Sometimes, I think that my heart is my body. My feeling of awareness seems deeply grounded in my body experience. My body is the root of my perceptions, and my heart experience is anchored in that body awareness. Even when I am reflective and am aware that my body is aware, even in those times of focused concentration, my body tugs at that awareness.
As much as I know that my awareness is more than physical, so much of my reflective awareness is still shaped by a penetrating sense of my body. Even when I have those fleeting moments of touching something that seems completely empty, without time or space, my awareness habitually returns to my body and all that it feels.
I may think of myself as essentially a spiritual being. I also seem to be routinely learning what it means to make the most of what it means to be alive with a well-0functioning body, a body that at least still supports my consciousness. I am aware that until I am totally free of what it means to have a self-defined body, I will experience the tension between the physicality of experience and the aspect of experience that is almost totally separate.
The price of being alive is living. Each moment is full of the tension of a wager. Unless I am willing to take the risk of being fully alive in that moment, unless I am willing to embrace the risk of surrender to what is soon to become, I will not experience what it means to be alive with a heart that is my body.
Each moment has the risk of unpredictability and uncertainty. That is what it means for me to have a heart that is my body. My experience is embedded in an uncertain, unpredictable world. That produces a tension.
The fragile experience of an open heart in the body of mine is dependent on my risky leap into each new moment. There is a constant tension between what I think I know in the present moment and what is yet to be.
In order to be alive, I must willingly give myself to it. Not hesitate, not resist. The tension draws me into a different kind of experience that leans beyond my body.