Expressing the heart virtues is a practice not a philosophical discourse or abstraction in metaphysical exploration or scientific process leading to some verifiable “proof.” It requires that you understand its framework and begin practicing it in your daily life. This practice is best applied with an experimental attitude that operates without over-judging your performance of the when-which-how practice. The practice consists of:
• When you apply the heart virtues (or any subset therein) to a particular life situation;
• which one(s) you apply; and
• how you express the virtues into that situation.
There is no instruction manual for this process of when and what to apply and how to express it. There are far too many variables to assign clear-cut guidelines, and this is precisely why a high state of internal coherence is the ideal platform to operate in, because this enables your intuition to guide your practice in the moment for each specific situation.
It is in this practice that you will find the practical instructions of how to experience life in the moment and how to weave the six heart virtues into an expression that magnetizes your biofield to the highest consciousness of your total personality. This magnetic draw is what makes possible your inmost instructor (your soul) to reveal itself in the domains of duality. This is the goal of the when-which-how practice: to draw your soul into the experience of the body-mind, and enable it to lead the expression of your life in the domains of time-space.
It is the heart’s intention to be the enabling force for this goal. There is much written about the power of the mind, the influence of intention, the laws of attraction, and the mesh of these elements in the achievement of success in the material world. To be sure, I am not one to pour water on the fires of ambition that burn within a person to achieve their heart’s desire, but it is an important distinction to understand that living from the heart is not connected to an ambition or achievement. It is the innate desire of the heart to draw the soul into the pilot’s chair of the personality, knowing that this unlocks the blueprint of the individual to express the qualities of light stored within them.
This does not mean that the individual will suddenly begin to express wisdom in the manner in which humanity is accustomed—books, lectures, websites, music, art, etc. For most of us, the expression of the qualities of light stored within us is contained in the tiniest details of our heart’s expression in the most fleeting moments of our life. It is as though we leave a trail of light and divine sparks as we walk our life, and this activity—not the writings, the sharing and gaining of knowledge—is what is needed most at this time. This is what is unlocked and shared so faithfully from your heart.
There is a dawning awareness within humanity that its destiny is configured by the mind of the species—in a sense—its collective intention. A similar process operates at the individual level, and scientists and researchers like Schwartz, Korotkov, Popp, McCraty, Tiller, Radin, Emoto, Nelson, Penrose, and dozens of other researchers are trying to illuminate how consciousness can influence and communicate beyond the body in which it is housed; how consciousness can absorb or access knowledge systems beyond its direct study. These researchers are devising scientific, three-dimensionally based experiments to analyze the sub-quantum realms in which consciousness originates (a little like using a telescope to study the nature of atoms).
They will find the faint echoes of realization as they touch the edges of this greater reality, but it does not satisfy the “what-to-do-about it” questions that arise as one discovers the edges of this vast mysterious puzzle called consciousness. The answers to the what-to-do-about-it questions are contained inside the practice of the heart virtues because the practice establishes a feedback system. This system refines consciousness, enlivening its discrimination and opening its ability to see energetic responses to the practice that enable the experiencer to adjust their expression of the light-energy associated with each of the six heart virtues.
The Six Heart Virtues as the Trunk Line
One of the main guiding principles of the when-which-how practice is that the trunk line (core focus) of one’s life experience is living from the heart. The gravitational core of our highest purpose is like radiating magnetism, attracting into our life the purpose for which we incarnated. For example, if your spiritual studies arise from the trunk line of the when-which-how practice (living from the heart), a magnetic field is created that attracts spiritual studies that are aligned to your fundamental core practice. Thus, when you pursue your spiritual studies they are woven back into the trunk line in terms of their relevance and usefulness to living from the heart. They are self-reinforcing and resonant with the trunk line, and, to the degree they are not, your powers of discrimination are activated to resolve this lack of resonance.
Many people have different trunk lines like expression of my purpose or the pursuit of well-being. These are not bad choices, but it is important to understand that they create a different gravitational core or resonant field in one’s life, which in turn, attracts a different system of energetic branches. The branches arising from the trunk line related to living from the heart evolve in alignment and resonance to the trunk line. The learning gained in the pursuit of one of the branches will return to the trunk line and support and nourish it. Like all trunk lines it is self-reinforcing, whether it is selfish in nature or altruistic.
