powers of the heart

7 Secret UNLOCKING

Shai Tubali

Published by Shai Tubali Drakestr. 42, 12205 Berlin www.shaitubali.com Copyright © 2017 Shai Tubali All rights reserved. Not all images are copyright-free or public domain. They may not be used for own purposes. This ebook “unlock 7 secret powers of the heart” may be passed on and shared unchanged. Version 1.0

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Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Secret No. 1: Your Heart always knows what your mind forgets . . 2 Secret No. 2: You are unbreakable when you are vulnerable . . . 4 Secret No. 3: Forgiveness is a miracle that sets you free . . . . . . 6

Secret No. 4: Your heart doesn’t need a process to be able to love 8 Secret No. 5: Your heart can transform any energy . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Secret No. 6: Your heart can be your driving force and strongest motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Secret No. 7: Your heart can reveal your divine perfection even when you are imperfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

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Introduction We tend to consider the heart a most vulnerable and tender area of our being. Accordingly, we develop many psychological strategies to protect and conceal it. Deep emotions like love, we believe, are too delicate and can only be revealed in a supportive and nurturing environment. This small book carries a very different message: your heart is not weak at all. A deeper insight into it reveals it is, in fact, a source of power even greater than your strongest willpower, ambition or resourcefulness. Indeed, when the heart turns into the hidden force behind all your qualities and capacities, it is discovered as a supremely active engine which provides all your actions with an inexhaustible reservoir of energy. More than that, not only the heart is not vulnerable, it is actually indestructible. Emotions like love and compassion are not tender but rather invincible powers of our being which channel tremendous cosmic waves. They require no secure environment to be shown; they can proudly and openly flow even in the harshest and noisiest marketplace. You will find here seven dormant powers of your heart. There are more, of course, yet these particular seven are essential especially as a first step towards a full activation of your heart and love. They will initiate you into a journey in which you discover the heart as the one true driver of your life. You are about to learn that: 1. The heart is your source of doubtless knowing 2. The heart holds the power to make you invulnerable 3. The heart can release you from all past and dependency 4. The heart makes it possible for you to love already now 5. The heart easily transforms every desire, fear or tension 6. The heart can replace your willpower 7. The heart shows you how you can love yourself even now May we all wisely activate our heart in accordance with its original destiny and purpose! Let us start now…

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Secret No. 1: Your Heart always knows what your mind forgets Very often our brain gets overcrowded with doubts and mistrust. We then feel lost and confused, not sure anymore what is right and what is wrong. Of course, none of us can absolutely prevent any doubt or confusion, nor should we aspire to achieve such a perfect doubt-free state. Sometimes it is essential to go through such “crises” of uncertainty in order to shift to the next phase. Nonetheless, even then, in our darkest moments, is it important to have an anchor of a solid, unbreakable knowing. But what could we do? How do we reach at all a knowing in such states, when there are so many contradictory thoughts running around in our mind? Here enters this secret power of the heart:

your heart is what I call the “body of knowing”. It is the center in you that knows the truth, even when your body trembles with

anxiety, your mental center is packed with negative thoughts and your emotional center is in a state of overwhelming turmoil.

It is necessary to distinguish “knowing” from “thinking”: knowing cannot be contrasted with some thought or other; it exists beneath all fluctuating thoughts; it is, in essence, eternal. Of course, it could evolve and expand, be redefined more deeply or accurately, yet fundamentally it is indestructible. It is that which we recognize in our depth as “true”. Unlike what we may think, our heart accumulates throughout life quite a great deal of knowing. This knowing is like the honey we extricate from the flowers of our different experiences. Being over-cautious and avoiding defining our understandings and learnings as “knowing” are not wise at all. Often we are cautious because we feel it is socially too defiant and arrogant to know things without a doubt. However, our heart is not a social asset and knowing is essential. We must declare that we know to make the body of knowing within our heart conscious and present at any given moment - especially when we need it the most, when both our mental and emotional state and external circumstances entirely contradict and attack our knowing.

