Every heart is connected to the Great One Heart. It is from this heart of hearts that we are un- conditionally loved, nourished, healed and re- deemed. The Hebrew word for “compassion” is derived from the word for “womb.” God is the primal matrix, the Great One from which all beings are born and all love streams forth. We experience on a very tangible level this immense love pulsating through our veins.

This heart connection to source is our lifeline or umbilical cord.

While it is difficult for humans to fully grasp the immense love of the Great One Heart, we are all intimately connected to it and can learn to cultivate a deeper and richer understanding of this love if we so desire. Not all humans acknowledge Great Spirit as the ground of their being, but this does not stop the unwavering flow of love from source. We may choose to intellectually deny the Creator, but we continue to partake of divine love in each breath we take, for God/Goddess resides in every cell of our bodies and nourishes our souls on spiritual and physical levels.

If we decide to cultivate and understand on a deeper level the compassion of the Great One Heart, we must first open our heart to receive Spirit’s love, which requires a certain degree of reverence, surrender or transformation of the ego, for it is only when we surrender to the Beloved in our brokenness and pain that the Great One Heart can then fill our cups with unconditional love and forgiveness. This is what it means to claim our divine gift as the beloved. It is because of Great Spirit’s compassion for us that we can then love ourselves and extend compassion to others.

When we know, deep in our hearts, that we are a re- flection of God’s awesome love, we are exhibiting authentic self-love. We have claimed wholeheartedly the gift of our belovedness which, as Jesus teaches, is avail- able to all those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. The tendency to deny or reject one’s self or elevate self above others usually stems from an insecure ego that has fallen prey to the illusion that its self-worth comes from worldly definitions as opposed to a direct connection to Source. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. Our belovedness is the core truth of who we are. Every time we listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls us Beloved, we will discover within ourselves a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply. It is like discovering a well in the

Once you have touched wet ground, you want to dig deeper.

When we have been transformed and melted like butter by the love of the great heart, we can then choose to become a vessel of this love and commit our lives to assisting those who are still suffering. We might choose to become what Christians call stewards of God’s love or what Buddhists call a Bodhisattva of compassion, a being (satva) committed to liberation (bodhi). This kin- ship with the suffering of others is the discovery of our soft spot, the discovery of Bodhicitta or Mercy. It is said to be present in all beings. If this is the case, everything that exists in creation does so because of the Great Mother’s compassion.

This love is so great that it moves us to explore what it means to live a compassionate life and seek enlightenment

A Bodhisattva of compassion is one who has empathy for the distress of others, coupled with a desire to alleviate suffering in the world. The word compassion is derived from the Latin words parti and cum, which together mean “to suffer with.” Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. It challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely. Compassion requires us to feel weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable and powerless with the powerless.

Compassion requires us to withhold judgment and practice empathy. It also requires us to set healthy boundaries that honor our highest good as op- posed to falling prey to a codependency that enables dysfunction. Compassion requires that we value the wisdom of grief and solitude. It also requires us to be humble and forgive those who have trespassed against us, so that even though we can feel the suffering of others, we also maintain the witnessing part of ourselves that allows us to see the bigger picture simultaneously.

We have much to learn from Buddha’s and Christ’s messages of compassion, for they are some of the deepest sources of strength and validation of the arduous path of the bodhisattva or faithful steward. Both Masters understood that life is filled with suffering and that we must learn to live in ways that reduce the suffering of those around us. We, too, must learn to find ways to alleviate our own suffering and transform it into well-being and peace.

We need to look deeply into the nature of suffering to see the causes of suffering and to find the way out. This requires every one of us to focus on our own healing, as it is the only thing we can really control. We can’t alleviate war and suffering in the world until we have first alleviated the war within ourselves.

We all have the capacity to feel compassion, but not all of us desire or choose to cultivate and implement it in our daily lives. For most humans, the practice of compassion is easier said than done since it goes against the grain of the ego, which is self-serving and competitive by nature. In Sanskrit, bodhi means “awakened” and chitta means “mind” or “heart.” Bodhichitta -- “awakened heart-mind” -- is the compassionate wish to realize enlightenment for all beings, not just for one’s self.

