This morning, I saw someone I hadn’t encountered in a long time. When I interacted with them on community projects, they were vibrant, kind, talented, enthusiastic, and deeply engaged in community life. But today, as I walked through the lobby of an office building, I saw that person in a wheelchair, frail and tired, and attended by a caregiver. Their face was lined, their body weakened, and an unmistakable sadness surrounded them. They had not yet seen me approaching.

Our aims are the intentions to stay spiritually awake throughout the day. They remind us to return, again and again, to the clarity of consciousness rather than drifting into automatic reactions. One vital aim is transformative but straightforward: stay with the experience.

From our first days of life, curiosity helps us survive. As infants, we instinctively search for nourishment. As adults, our curiosity matures into the wish to know and to understand what would otherwise remain hidden.

One of the most vital spiritual aims for the new year is telling the Truth—the commitment to seeking the truth, accepting it, and telling it.

At first glance, this may seem simple. But look closely: hundreds of times each day we encounter half-truths, distortions, exaggerations, and convenient omissions. And if we are honest, we sometimes feel tempted to offer our own versions of the truth when it suits us. Why doesn’t this work?

The first sound you ever made wasn’t a cry, but a heartbeat, and it’s been telling the same story ever since. Each of us received the life force at our making and that same life force formed our bodies. Our hearts are the first organ to develop and they pump continuously until we make the transition to another form. Our human hearts reflect the heart of God. And our hearts reveal the emotions of God. As above, so below.

The grandmother, who as a schoolteacher, once nurtured children every day, can justify separating babies from their mothers, and this should terrify us all. How does a human heart travel from tenderness to atrocity? The distance is shorter than we think.

Happy New Year to you. I pray that this is the brightest year of your life! 

Firecrackers, fireworks, celebration, champagne toasts, or perhaps a quiet evening with family around the fire, looking back on the year and imagining the one to come. Whatever the setting, at this special time of saying good-bye to part of our lives, we long for life’s energy to shine as brightly as the fireworks themselves. And if we’re not celebrating, we still crave that burst of life because it is an antidote for the death of an entire year. We need something to compensate for all our losses and to distract us from the irreversible ending that will occur tonight, and all losses of the year that will take its last breath tonight. We need something to give us hope… hope that life will go on, that our life will go on. This night can be a lonely night, even if we are with people, so, some of us may find the unbridled life force by watching the teeming crowds in Times Square. 

The heart doesn’t ask permission before it fills with rage, grief, or joy. But we can choose what happens next. The heart holds our joy and our grief, our merriment, and our anger. Such strong emotions are real and valid. Frequently we cannot choose our emotional state because of the circumstances around us. For example, in wonderful events such as the birth of a child or grandchild, our joy is uncontainable. Likewise, when someone steals from us, we are naturally incensed and angry. Joy and merriment are welcomed emotions, but anger and grief are not usually so welcome.

What if everything your heart clings to could be taken away tomorrow, except for one thing? While that isn’t true, it could be. But there is more to the story…

The heart not only holds our surface feelings, but our most compelling emotions: the passions. Many of our passions are positive, such as the passion for health, for giving, for loving the needy, for leading, etc. But we also hold negative passions such as rage, envy, fear, and vengeance in our hearts. The heart can easily overflow with love which pours into every cell of our being. Yet negative passions held in our heart cannot remain there without infecting our entire being.

We have all heard the saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But is this true? The short answer is yes. But why?

Join us for this week’s reflections on “The Heart Center of Intelligence.”

All our lives we have heard to follow our hearts, but what if we did? The heart is a powerful force in our being. So, if we follow it, we are open to its emotions and pulls. But decisions made on emotion alone may be in error.

You are likely very busy today. Perhaps the shopping is finished, the gifts wrapped, and the meals prepared—but today the demands are different, and sometimes even greater. Christmas Day is the time when most of us gather with those we cherish or with whom we share some lasting connection.

Over the many years, Christmas Eve has changed for me. As a child, I could hardly fall asleep for all the excitement. There would be gifts and surprises, especially the ones from Santa! And we were excited to make the long drive the day after Christmas, to Grandma’s, where wonderful meals and family stories awaited us.

Spiritual introspection is one of the deepest dives we can take. Its essential practice is inquiry, a sincere questioning of ourselves across nine dimensions reflected in the Enneagram of Personality and the Enneagram of Soul. The answers we seek come not from our egos but from our souls.

We have all had seasons, times, and instances of introspection. We delve deeper into our own lives to see what is going on with ourselves. 

What we comprehend and grasp from our deep dive is finally combined with our soul. This union is also called embodiment. Though the soul is not the body, it works through the body just like the heart and mind. We can know something mentally and feel it emotionally, but only when we embody it does it become part of our being.