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What do you know? What do you know with certainty within your heart - with a certainty that doubts cannot reach and damage? To answer this honestly, you need to turn your awareness to your heart and to slowly find there a hidden yet completely solid rock of conviction. This may not be the type of certainty that tells us if to turn right or left on life’s path or what exactly we should decide in any junction. But it most definitely tells us what is real for us, even if we haven’t experienced that enough. To unveil your body of knowing, create your very own “book of knowing”. Take a beautiful notebook and start, slowly but surely, to write in it things you know within your depths. Take your time. Even if you feel satisfied at first with only one sentence, one sentence of knowing which could never be touched by thoughts and emotions is actually a lot! Do you know that you are a soul and not a body? Do you know that there is something beyond the senses? Do you know that love is an invincible power? Do you know that a certain partnership you have is the type that lasts for the rest of your life? Do you know that you have a certain mission to complete in this lifetime? Do you know that anger is caused by fear? Do you know that there is one thought or emotion that you must overcome in this life? Gradually consolidate your book of knowing that springs from your heart. Whenever your being is flooded by fear or doubt, open it and read. Until the day comes when you embody this book and become your knowing.

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Secret No. 2: You are unbreakable when you are vulnerable We are all afraid of being too weak. To conceal our weakness we put on ourselves an armour, a thick layer of protection with which we defend the vulnerability and fragility of our heart. This is why we harden, react with anger, hatred, grudge and vengefulness, and refuse to open up. We want to be strong and impenetrable and wish for a state of invulnerability in which we could never get harmed and could never feel pain. Perhaps this is a wise strategy to build such a protective wall around our heart, as long as we do not know how to cope with strong emotions and deep disappointments. But with this secret of the heart we can finally remove the wall:

What we believe that makes us stronger, actually makes us weaker; what we believe that makes us weaker, actually makes us

stronger. The more we feel we are in a position of self-defence, threatened and in need of protection, the more intensely and deeply we feel how fragile we are. On the other hand, a tender heart which doesn’t try to protect itself and remains in all circumstances open, loving, accepting, forgiving and willing to experience is an unbreakable heart. There is nothing that it cannot envelop and contain; no power that it is unable to melt away, since whatever penetrates it, it agrees to receive. What enemy could defeat such a heart? Even the strongest enemy becomes helpless then, as it is trying with all its might to fight against, hurt and ruin, but the love of such a heart keeps it unharmed. We can only get hurt as long as fear nests within our heart. Any aggression and destruction feed on our fear, while in the face of love they completely lose their power. Love and openness of the heart are the mightiest power in the world - a power that only grows when we love exactly at those times when it doesn’t make sense to open up at all. We fear getting hurt, but what could happen if we are willing to get hurt and commit ourselves to love even in such a condition?

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The great irony is that the more we contract our heart, the more we feel it needs additional and even more sophisticated layers of protection. Eventually, we don’t feel pain but also hardly feel anything else. We become cautious and numb, hurting a little and loving a little. Many consider the life of Jesus a perfect example of the heroism of the heart: the way he walked around in this harsh world as the most delicate flower - wide open, exposed and loving. Do we think that those who crucified him defeated him? No, we know that the heart of Jesus could never be crucified, only his body. You cannot crucify a heart that its last words are “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Remove gently and gradually these protective layers. Remember, your fear of doing so makes the heart more prone to damage. But if you step forward and declare: “From now on, I leave my heart open and choose to love even in the toughest conditions”, nothing could happen to you. Your heart is stronger when it’s open and more breakable when it’s closed. Wait for the next inevitable hurt and this time, don’t contract. Instead, open up your chest fully towards it, agree to the pain, pour love towards the one who caused you this pain - and you will quickly find out that the pain flows through you and becomes transformed into a greater power of love.

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Secret No. 3: Forgiveness is a miracle that sets you free Sometimes it seems to us that holding grudge and keeping our disappointment with another are an effective strategy of self-defence. We may even perceive it as our way to compensate for the pain - by remaining angry and unforgiving we maintain a sort of a power position which perhaps was completely lost at those past moments of deep hurt. We could live for long years, even for a whole lifetime, without the willingness to finally let go of the expectation which lies at the root of our grudge. For some reason, we harbour the hidden assumption that people should not disappoint, betray or hurt us. Reality, however, shows us otherwise: people, it seems, are definitely meant to disappoint, betray or hurt us. We tend to overlook the fact that we too are perceived by others as ones who disappointed, betrayed and hurt them. What we experience as a betrayal is more often than not someone else’s need for self-fulfillment. Mostly, it was not directed against us at all but, very simply, a choice made for their own sake. This makes forgiveness a godly attribute that the human part of our heart is unable to realize. The human part of our heart would always prefer to hold grudge and to feel hurt. That is why when we are willing to forgive, we form a direct contact with the godly part of our heart - with a transhuman love and transhuman capacity to include and contain. We are willing to be bigger than the person in us who is completely identified with the pain. But there is much more to it: forgiveness is a magic power. By becoming bigger than the hurt person and the seemingly uncontainable painful experience, we turn ourselves into indestructible beings, completely liberated from the memory and the emotional shock. We purify ourselves from any imprint and energetically disengage from our so-called victimizer.

