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“Did you know that your heart is a planet? It rests at the center of the Wheel of Mother Life–your life. Dance in its medicine of oneness to the very center of your body,
mind, soul and spirit. When you do, you will be amazed to find that you are interconnected with all beings, both seen and unseen, all the way up to the smallest star and down to the smallest grain of sand. Within that pulsing globe of love, all suffering dissolves. All that remains is pure joy.”
This message came to me one morning I was dancing with my students in a beautiful Earth Wheel at Galleywinter Farm just outside Charlottesville, VA during the North Lodge. We flowed in circles and back and forth from the outer ring of the Wheel to the center Grandmother and Grandfather stones. As we moved, we connected with our own heart and, through sacred dance, song and drumming, activated the natural harmonic resonance of our collective heart. Then, as our bodies tingled and our heart centers hummed from the energy brought from Mother Earth and Father Sky by the dance, we sat down to do the Loving Heart Meditation. We breathed wave upon wave of rainbow love light into and out of our hearts. This meditation is modeled upon the tonglen meditation of Tibetan Buddhism in which we breathe all the joys and suffering–our own and others, all the way outward to Mother Earth–into our heart. We then breathe out the aspiration that all beings will be well and happy. We say the words, “May you/I be filled with lovingkindness. May you/I be happy healthy, peaceful and free. May we be happy, healthy, peaceful and free.” Little by little, the mantra and the energy of the rainbow love light within, through and around us opens our hearts–even if we experience it as hardened through the pain of life. We become, in a sense, the heart. Then we can literally feel and hear the heart as the sentient, conscious being it is.
As I led the practice, my heart suddenly spoke these words: “I am a planet. I am a planet of love, just as Mother Earth is a planet.”
Planets are living beings who create and support millions upon millions of life forms, from the plants, waters, and stones to the 2- and 4-footed, feathered, furred, scaled and shelled. A planet knows no boundaries between herself and her children, just as we do not experience our internal organs or the hairs on our head as separate from the totality of who we are. Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo said once in a class I attended over 30 years ago that her grandmother died and reincarnated into a planet. “How much love she had to share! To be willing to hold this much!”
We do not have to literally be reborn as a physical planet. That planet is already at the very center of our body–our heart. What does this mean for our lives?
In the practices of Mother Earth mysticism, we are seeking to find our way back to our hearts and to feel and connect with the resonance of the heart in everything around us. When we recognize that all the pain and suffering of the world can be held and transformed in the great generator of the heart and that everything has a heart, is a heart, we must then embrace the truth that no wrong, no evil is outside love. We learn, in fact, that the only way to transform the greatest harms, we must open our hearts. If Mother Earth, like a Great Being of Light that is the heart of some greater being who is dreaming her into being, so we are dreaming our own hearts into being–a planet of love. A planet of transformation. A planet at the center of Mother Life.
So tend to your hearts as you would tend to a garden. Speak words of kindness to yourself and all beings, from your loved ones, your mentors and benefactors, to your enemies, outward to all human beings, Mother Earth and all her children, and the Great Beings of Light. Every particle of the created universe seeks to love. Every particle of the universe is a planet of love. Never forget this. Walk gently where you go in life!