Through bodhichitta, the desire to attain enlightenment transcends the narrow interests of the individual self. Bodhichitta is an essential part of Mahayana Buddhism. Without bodhichitta, the path to enlightenment is mired in selfishness. However hard we work, we are still wrapped up in our own heads, our own pain, our own wants. The path to awakening opens when we become aware of others as well as our- selves. One of my favorite Tibetan Buddhist teachers, Pema Chodron, explains the cultivation of bodhichitta in more detail:

Those who train wholeheartedly in awakening unconditional and relative bodhichitta are called bodhisattvas or warriors—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world. These are men and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire. Training in the middle of the fire can mean that warrior-bodhisattvas enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering. It also refers to their willing- ness to cut through personal reactivity and self-deception, to their dedication to uncovering the basic undistorted energy of bodhichitta.

We have many examples of master warriors—people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King—who recognized that the greatest harm comes (198) from our own aggressive minds. They devoted their lives to helping others understand this truth. There are also many ordinary people who spend their lives training in opening their hearts and minds in order to help others do the same. Like them, we could learn to relate to ourselves and our world as warriors. We could train in awakening our courage and love.

In our legalistic societies, we have been conditioned to believe that there is little incentive in the human world to cultivate compassion because it might make us too soft, and therefore, more likely to be eaten alive by those who have chosen to shut their hearts down. We have been taught to view suffering as something to be avoided at all costs. Hence the call to compassion is a call that goes against the grain and requires a total conversion of heart and mind. Why would we want to open our hearts when the world will just break them over and over again?

In the midst of so much human suffering, we might assume that it would be easier to shut our hearts down and not have any expectations of hope for the future at all. Yet, in our heart of hearts we all know that a world without compassion would be a living hell, a human wasteland, and therefore the choice to uphold God’s grace amidst great suffering and despair can be seen as a choice for a better world for all. We do this for one reason and one reason only, because it is at the very core of who we are as humans; it is the greatest blessing any of us could ever ask for. In embracing human suffering and healing our hearts, compassion breaks down walls and unites all of humanity in the Great One Heart. It is the gateway to our spiritual evolution as a human race. It is the true utopia that we all seek.

Those who choose to cultivate compassion in their lives soon come to learn of the spiritual riches in the Great One Heart, which makes the false riches of the socially constructed, egoistic material world look like plastic, disposable toys. When we come from a place of compassion, we are holding up an ancient light of truth that has been revered throughout history and can never be destroyed. It is the truth that we are One in the Great Matrix of Consciousness. It is the truth that each one of us is a reflection of the Ultimate Reality. This is the core message of the Bodhisattva and the central message of Jesus’ teachings as well as many other teachers of compassion. Their teachings are designed to awaken each person to his or her Divine Self and to cultivate a direct connection to Source.

The path of the bodhisattva is indeed a radical call, a call that goes to the roots of our being. Those who choose to implement compassion in their lives are the weavers and the menders, the bridge builders, the integrators, the diplomats and the nurturers. They work in the trenches of our communities in an assortment of vocations. They have embraced their grief and experienced the redemptive power of God’s unconditional love. They are the salt of the earth, the lighthouses in the storm that guide us back to our Divine Self. They are the true educators of spirit, the wounded healers, totally perfect in their imperfection because they have been touched by the healing powers of Grace. Their one wish is to awaken all souls to the power within themselves.

It is because of the Great One Heart that the Bodhisattvas of compassion come as humble admirers of the Beloved in others, grateful and joyous, for they know that Love is the only true power. They remind humanity that we have a lot to look forward to. However, we have an immense amount of healing work to be done, for the illusion is much like a weed that wants to strangle out the truth. Bodhisattvas are quite aware of the social in- justices in the world and the human ignorance that produces those injustices. They are deeply pained by them all, just as God is pained by it all. However, rather than run from the places of poverty and despair, which most people tend to do, they go directly to these places where “angels fear to tread.”

Most of them choose to serve without recognition, blue ribbons and purple hearts. They have chosen the difficult task of opening and healing their hearts so that they can then assist in healing what is broken on larger levels. They don’t expect recognition because they know that those who are still suffering are experiencing a spiritual void—a starvation of the soul-- and therefore aren’t coming from a place of gratitude. Most of them work in humble servitude and know their human limitations. They don’t expect to save the world; this is too heavy of a burden for one person to carry. They do, however, wish to assist in the raising of human consciousness, even if it means working with just a few individuals in their lifetime, for awakening others to their Divine Self is the most powerful source of social change. In this sense, they are radical agents of social change. And while they are the very glue of humanity, most bodhisattvas will never be featured on the cover of a magazine for their humanitarian deeds. In keeping their eyes on God, they know where their true source of recognition comes from.