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Our forgiveness, we must understand, does not free the other person from responsibility; rather, it frees us from our imagined responsibility for the other and the other’s fate. It is not us who are the judges of that person, and so, when we judge, we only sentence ourselves to a life-imprisonment - to forever remaining caged within the memory and within the position of the victim. Your heart holds within it the magical power to forgive and it also loves forgiving. The reason it loves forgiving is not only moral. Even more so, it is because it recognizes that as soon as it activates this magic, we get the chance to become liberated in a way that not even a heartfelt regret on the other’s part could grant us. We let go of the expectation and the fake power of revenge, and instead love the other to such a degree that we also become fully capable of loving ourselves. Don’t say this is impossible because your case is especially painful; always keep in mind that there were holocaust survivors who looked their Nazi victimizers in the eye and forgave them. By forgiving them, they didn’t let their victimizers go; they let themselves go. Think of all the people towards whom you hold grudge or disappointment. Forgive them with joy, not reluctantly. Let your heart fully envelop them with love. It is not important if it’s “fair” or not. In the game of life the question who was right is unhelpful and often also unsolvable. What really matters is whether you are free here and now and whether you are paving a new path for yourself to tread.

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Secret No. 4: Your heart doesn’t need a process to be able to love Many people assume that to reach a state in which one is able to love and to give, one requires first a process of healing and rehabilitation: before giving others, we must first feel good enough ourselves; we need to be given love, to learn to give love to ourselves and to heal deep-seated traumas and emotional wounds. The general feeling is that “one day we will be ready to love” - but not now, not today. This assumption is not completely wrong. It is pretty obvious that the human part of our heart, the one that absorbed difficult memories along the way, needs some rehabilitation and nourishment. A process of healing is essential for emotional maturation. In the same breath, one of the most astonishing secret powers of our heart is its ability to love and to give at any given moment, without any preliminary process of preparation.

There is an element in our heart that is ready each and every moment for the act of love. This means that your heart can open here and now. It is just a matter of choice to allow this

element to awaken in you. We know this part quite well. Any fresh mother or father knows that in their heart they can always find a space for their crying baby, even when their body is already on the verge of collapse. Any therapist would confirm that even when their own life is in a state of crisis and conflict, as soon as they sit in front of their patient, they miraculously manage to gather their forces and to elevate their spirit for them. People who never knew each other find at moments of common distress enough compassion and courage in their heart to help one another - even if they haven’t gone through ongoing psychological processes of healing. At this very moment, your heart can love. This is not a “practice”. You simply allow this glowing part in your heart, which requires no healing since it has never been broken or wounded, to express. This part is the essential quality of our heart, its true nature.

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If there is any real process of maturation, it is surely the process of slowly agreeing to contact this part of our heart, without fearing that if we let it flow, our story as ones who need love might come to an end.

In a way, it is true that we need love - but not so much to receive it and so much more to give it; to know for sure it is inside us in

abundance; to sense it within ourselves. After all, the heart feels full not when it receives but when it finally gives all that was inside

it, waiting. When we realize there is never a good excuse for not loving at any given moment, we also understand the unbelievable: our heart is open even when it feels closed. We recognize this whenever we engage in a conflict or a tension with another and choose to close our heart - deep down we know we could open up if we only wanted to. We hear this whisper in our ear. Yet sometimes we simply don’t want to follow it, because then we would “lose” in the argument. However, the only loss in the argument is our very own - missing out on one more opportunity to love. Initiate a contact with this element when you feel your heart is closed. Do it now - feel your open and exposed heart throbbing behind the wall. When you feel you cannot possibly love at a certain moment, try to make a conscious choice to act out of this abundance of love inside you. Lose in arguments willingly. If you do all this, you will soon notice that a ray of happiness shines from your chest, because you have cracked open the secret your heart was trying to tell you all along: that it was ready to love even when you said it wasn’t.

