The heart is a mysterious and beautiful thing. It’s our sun inside.
We all have moments in our life where we experience our heart shining into the world – Simple, beautiful, warm and expansive.
Sometimes it feels far away, sometimes we forget it’s even there, and other times it’s more mysterious.
Does our heart randomly express itself, or do we have a choice?
Yes, we have a choice!
We can choose a path of heart. It may not always be easy, and it does take some inner work (healing is rarely ever a straight line), but we can choose to work towards a deeper and more stable connection to our heart.
One of the ways we can do this is by becoming more familiar with some of our heart’s fundamental qualities. The sun inside is one of these.
The Sun Inside
I love this metaphor of the sun inside! It’s a powerful one.
Why?
Because it’s easy to feel and relate to. Even if we haven’t followed any spiritual path, just the idea of “sun inside” speaks to us.
There’s something that’s so relatable about the sun. We’ve all felt the sun’s warmth on our skin. We know how good it feels. Especially when we’re feeling a little cool, or when we’ve been in a lake or the ocean, and then we stand out in the sun, allowing its warmth to touch our skin… Ahhhh… Sooo good!
We can feel it’s unconditional, unwavering solar warmth and life-giving vitality.
We’re touched by a principle of life that speaks to something mysterious deep inside us. Something beyond our ordinary, rational and over-thinking mind. Even if we don’t acknowledge it as a spiritual experience there’s a spiritual element to our experience that transcends thinking and touches our heart.
In simple terms, we respond to the sun… we feel its warmth and something in us softens, opens and relaxes.
So, when I say sun inside, you can feel I’m pointing to something inside you. You may not fully understand it consciously, but you have a sense of it.
Right?
Maybe it’s quite tangible, maybe it’s very subtle, or perhaps it feels like a distant memory of something deep and profound that you once knew but can’t quite remember from when.
Heart and the Sun Inside
The path of awakening to our heart is a path of reconnecting to the light of our uncorrupted presence – the sun inside. The part of us beyond the stories and dramas of our life.
When we connect more deeply to our heart, it can actually feel like a sun inside – not a physical one of course, but there’s something of a fundamental solar principle shining inside us.
There’s a similar and familiar solar warmth that shines unconditionally and unwaveringly… but instead of its source coming from outside of our self, it comes from within.
It can often manifests through us in qualities like warmth, joy, light or sense of presence, but this solar principle can also be felt through feelings like enthusiasm, wonder, curiosity, compassion or love.
Think about times when you experience these feelings – notice how they shine a certain quality of sun… and of heart.
Why is this so important?
It’s important if we want to get more in touch with your heart. These solar qualities and feelings are powerful handles into our heart, and by following them consciously they help us to cultivate a deeper and more stable relationship to our heart.
Not all of our emotions and feelings come from the same place. This might sound obvious, but this becomes important when we start to realize that the source of feelings like joy, enthusiasm, wonder, curiosity, compassion and love is the sun inside – our heart.
The next time you experience feelings like joy, enthusiasm, wonder, curiosity, compassion and love, pay attention to your heart, and notice the quality of your sun inside expressing itself. Let yourself feel the shining.
Be present to it.
Enjoy it!
And you don’t have to always wait until these experiences just happen, seemingly randomly. The more familiar you are with them the more you can engage them willingly and by choice.
Joy, enthusiasm, wonder, curiosity, compassion and love are more than something we feel inside us. When we feel them flowing through us they become a state of mind or an attitude towards life. There’s a shift from being caught in our ordinary anxious and busy state of mind, to our sun inside expressing itself into the world through our heart.
Sun, the Mind, and Clouds of Distraction
A powerful observation to make is the unconditional and unwavering quality that comes with the sun inside.
But you might say: “How can it be unconditional and unwavering when I don’t feel it all the time?”
Great question!
Consider the sun in the sky?
The sun does not stop shining because we don’t see it or can’t’ feel it. Whether it’s covered by clouds in the sky or shielded by the earth at night, the sun shines unconditionally and unwaveringly.
We know the sun does not choose when to shine, and we understand the weather and the environment plays an important role in how we experience the sun.
The same principle is true for the sun inside. Just because our mind is distracted by emotional reactions, stories, dramas, fears and insecurities, does not mean the sun inside is not there.
We have an internal environment of thoughts, emotions and feelings, and in the same way these also play an important part in how we experience our sun inside.
The sun inside is the essence of who we are. It’s our uncorrupted self. It shines unconditionally.
Let’s make this practical and apply it!
The next time you have an experience of your sun inside, whether its come consciously or seemingly at random, notice that the feeling radiating through you is unconditional and unwavering. It was always there in the background.
The sun (inside or outside) does not need a reason to shine. That’s what it does.
Then, when the experience fades, notice how it’s not actually the sun inside that fades. Recognize that it’s your inner environment that changes.
Engage your curiosity.
What happened?
Was it a thought, an emotion, a reaction, or some form of distraction that passes through your inner environment and temporarily blocked out your sun?
Perhaps your mind just started thinking about something else, or maybe you received some bad news which created a storm of emotion inside you.
The power is in observing the difference between your unconditional sun, and your fluctuating mind. One is truly you, and the other is temporary.
And remember, curiosity is an expression of the sun inside, so by engaging it, you’re already starting to connect with it. Curiosity creates a more stable place to observe and understand your inner environment.
Learning and Not Judging
Be careful not to judge your experiences, or your inner environmental fluctuations, as right or wrong. The path to the heart is about learning to navigate. The more consciously familiar we become with the landscapes of our mind, the better equipped we are to find our way.
Sometimes this might mean traversing dark and emotionally intense places, but remember, no matter how dark it might feel the sun inside is always there in the background.
Like the winter solstice – it’s the longest night, but it also marks the return of the light. The return of the sun.
When we bring awareness and curiosity into our darkest moments it is like the return of the sun.
Our journey to the heart may take us through storms of emotion where we might temporarily lose hope. But the more we take time to consciously connect to the sun inside us, the more we anchor into the navigational wisdom of our heart.
By choosing the path of heart, we are choosing the sun inside.
Follow the sun inside to your heart, and shine it into the world.
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