In your daily life as you encounter an event, problem or goal—or perhaps have an inspiration or new relationship—you can apply the when-which-how practice to these encounters and orchestrate your encounter from this perspective. Remember that within every encounter there are different dimensions of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. The complexity is quite daunting if you think about it, but the practice, as said before, is not judged by its perfect expression, or its analytic virtuosity, but is performed and guided by intent.
The areas in which we focus in our everyday life shift between events, inspirations, relationships, goals, and problems, and within each of these encounters we have multiple playing fields from an energetic perspective (i.e., physical, emotional, mental, spiritual). When you express one or more of the heart virtues into an encounter you can then observe its influence on the event or participants therein. The observation can then guide your follow-on expression, its intensity, to whom it is directed, and its duration. This cycle of expression and observation enables a more fine-grained expression, and it is this adjustment that leads you forward on the path to emotional self-mastery.
What’s in it for me?
I can almost hear the question in chorus as I write this paper. Somewhere in your mind you are probably asking the questions: “Why do I care about emotional self-mastery? What will I gain by applying the practice of when-which-how?” I can understand the basis of these two questions because our social order is understandably geared to ambition and achievement, and usually for the sake of some gain, reward, and/or recognition.
Emotional self-mastery is a reflection of your maturity as a spiritual being within the worlds of time-space. In other words, the emotional energy within your heart center is the vehicle in which you express your into the dimensions of time-space, and provides a grounding of these energies upon earth and the sharing of these energies with those beings that live upon her—both human and animal. Thus, the reason emotional self-mastery is so vital to attain is that it enables your highest purpose and soul presence to reveal itself in your present lifetime.
It is not an exaggeration to say that if you possess emotional self-mastery, you live as soul upon the earth with minimal distortion from your physical body and mind. The body and mind become more of an enabling force for your spirit to operate in the worlds of time-space, and provide less dampening or hindrance to your soul or inner spirit. In simple terms, you live as soul, which is your purpose distilled to its purest definition.
The original essence that is you, was forged a tempered spirit when first born. Only in its journey through the worlds of time-space does it find immaturity, weakness, vulnerability, and the judgment and separation of the mind. The emotional prism is the healing instrument of both the body and mind because it enables the original essence to come forward, to be explicit in this reality and orchestrate the encounters of your body and mind for the greatest good.
The when-which-how practice is transformative, reinforcing a new way of being that empowers you to detach from the habitual ways of thinking and doing that modern society has so effectively established. It moves you from the feeling of separation to the sensibility of interconnection—the belief that we consciousness is more vibrant and meaningful than me consciousness, and it is in the former state of being that truly great things can be magnetized and attracted into the consciousness of humanity as a whole.
Now, to the second question: “What will I gain by applying the practice of when-which-how?” As you begin to apply the practice you will feel that what is happening in the outside world—both personal and non-personal—is not defining or shaping your inner state, unless you allow it to. In other words, you will gain a sense of stability and control. This is one noticeable aspect of progress early in the application of the practice.
An emerging sense of empowerment evolves as you find your artistry and your competence of the practice improves, and for most this will require three to six months of dedicated practice. This is the realization that the well-grooved patterns of the mind and ego-personality are not dictating the way you interact with an encounter or event, and that your intuitive faculties are awakening to the subtle expression of the six heart virtues.
The six heart virtues have precisely sixty-three combinations of expression. These combinations are further varied by the sequence in which they are expressed, their duration, and the energetic expression (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual) used to convey the virtue(s) to an event, individual, group, or encounter. It is this intricacy of expression that pulls in the intuitive faculty once activated by the initial practice. It is this intuitive faculty that you must learn to trust despite what your inner mental dialogue might be telling you.
Remember that the intuitive sight stems from your heart’s intelligence, ascending from your , and it is this deepening connection that enables you to wield the sixty-three combinations of expression with the artistry and competency that the practice requires in order to progress to emotional self-mastery. In other words, you must trust your intuitive nature, and in doing so, you will instinctively understand how to apply the six heart virtues in your life’s various encounters.
Take notice that the timeframe to achieve an initial level of emotional self-mastery is three to six months. Not a long time to be sure, but in today’s instant gratification world and mind-driven ambition it may seem a prolonged period of time. The duty of the practitioner is to persevere, and not to focus on the outcomes or their subjective analysis of their performance of the practice. The mind and ego-personality are more than willing to project their analysis and judgment during this phase of development, but this judgment is meted out without genuine understanding of the deeper processes that guide the practitioner in their practice.
