A Tender Heart

 Even if we try to be loving and kind persons most of the time our heart remains hard, like a stone that laying at the bottom of the lake does not become softer. We do not feel the suffering of others, nor do we participate in it. We just pursue our own self interest without any care for others.

 Certainly some conditions and circumstances can make our heart tender. For example when we fall in love with a woman or a man, we are willing to accept the other person in its entirety, with his or her faults and qualities. That total acceptance acts as a catalyst that opens our heart. Then our heart becomes tender, a feeling of compassion arises and we want to protect the other person from dangers and fears.

 It is like if all our being melts with the power of that feeling, we become less concerned with what happens around. It seems we are in the centre of the universe. We feel well and renewed, as if we were stripped ourselves of our habits, and new world opens to us. We think this wonderful feeling of well being has arisen because of the external presence of the woman or the man we like. 

Thus we start to desire that person more and more. When our thoughts recurs following the images of our beloved, attachment arises and with attachment comes a strong longing for that person and the desire of wanting to possess that person and make it “mine”. At that point we have fallen into the trap of “having” as opposed to “being”.

 What ensues, is common knowledge. Our desire to possess eventually come in the way of a good and healthy relationship with the other person and suffocate the space that breads the relationship. Jealousy comes to replace the feeling of affection for the other person. Suspicion comes to replace the sense of full trust in our beloved. Ownership comes to replace pure love. Anger comes to replace patient acceptance of the other. What was once a loving relation slowly becomes a series of quarrels, and misunderstandings. And our tender heart is lost.

 Having lived such experiences, many people close themselves up and do not allow that kind of love to emerge. They live always in the suspicion that the “other” man or woman is going to take advantage of them, so they shut the door to the possibility of even enjoying healthy worldly pleasures and become idealists. But this kind of reaction is similar to a person’s refusal to eat after food intoxication.   

 In any case, a real tender heart does not depend on an external condition, it is not something we acquire from outside, it is always part of our nature. It is part of the nature of every living being, it is the nature of every living being. Also a tender heart does not have only one focus, in fact it does not have any focus at all, it is aimless. A tender heart is the heart of one who does not defend himself or herself, it is the heart of one who accepts everything as part of himself or herself. It is a heart that can receive harm.

 Sometime in India we can see people with a curious genetic malformation begging on the street. Usually they are physically underdeveloped youths that have their ribs missing above the area of the heart So their heart can be seen beating under a thin layer of skin, almost nakedly exposed. The tender heart is like that, a heart that does not have any thick cover on it, it is vulnerable, it can feel easily as it is touched even slightly.       

 Then how do we descover this treasure which exist within oneself? Some say that we have to cultivate an altruistic intention through the methods of mind training. But such methods for developing altruism are mostly conceptual. And however much effort and struggle we can make in applying them, such a tender heart will never arise in a genuine way. A true tender heart is not the result of a training. What result from training is always within the domain of the working mind and of concepts, thus artificial.

 It is only when we come to understand one’s real nature, that is ineffable, beyond definitions and come to dwell in that nature, that a true tender heart can emerge. It emerges spontaneously, when one witness ordinary people’s ignorance of their authentic nature. At that point the tender heart is not artificial, it is not the result constructed by an effort of the mind. The tender heart itself is not different from the knowledge of one’s real nature, it is just an indistinguishable side of it.

 One’s real nature seems to pervade everything without distinction and similarly the tender heart pervades everything without any object or person to rest upon. It is beyond attachment and aversion, beyond feeling close to some and distant from others.

 When being with others, one is the tender heart. When being alone, one is the knowledge of one’s natural condition. Like butter added to fire, the tender heart makes one plunge into one’s real nature even more. And with the increase of the knowledge of one’s real nature, the tender heart waxes like the moon.           

Elio Guarisco