Foreword

A note from Barbara

These talks were presented in the Wednesday night class over a six month period. Aaron did not offer new talks for the series every week as his intention was that we work with these practices and bring them into our lives, not merely hear them.

He repeated instructions and background frequently as the weeks and months passed, in order to clarify his basic intentions. We have chosen to maintain the integrity of these talks and publish them just as Aaron presented them. We found the repetition helpful, and trust that it will help you too, as you bring these teachings directly into your own lives.

Introduction to The Awakened Heart, excerpted and revised from the May 7, 1997 talk

Aaron: I am Aaron. Good evening, and my love to you all. I want to offer just a very few minutes of background. There are so many subjects that I could talk to you about. People want to know what the universe is about, who you are, where you came from and where you're going, what is the nature of human experience and what is the reason for human pain and confusion. People want to talk about somewhat esoteric subjects such as simultaneous, non-linear time. I'm happy to talk about all of these things, but my primary interest is to illuminate the incarnative experience and the use of that experience as pathway to maturity.

You're here, here with your joy and your pain, your clarity and your confusion. How do you live this life with more love, skill, and wisdom? While we do entertain a great many subjects here, the focus of most of my work is on this one question: How do you bring in love where there has previously only been fear? How do you bring in light where there has only been darkness?

I call you "angels in earthsuits." Each of you has this divine core of your being, the "angel," and here you are in your earthsuits. Sometimes the earthsuits feel very stiff and unwieldy. You feel trapped in incarnative experience and the angel in you wants to soar out of the body. Sometimes you feel so deeply immersed in the incarnative experience that you get lost in it and forget that you are angels. My hope is to guide you to find a balance. You are neither the angel alone nor the earthsuit alone, but quite literally are this divine energy incarnate into a human body, carrying an emotional and a mental body also. You are all of this.

Through this year, I will offer a series of talks which I have labeled "Awakened Heart." The premise for this series is as follows. Some of you for many years have heard me talk about making space for the heavy emotions. A primary emphasis of my teaching has been that it is not bad to feel emotions, that when certain conditions are present, certain emotions will arise. Anger is just energy, for example. If anger arises it's not bad that it arose. Uncomfortable, yes. But you are not bad because anger arose in you. Jealousy, greed, impatience-all the same. If the conditions are present, the emotion will arise. I teach people to make more space around the emotion so that you do not need to fling it at others, which does do harm and for which action you are karmically responsible. I also teach you not to suppress it, because its energy solidifies in you, but to figuratively and literally invite it in for tea, just to make space around it, to know that emotion is present and not get into a relationship with it but come back to a place of clarity which observes how it arose and knows that it will pass.

For many years I have been talking about this process of making space around emotions and that emotions will arise if conditions are present for them to arise. If you don't want those emotions to arise you must begin to look deeply at the conditions out of which they arise, primarily the conditions of fear, of the illusion of separation, separation from other beings, separation from the divine.

I suggest that through a series of practices and exercises, one could more deeply open to that angel aspect of the self which does not choose to invite in the conditions which give rise to such painful emotion. This is not a "getting rid of" anything, rather we note that side by side there is the tense and frightened human and there is the innately loving, open-hearted human. You have a choice: you can enact your fear or you can choose to note your fear, to observe that the loving Awakened Heart is always present, to nurture it and to enact that loving heart. You always have a choice.

We will spend several months discussing how to connect with this Awakened Heart, how to experience it in the self. Then we will spend some time talking about how to stabilize that experience. Finally we will come to a series of talks about how to live from that Awakened Heart. That is all.