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Secret No. 5: Your heart can transform any energy Desires, fears and tensions are all energies we need to handle within ourselves on a daily basis. Yet more often than not, we feel quite helpless and confused when facing them. Interestingly, even those energies which are relatively “old”, persistent and familiar could still embarrass us and make us insecure. They seem to speak in a language so primal and instinctive that our rational thinking simply cannot understand. Of course, we are relatively capable of “overcoming” such strong emotions and feelings using our weapon of self-analysis - and indeed, a cognitive understanding of what is happening in us helps to a certain degree. Another way to cope is the calming effect of meditation and spiritual energy, which frequently relieve such inner tensions. However, only a few know that the greatest transformer of the human system is the heart. The heart can easily transform any desire, tension or fear. It acts like a powerful magnet which absorbs them into it and radically changes their nature. As soon as our center of gravity is placed in the heart - physically speaking, in the chest - all energies are drawn to it and quickly swallowed by it. In the world of Tantra great tantric masters have been aware of this secret of the heart. They have made use of it to transform sexual energy: while desire initially awakens within the sexual system, in order to transmute it into a more refined type of energy, one needs to direct and draw it to one’s heart. In this way, desire eventually turns into love. But how come the heart holds within it such a tremendous transformative power? The answer is exactly this: love.

In the whole world there is no stronger energy than love. When love is present, any lower and weaker energy submits to it, since

all energies yearn and long for love. Truly, at the deepest level most of the conflicted dynamics that take place within our mental and emotional worlds are the outcome of our loss of contact with the power of love. As soon as our heart becomes empty, the human system gets disoriented and lost and a vacant space is left for the appearance of more primitive thoughts and emotions, such as desire, anger, jealousy, fear and resistance.

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The heart is capable of overcoming any base emotion and feeling, and its great advantage is that it doesn’t have to battle with them the way our rational mind needs to. Its way of overcoming is sweet and tender. It instantly envelops this lost element with the luminosity of absolute positivity. It purifies it at once from its egoic tendency and elevates it to the higher domain of selflessness. Most of all, it reminds the person what one loves more than anything else and where it is most natural for one to abide in.

Being able to place yourself in the heart to enable it to become this great transformer is the simplest thing in the world: whenever you encounter some tense energy inside you, physically shift your

center of gravity to the center of the chest. For the most part, we experience that the center of our being is located in the head - most definitely, a place we feel uncomfortable to be in which is why our shoulders and neck are often so burdened. On the other hand, at times of desire or anger we may feel our center has moved to the pelvic region or the belly. Our heart is physically located in a particularly spacious area, far more spacious than our rather small head: the entire expanse of the chest. Thus, in the same way you experience yourself existing and perceiving from within the head, shift the center of your being to the chest - and from it, watch and communicate with the world. You will quickly realize how impossible it is to remain narrow and selfish from this new position of your being. You could even practice as if you have no head - as if your head fell off - and so, your head is now located in your chest. Imagine that the chest has eyes - how does it look at everything? What does it see? When you will practice in this way, the heart’s magnet will begin to operate, sucking into it any negative or limiting energy and transforming it into the invincible power of love.

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Secret No. 6: Your heart can be your driving force and strongest motivation What is your source of energy, urge and motivation to do everything you do? Ordinarily, many people derive their energy from ambition and will. They want to achieve something, or several things, and this will drives them to wake up in the morning to a brand new day. No doubt, ambition and will are a powerful source which have clearly propelled tremendous individual and collective processes in the world. However, these motivations also suffer from an intense limitation: they exist without necessarily being tied into any deep sense of meaning. This is why a highly active individual is capable of waking up one morning, after many years of ceaseless engagement, feeling completely worn-out and asking oneself: “What is the point of all this? Why am I constantly chasing around after things?” Indeed, ambition and willing have their edge, and ironically with all the intensity they evoke in us, they often lead us to a sense of emptiness. When we think of potential sources of energy and power, we rarely consider our heart. We may include in our list more obvious factors such as physical energy, desire, craving, passion and of course ambition - yet we tend to overlook love, at least as a driving force or a source of motivation. Nonetheless, love is a source of power. Try once to define within yourself love as your reason for action. This doesn’t have to be an important action; it could be the most mundane, simplest one. Think and feel: “I am doing this because I love”. Right now I am writing this little book out of love. I could write it because I strive for a certain status; because I wish to reach as many people as possible, gain your recognition, or convince you. I could even write simply because I feel like writing - yet I am writing right now because I love.

Love is a power that can move mountains. It is not just some tender and vulnerable feeling inside us.

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This is why it is a good enough and strong enough reason to wake up in the morning. I wake up in the morning because I love; what makes me rise from bed and enter a new day of action is love. I work out of love and meet people because I love. The wonderful thing is that tapping into this source of power also leads to a direct connection to the meaning of life. Of course, no one really knows what the meaning of life is, and truly, if there is one at all. Intellectually and even spiritually we have absolutely no idea why we are here. Yet emotionally, we do have a feeling about it.

When we love, we no longer ask what the meaning of life is, since we have united with it.

