Growing Bigger Hearts By Sauntering, Sensing and Being Vulnerable
After a recent workshop on race, a participant said, “Boy, this race work requires that we build some thick skin.” I thought about this for a moment and I replied, “Thick skin is not going to cut it. We need to grow bigger hearts!”
How do we grow bigger hearts?
Learning to saunter through nature has opened me up to a world of divine beauty and coherence that I never thought possible. It has helped me to grow a bigger heart.
As my heart grows, my faith in God is being restored and I am able to witness wonder and mystery emerging all around. All I have to do is show up and be me. All I have to do is use my senses to become aware of what is being revealed through everything that is. Then, I embrace courage and do my best to what I am being given.
All of this began years ago when I started to become vulnerable and honest. Shame and fear lost it’s hold on me one day because I heard God say, “I love you. You are okay. I will never leave you. Enjoy this world that I have given you and share it with others.”
Yes, growing a bigger heart is the only way to confront the chaos and confusion of this present moment here in America. And I will admit. It is some scary shit.
Growing bigger hearts requires courage, and it is the only way we are going to co-create a new world that sustains and enhances life for ALL on this planet. So let’s get to it.
Sauntering Through the Bosque
The Cottonwood forest along the banks of the Rio Grande is called the Bosque. It is a magical place. When viewed from heights around Albuquerque, it reminds me of a grand, meandering Central Park right in the middle of the city.
Sauntering through the Bosque this past weekend with six other human souls, we focused on our five senses. What were the Cottonwood trees trying to say to us, standing there all stoic, twisted, and magnificently sheltering us from the blazing New Mexico sun?
Were the bees and the beetles hovering amidst dazzling Sunflowers trying to intoxicate us with pollinator magic?
We tuned in and listened to what was sounding through the non-human world, and we were affirmed in the reality that all is good, connected and being revealed to us.
One of those souls on our saunter reminded us that creation is our first Bible. Getting out into nature helps us to read that good book better.
Another soul with us felt inspired and so comfortable in the container we created with our presence, that he sang a song of sorts. “He spoke in tongues,” is how one soul put it.
Whatever it was, a song, poem, or spoken word, it was if he became a conduit to the center of the earth and something profound revealed itself to each one of us present in that place.
Real Sensing Requires Trust
One of the main principles attracting me to contemplation and the way of the mystics comes from, Richard Rohr, who says, mysticism is experiential knowledge of spiritual things. This statement helped overturn decades of stinking thinking and internalized oppression on my part.
When I attended a conservative, Southern Baptist seminary back in the late nineties, I was told not to trust my own experience. “Your heart is deceitfully wicked. Who can trust it?” professors taught from Jeremiah 17:9.
But what about how being in nature impacts my heart and fills me with awe and wonder? How does this wicked-heart philosophy jive with what the apostle Paul declared:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20)
I have come to realize that reading books, especially the Bible, is a powerful practice. But if it is our exclusive way of learning, it limits our ability to use all of our senses to take in the world.
Indigenous cultures, formed before literacy, believe that plants are the most intelligent of all organisms and that animals are second. Humans are a distant third on the hierarchy of intelligence and therefore humans must go to nature to learn from our wiser brothers and sisters.
Books are fine, but going out into nature is better.
One of the souls participating in our saunter in the Bosque said he decided to come out and join us because of what I wrote in Our Sensual Becoming regarding the indigenous perspective.
“I don’t hear too many people talking about the indigenous view and I wanted to be a part of that.” he said.
One of the plants that really spoke to us was Yerbe Mansa. It grows in moist, boggy patches throughout the Bosque. It has magic powers say the locals who revere the plant for its medicinal purposes.
“Smell it!” someone in our group said. Inhaling deeply, I felt some heavenly sense of calm and peace come over me.
“It does something to you. Doesn’t it?”
Indeed it does, but I could not begin to put words to it. I just stood there sniffing, reveling in beauty and wisdom that I could not explain.
Vulnerability
When you go to a beautiful and majestic place like the Bosque, it is easy to become vulnerable and open to forces you realize are greater than yourself.
The Cottonwoods seem to stand like old, wise, and mangled sentinels protecting its human and non-human inhabitants. Vulnerability comes easily to me in a place like this.
Becoming vulnerable is what really started all this heart growth for me.
Four or five years ago I began a practice of meditation. Yoga and Tara Brach were my first instructors, but I transitioned into Centering Prayer because of my affiliation with Cynthia Bourgeault and the Center for Action and Contemplation.
One day, after I listened to Brené Brown’s TED talk on Vulnerability, I was meditating and trying to focus on my sacred word. Out of nowhere came a flashback to a moment in time for which I felt more shame than any other in my life.
When I was about eleven years old some stronger, older boys took sexual advantage of me. I felt like it was my fault. I just knew God was gonna judge and punish me for what I had done.
Looking back, I realize this moment became one of the main catalysts for my going forward and accepting Jesus Christ as my savior at a Baptist revival a year later at age 12. I desperately wanted someone to take this sin away. I didn’t want to be judged for this one act and damned to hell for eternity.
I had buried this incident somewhere deep in my subconscious. I literally had not thought of this moment for decades and there it was loud and clear in my mind. Embarrassment and shame flooded back like an unexpected wave and I wanted to cry.
Then I heard a powerful and assuring voice rise up from within me, “It is okay. This is not who you are. I see you. I know who you are. I love you.”
From that moment forward I began the journey towards discovering who I really am. I began living without fear of death, dying, or judgment for the things I’ve done or will ever do.
I began trusting my own experience and embracing what I am learning through the five senses I have been given. I began to become aware of the divine speaking through every part of creation.
Now I understand what Jesus was talking about as he sauntered the earth, experiencing the thickness of every emerging moment. Moments like the time he stymied the Pharisees trying to get him to scold and silence his disciples, “If they keep silent, even the rocks will cry out!”
As I walk through this world these days full of awe and wonder, I know that everything is crying out the reality that it all belongs. It is all good. It is all emerging just as it is supposed to be.
I must do the same. I must trust and grow up. I must be vulnerable to you and to the voice that is constantly trying to tell me, “I love you. I created you to be you. You are exactly what the world needs.”
It takes a big heart to live this way and I know mine is getting bigger every day.
What are you doing to grow your heart?
Peace and Fire!
Byron
Byron McMillan is a former Army Captain and decorated combat veteran turned nonviolent contemplative peacemaker. He is from Raleigh, North Carolina and a graduate of East Carolina University. Byron is the founder of RiverFlow Communications and has been deeply influenced by the School for Conversion in Durham, North Carolina, the Christian Community Development Association, MIT’s U-Journey, Illuman, the Mystic Soul Project, and the Center for Action and Contemplation, where he completed the Living School in 2019. He humbly acknowledges all his faults and failures on his unending journey of descent where he is slowly learning to observe and experience all things in love. Byron McMillan currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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