Some people say that it could take many lifetimes of practicing compassion before one can become an authentic, realized Bodhisattva. Therefore, one must be patient with one’s self and practice forgiveness over and over, embracing imperfection and humbly asking for redemption. We can create struggle in our spiritual lives when

we compare the images we hold of ourselves with those of enlightened teachers, of figures like Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, or Mother Theresa. Our heart naturally longs for wholeness, beauty, and perfection. This can be very discouraging, for most of us are not yet masters. Spiritual evolution is a process that will inevitably reveal all of our faults, but this is meant to make us stronger, more humble and teachable.

While it is difficult for us to understand and make judgments about the nature of spiritual evolution, there are a number of paths of service and rites of initiation that one can experience in order to cultivate the Bodhisattva’s state of consciousness. Some of the more obvious character traits of the Bodhisattva are humility, joy, empathy, kindness, patience, forgiveness, faith, surrender, gratitude and a commitment to service. Most Bodhisattvas have experienced a dark night of the soul, which is an experience of complete darkness, separation and despair, sometimes involving ego death and rebirth. It is a time of utter pain and disillusionment, where one’s sense of self is shattered. However, it is in these places of dark- ness that the greatest healing can take place; that is, if one is able to see the compassion that lies underneath the pain.

It can take many dark nights before one is able to truly see the luminous wisdom that exists in the dark- ness. Some of us may never embrace the wounded parts of ourselves that exist in the shadows, but if we seek the path of liberation from suffering, healing the wounds of the heart, mind, body and emotions is an essential focus to bring about real internal healing.

Bodhisattva’s don’t feel the need to draw attention to themselves, because they don’t need any validation from others in order to be whole. Fully awakened to their complete and utter dependence on God, their cups are overflowing with love and ecstasy, yet they are intimately connected with experiences of pain and suffering as well as the suffering of others. They understand the weakness of the human spirit and are completely dependent on the Great One Heart.

They pray a lot and ask that God will keep their hearts free from the illusion of competition and ego. More importantly, they know that the human race has been forgiven for its ignorance and that God has bestowed the ultimate gift of grace on us. Human suffering and pain are therefore inevitable manifestations of the human drama. Pain can either take us down a road of self-destruction or it can be used as a catalyst for redemption. More often than not, pain is used by God to wake us up so that we can be drawn closer to the central heart or the inner integrity, which is our true destiny.

Another important trait of the Bodhisattva is humility. Bodhisattvas generally avoid self-aggrandizement, a sign of spiritual weakness. They also stay away from self- deprecation, since feelings of both superiority and inferiority are signs of ego imbalance. They have great compassion for those who struggle with low self-esteem because they have experienced the psychological torture that it brings. They also know that it is extremely difficult to see through the illusion of fame and ego, because there are so many incentives on a day to day basis to worship the maya of the world.

Even the most enlightened humans fall prey to the ways of an insecure ego at times, but they know that going back to source, to self-reflection, prayer and humility will return them to balance. This is the Goddess’s promise to all of us; that if we respect and honor the compassionate boundaries that are set for us by our inner spiritual guides, we will not be thrown off- base by the demands of the world.

Awakening the Heart through Art

The world over, art has been used as a compassionate tool to raise consciousness and alleviate suffering. Musicians, writers and artists of all kinds have used their gifts to support the evolution of consciousness, whether by raising money for the poor or as a therapeutic modality to resolve conflicts, heal toxic emotions and bridge gaps in communities. All of the artists and writers in this book have in one way or another devoted their lives to a path of service through art and/or other healing modalities.

If we look at history, we see that most of the great visionaries and prophets were marginalized, particularly women and minorities. While all of the artists in this book have chosen a difficult path, they are also committed to their own spiritual and personal growth. Furthermore, they see the gifts that all of God’s children bring to the healing of the planet, and therefore have made a conscious attempt to avoid competition or spiritual elitism.

Most of them are doing their own shadow work and understand that awakening doesn’t necessarily hap- pen overnight. However, they also understand that the process of awakening involves cultivating a humble heart and what Buddhists refer to as “beginner’s mind,” which means that they are open to learning from all walks of life. We are all teachers and students in this life. It might take many lifetimes to reach enlightenment, and there- fore we can come to accept learning experiences with gratitude. We can greet conflict with open arms and value the life lessons in all relationships. As a result of our ignorance, we need others to help us see our denials or our denied shadows. We simply can’t evolve alone.

Blessings on your easter day, from the deep wells of compassion and grace!

Written by: Victoria Christian

Excerpt from : Feminine Mysticism in Art: Artists Envisioning the Divine