or receivers. We can know it is right and that we want to do it and still not be able to.

We can, however, be open and receptive to the power of forgiveness, which, like any gift of the spirit, isn’t of our own making. Its power is rooted in love. The Greek word for this kind of love is agape as “Love seeking to create community.” This kind of love is human, but is also the grace of transcendent power that lifts us out of ourselves. It transforms and heals; and even when we are separated by time or space or death, it reconciles us to ourselves and to Life. For its power abides not just between us but within us. If we invite the power of agape to heal our personal wounds and give us the gift of forgiveness, we would give our world a better chance of survival.