The Six Heart Virtues Grid Meditation
Within the first year, normally towards its end, the practitioner of living from the heart becomes increasingly aware of a system or framework that they are operating within that could be likened to an energy grid that surrounds them. It would be similar to visualizing the grid, represented on the next page, and operating in the middle circle, which is the symbolic position of divine love—the intersection of the six heart virtues.
Operating from within this grid is a form of meditation, but not as we normally think of meditation: the internal state of relaxed awareness. This is more of an external state of active awareness and expression, but one that stems from the stability of living in the “center circle” of divine love, knowing that you are surrounded with the skills of the when-which-how practice. This practice enables you to rise from your center in any direction in order to infuse an encounter with the appropriate emotional energy; this is healing, rebalancing, and re-vitalizing energy from your heart to share itself with any circumstance or human condition.
This is an active meditation that is practiced throughout the day and requires a degree of visualization as you move from encounter to encounter. The visualization you can hold in your imagination is that the six heart virtues grid surrounds you like an energetic hologram, extending out three to five meters in all directions from your body. As you practice this visualization, you will in time begin to see it as an extension of your energetic body, not a separate imagined grid, but the actual structure of your energetic body. This replaces the persistent abstraction of the chakra system of colors, frequencies, and traits associated therein.
The critical factor is that you envision the centermost part of your being enmeshed in divine love. It is as if your beingness—regardless of where you are physically in the world or what you are encountering—is saturated in divine love and masterfully connected to the six heart virtues and their sixty-three variations. This energetic grid, anchored in divine love, is capable of mobilizing in an instant, assembling its expression of the six heart virtues with ever-increasing virtuosity.
The six heart virtues grid meditation is a means to anchor the framework into your daily life. It is a way for you to seat the principles into your behaviors through the imaginative process of your mind and the belief constitution of your heart working together in alignment to the formative intent of living from the heart.
The Virtuous Cycle Technique
We have all heard of vicious cycles—when negative behaviors seem to feed on one another, replaying the feelings of greed, envy, bitterness, jealousy, blame, judgment, or anger, as though they were engrained in our very natures, and we were powerless to stop reaping their ill-fated effects. The vicious cycle of negative emotions depletes our energy, stifles our creativity, and, if unchecked, leads us to the dry desert of depression, choking the flow of spirit between our heart and mind.
There is also the virtuous cycle that generates the positive outcomes of living from the heart in all dimensions of one’s life. The when-which-how practice is the power generator of the virtuous cycle as it applies to the individual living from the heart. One of the core features of this practice is providing it an energy source just as you would need to provide a power generator its raw source of energy like the wind, water, or sun.
One of the sources of energy that supports the when-which-how practice is the virtuous cycle technique, and it requires that you invest ten to twenty minutes of your time, as frequently as you are guided, to perform a simple energetic inflow. This is an effortless exercise of breathing in a calm and alert state of mind and body, and then repeating aloud the six virtues in the following order:
• Appreciation
• Compassion
• Forgiveness
• Humility
• Understanding
• Valor
When you say each name allow it to echo or reverberate inside of you as though your internal state consisted of a vast canyon. As you continue to repeat these words in the sequential order of appreciation, compassion, forgiveness, humility, understanding, and valor, think about their energetic meaning; feel them, and let this feeling fill you, expanding into every cell of your body. The more you perform this technique you will begin to see how the six heart virtues thread together, remaining distinct yet interconnected like a mosaic platform. Each word energetically carries a frequency that becomes increasingly grounded into your body-mind consciousness as you perform this exercise.
Like any cycle that repeats, there is a momentum path that refreshes the cycle and keeps it moving through the gravity of distractions that we all encounter in our daily lives. The virtuous cycle is maintained through this simple exercise, so I recommend, especially at the outset of your journey into the application of the when-which-how practice, to use it as a means of generating the virtuous cycle.
Over time, you will be guided by your inmost self to shift this technique from internal contemplation and energetic assimilation, to expression—or sending the energetic codes of each word outward. Initially this usually takes the form of radiating the energy of each word to loved ones, friends and family, spirit guides, and those whom you have a special connection to. This expression can also be directed to events and the people and/or animals enmeshed in them.
For those of you that have been ensnared in vicious cycles of emotional disarray, this technique is particularly helpful in breaking out of the “quicksand” of the vicious cycle. I realize, as techniques go, it seems very simple and therefore, you might ask how it could have a profound effect; but the repetition of the words have a power unto themselves because of the deep and layered meaning contained in each word. Before you start the technique, read the appendix to this paper where a preparatory definition for each of the six heart virtues is offered.
