Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
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Rising Into The Heart
The process of self-discovery must be completed thoroughly, fully, and scrupulously. The idea of completing personal inner work is not generally accepted or even understood yet. The idea is beyond most psychotherapists’ models. But it is not only crucially important to an individual lifetime, it is crucial for collective humanity today. More than ever before in recorded history we now have the means to destroy ourselves in a futile abeyance to conflict and surrender to the gods of war, hate, and self-destruction. It seems obvious that the modern world is in need of our care, our feeling, our compassion, our love. The way for us to do this is to ascend in consciousness to a new center, out of the animalistic lower energy concerns to the heart center.
The second stage of awakening is predicated on the unique idea that you can transcend your early life conditioning. Sacred Attention Therapy proposes a new paradigm of psychotherapy and counseling that aims at releasing and healing the childhood ego, rather than merely coping with life difficulties. The second stage is an entirely new milieu, a completely new approach to life in which we nurture and grow our compassion and authenticity in order to awaken our true heart-nature.
The second stage of awakening is a rarity. I would like to say otherwise, but mostly we are struggling collectively to rise into the heart chakra, the energy beyond self and personality. There can be no rushing it, no faking it, and no substitute for genuine heart-filled life. You simply have to work your personality to death, which is the key process of the first stage. Importantly, first stage awakening must be completed before you rise into the heart. This work is merely preparation for the joys and challenges of the second stage. However, the beginning is there, in the first stage of awakening. Everyone without exception needs to release themselves from the cocoon of early life experience, from the judgments, naive conclusions, and restrictive, fearful life that they have created, based on the perception of lack of love which is endemic in the world today.
The transparent heart arises out of the fire of personal healing, when you have dealt with your early life issues of dependency, orality, betrayal, abandonment, punishment, and so on. Only then may you engage in the profound practices that allow you, the human-divine blessing, to act as a clear conduit for divine love. In the meantime, the petty ego finds excuses and justifications, complains and barters in an attempt to outwit the Divine and add to itself through self-aggrandizement.
Having released yourself from the context of fear, the chrysalis of survival, you face a threshold. This is the Threshold of Transformation; it is a void and when you cross it, you can take nothing with you.When you reach the other side, you enter an entirely different context. It is a context of freedom, love, warmth, empathetic response, and reality. It is a context of compassion, where your life is led by the heart alone. There is nothing else. You are heartcentered, heart-led, and heart-nourished. The challenges are great. You cannot just love the attractive and the beautiful. You can no longer follow your preferences. The context now tests, challenges, and tests you again.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Harvey’s book Your Divine Opportunity.
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This article was published on this site in February 2025.