The heart feels the meaning of life, and that is why it recognizes love as an authentic driving force. When we do everything we do out of love, our world is instantly filled with meaning, value and beauty. We wash the dishes out of love, walk our dog out of love, read a book because we love. More often than not, our action becomes empty of meaning and everything seems tedious and dull. However, when love appears as the background behind each and every action, the most ordinary activity gains a new colour, for the simple reason we have come into contact with the only reason that could instantly justify all our actions in the past, present and future.

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Secret No. 7: Your heart can reveal your divine perfection even when you are imperfect Many of us find it difficult to deeply and fully accept ourselves. Consciously or unconsciously, we are in a state of quarrel with who we are: with the body we “received”, with the past we were compelled to experience, with our built-in limitations and stubborn patterns, with all that we would never manage to be and with the specific challenges of our life. For this reason, we could hardly imagine perceiving ourselves, just the way we are at this very moment, as divine, whole and complete. We believe that the experience of perfection is a future achievement which we would perhaps be worthy of after sufficiently justifying it through intense self-correction, successes and recognition. One day, we unconsciously think, we will be able to deserve our very own self-love. Our heart, however, holds the secret power to reveal our divine perfection, even now when we are full of flaws and weaknesses; even when we feel ourselves most unworthy and undeserving. The heart has no need to wait for absolute self-acceptance. It requires no recognitions and successes to justify such an acceptance and even doesn’t seek a heavenly reassurance that it is indeed the time. This is because it is connected at this very moment to the sense of our inherent divinity - the one we achieved already at the moment of our birth. To begin with, the heart has no quarrel with our built-in limitations and shortcomings. It clearly knows that all human weaknesses, difficulties and obstacles must be there as a necessary balance for the divine powers in us and as a vital means for evolution and learning. In this sense, in our heart there is no doubt that this imperfection is also a type of perfection - one that could never be perceived by our thinking which forever measures, evaluates and compares, yet could be sensed through feeling and knowing. Even more importantly, our heart knows that self-acceptance means accepting the divine will. After all, who we are, exactly the way we are, is what the divine or the universe wished us to be. If the divine will would have been that we should be without any limitations, it would have taken care of that in the first place. As far as the divine will is concerned - and unlike the way we think - we are at this very moment in the right place and in the right body, with the right limitations and the right obstacles.

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Not accepting ourselves implies rejecting the universe as a whole. Why are we so ready to acknowledge that the universe is complete and perfect; that each and every lizard and caterpillar are complete and perfect, while we miraculously are the only element that deviates from the holy pattern - only we, specifically, are some kind of a cosmic error? How could this even be? This is the way God or the cosmos wanted us to be - beautiful and weak, confused and brave. As soon as we accept that wholeheartedly, we discover a new type of beauty and perfection: not the perfection which is the opposite of limitation but a perfection which also includes all possible limitations. A true self-acceptance is a tremendous power of the heart. It opens us up to love, to being able to also love others as perfect wholes; it connects us to the total feeling of the universe and enables the full flowering of all our gifts and abilities on the healthy ground of a deep positive sense of ourselves. All we need to do is to pass through self-acceptance as if it were a gate leading us directly to the divine reality, since inner wholeness is our most immediate link to the greater wholeness.

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About the Author

Shai Tubali has guided thousands of people through seminars, lectures, courses, schools and retreats in Europe, Israel, and India in the last 17 years. He is also the author of 21 books in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and of course spiritual transformation and self-development methods. Shai defines his spiritual teaching as a teaching of meaning: one that puts at the center the universal meaning and purpose of human life. As a spiritual teacher and philosopher,

Shai Tubali strongly believes that spirituality – the development of human consciousness – is vital for the fate of humanity; for its present as well as for its future. The fact that we ceaselessly advance in the technological realm while our consciousness remains essentially undeveloped, is an enormous obstacle to the shaping of our species’ future. In other words, spirituality is not only relevant but crucial. Shai Tubali believes that the development of human consciousness is a critical key to the shaping of the world. As such, being spiritually awakened implies a greater responsibility on one’s shoulders. The more ignorance is removed, the more one ideally grows in responsibility. If we want to have a positive impact in this world, our actions need to come from a state of love, clarity and acceptance. Our inner chaos, grudge, hatred and misconceptions need to be transformed so that we do no longer pollute our world with them. This makes the awakening of our heart so important, as it is the greatest transformer of the human system. Visit shaitubali.com to access a free video training on how you can open your heart and connect to the strongest energy in you. Let us plant together seeds of love and compassion in our beautiful world.

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