Starting this blog has already introduced change in my life, certainly my mental life. I am technologically challenged in both skill and equipment, so I have to use my brain, at 69 a good exercise, even a discipline. Then there is the question of how to welcome a public forum into my private point of view. Past experience of humiliation has caused me to make poor decisions, so I know I am not immune to ridicule, nor always comfortable in the spot light. I've taken brave stands, but I know the consequences are not always pleasant. The Heart Room has always been a safe refuge, will exposure take that away from me? What if I wrote a blog and no one cared?

The Heart Room is a form of prayer, a guided meditation, and a felt experience. In the Heart Room, I speak with my inner teachers, who only want to teach me how to love. When I say "my" inner teachers, I do not negate that you might "hear" from "mine", or have your own inner teachers waiting to "talk". Everyone has their inner guide. It's a matter of getting to know them. When I step into the Heart Room, which I will describe in more detail in the future, I step into love, where I am inevitably led to a stillness of understanding that embraces everything. How to carry that peace of understanding into my daily existence is the question to which this blog site is intended as a partial answer. It will be a learning curve, a process of inquiry and discovery, a dialogue between I and Thou, even if I am the only one here. The Heart Room is a dialogue in the stillness and silence at the center of love.

But it is not passive. "Welcome Change with Love" is a phrase often used in the Heart Room and it is a challenge. It includes being able to welcome disappointment, unfairness, lack of love, betrayal, even defeat. It also includes welcoming ecstasy, joy, and pleasure, equally difficult for some and perhaps for all at various times. It includes allowing and accepting into love even that which disturbs and provokes negativity, so that love may show you another way to be, or to respond. In the stillness of the Heart Room, embracing all with love, a new perspective emerges; the perspective of love, unafraid and eager to give, yet also quietly alert. There are poisonous snakes in the garden, lethal electricity in the air, monsters in the deep waters, predators and prey. I do not leave the Heart Room to walk blindly on this earth, immune to the dangers of existence, but I do leave the Heart Room changed by love, strengthened in love, comforted by love, and ready to give that love away.

So here I am, adding my words to the plethora of words on the internet, hoping to create a communion of understanding, a kind of family, connected in the Heart Room. I'll undoubtedly use a lot of words to express the Heart Room, but the truth ever is, "all you need is love". Still, each of us has been wounded by love, felt the pain of love's truth. Thus the plethora of words to describe it. How to recognize love is part of the journey.