The heart chakra is all too often a cistern filled with emotional pain. When that pain is transformed by deep meditation practice into love, joy and gratitude, a state of Ananda ensues, a blissful experience of happiness that sustains itself over a long period of time. I’ve often said, “Happy people are enlightened people,” but to find a happy person is almost as difficult as finding the Holy Grail, to find people who live that way all the time, people whose happiness doesn’t depend on ego, charisma, overindulgent personality, or positive and negative external experiences. This sublime state of being enables one to communicate compassion, love, empathy and kindness to others, and transform the difficulties of life into love. It enables one to work out their karma and free themselves from a merry-go-round of suffering that souls endure on earth.

…the key to spiritual enlightenment is an open heart. Just as a flower needs a stem and roots to blossom, the human heart needs strong internal roots to open and remain open.

Years of deep and intense inner work made me realize that the key to spiritual enlightenment is an open heart. Just as a flower needs a stem and roots to blossom, the human heart needs strong internal roots to open and remain open. The acts of compassion and unconditional love raise a person’s consciousness to the highest level attainable. They transform one’s foggy mirror image of internal and external chaos into a world filled with light; they transform maya (illusion) into reality and embrace life’s sacred teachings. Positive and negative vanish in energy that turns polarity into oneness of being, and life, itself, becomes the single most important teacher, a reflection of one’s inner self that reveals a step-by-step, moment-to-moment journey on a path that leads to spiritual enlightenment…

(To be continued…)