Bartering the Heart

Rumi said, “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” The mirror has been used as an analogy by many traditions over the millennia to describe consciousness, truth, and the heart. Let’s see how the analogy helps us understand the Goddess, too.

The City in the Mirror

Think of life, including the body, as a whole and complicated network, everything connected, as the body of the Goddess. The body of the Goddess is kind of like a city. A city contains roads that lead to the temple, babies crying, children playing, people arguing, and people making love. There is a lot going on in a city, but it’s still one dynamic whole, especially if we are looking at the city through the looking-glass. 

At the center of our being there is a point of total stillness. But that stillness is somehow reflective, like a mirror. If life is the city in the mirror, the reflection, then that means that something is emitting that perception and then receiving it back again. Sometimes this reflective center is called the witness, the observer, or the “I am.”  In orthodox Brahmanism it is called Brahman, and in Vedanta it is called Atman. Tantra calls it the heart. This is a particularly useful term because we all know that the heart is inside of us. The heart is that origin, the birth place, the singularity from which everything radiates and to which everything returns. Life includes all of the reflections that shine back to the complex heart. Life, the Goddess, is the city in the mirror.

The life lived with reverence is the life that investigates the city in the mirror. The life that stays stagnant in compulsion ignores the mirror and carries on without stopping to take a look, or it only looks in the mirror when the compulsion is fishing for more compulsion- more of the same. 

We all remember the wicked witch in Snow White who looks in the mirror, asking, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” When we already think we know the answer, or if our rigidity and our vanity say only one reflection is acceptable, then we will only be open to the image that we expect. Compulsion feeds vanity. This means that we may be trying to control the mirror. We lose our curiosity when we control the mirror. Like the witch in Snow White, we may become jealous and vindictive when the city in the mirror starts to show us images that contradict the compulsion and the control that we have carefully curated.

When the image starts to show painful things we may have work to do. This can be scary and it can make us reactive. If my city is full of angry people and dark alleyways then I may not have a very fun time living in that reflection, so cleaning it up may be a good idea. There may be so much chaos in my city that I cannot even see that my heart is there at the center, emitting and receiving the images that I know so well and that capture my fascination. It might be that doing some clean up work on the city streets is the only way for me to start to see the reflective surface that is emitting the content of my life. 

Curiosity is a handy tool that can do that work for us. It can be like the municipality that goes into the city and records and then fixes the potholes, cuts back the weeds on the pathways and streets, and retrofits old buildings or tears down unnecessary structures. No one out there is hiding our hearts from us. The mirror of the heart, the city in the mirror, is everywhere and always reflecting. When we stop telling it what to reflect then the work begins.

We can get back to the heart, the pulsing center of the city in the mirror, the one emitting the reflections, but only after we stop using the heart as collateral. The city in the mirror, the tangled mess of our thoughts and desires, our projections and attachments, can be hard to live with. We try to buffer our hearts in many ways. One of my teachers, Dr. Sravana Borkataky-Varma, warns that we are too often “transactional.” This is one of the most painful habits we carry. Once we get wise to the game we can stop playing it. We can stop bartering the heart. 

Bartering the Heart

The mind is transactional, and it uses its own peace- the heart- as currency. The mind says to life, “Let me pay you in heart currency, and I’ll get what I want.”  

Living with a transactional mind is painful because it creates and then it justifies suffering and unhappiness. This is how we keep our hearts closed and stop our process from even beginning, how we stay enthralled by the city in the mirror, while we’re just swirling in the coil of hidden agreements. 

The young queen, Snow White’s stepmother, was so lost in compulsion that she could only hear back, “You are the fairest of them all.” This made her happy. She believed her happiness rested only on her beauty. She believed, “I will be happy if I am the fairest.” Her happiness required a daily check in: “Am I still the fairest?” She was willing to barter her happiness day after day on this same question. This is compulsion.

The Goddess path, step one, is reducing or eliminating all transactional thinking. We cannot get any further in our Goddess path if we do not stop bartering our own hearts. Understanding this step is essential before we can map anything else. Here is what this looks like:

Transactional thinking always starts when the mind makes an exchange, starting with the hidden phrase, “I will be happy when…”  

Classic ways we engage in transactional thinking with our deep inner truth might look like one of the following statements:

“I will be happier when my job is better, and I’m making more money.”

“I would be happier if I had a different boss.”

“I will finally find peace when I find the right partner. When I fall in love, that person will complete me.”

“I am dissatisfied with my body weight and will find joy and acceptance when I hit my goals and my body looks different.”

“I will be happy when my partner starts doing therapy.”

“If my child gets into the right school or receives that honor, then I’ll finally be at peace.”

“If I hadn’t suffered that terrible loss, then I could be peaceful now.”

“I would be happy if I were enlightened.”

“Spiritual masters seem happy. I will be happy if I become a spiritual master, too.”

“I would feel more love if my partner acknowledged me or at least tried to listen.”

Please think for a moment, and then fill in your own statement here. If you have more than one agreement then start with the loudest or most current:

I will be happy when. I will find peace when… 

Most of the time, we do not know that these words are embedded in the full sentence of our thoughts. Instead, our thoughts are a clipped version of the whole sentence, something like “I should lose weight” or “I need to find a life partner.”  

Any time we have a should or a need to or a if only we can be close to certain that there is a full sentence making use of bartering the heart tucked in there. The “should” easily stops the complete thought, the part of the sentence that says, “I will be happy when,” which more honestly reveals the mechanism of our suffering. When we use half of the sentence it’s like we’re looking at the city in the mirror and we’re saying, “Only this road leads to the temple.” Of course, all paths lead to all places, but the reflection can be very convincing. 

Reestablishing reverence in the heart means taking this first step. It means applying our curiosity to these hidden statements. Listen to the whole sentence. You might be surprised at what you hear. When we complete the sentence, so to speak, we see that what we are doing is trying to bargain with life. If we can practice finishing the sentence, then we will at least be able to see what we’re saying to ourselves. 

This is why we start by writing out the full sentence. If we do not write out the full sentence then we may not see the agreement we are bartering in our heart. It’s just as honest for the mind to say to itself, “I will be happy when I make more money,” as when it states, “I should get a better job.” If anything, being honest with the full sentence gives us a lot more to work with because, while we’re still making an agreement, at least we can see what we’re up to. This opens the door to curiosity.

We delay our happiness and peace in the present moment because we think we only deserve that happiness and peace once we have hit our objective in the future. 

Understand Your Bartering Statement

We are simply writing down our bartering statements. Your statement might be, “I’ll be happy when my partner starts to see me, to pay attention, and to acknowledge me.” This is where we need to pause. We need to feel what it feels like to carry our statements. We must feel what we feel. We must not jump into the dark and twisted avenues that lead out from these statements, trying to control, manage, or soothe our statements. We are looking in the mirror. We need to stand in front of this house, this garden, this street corner in the mirror, and stay for a bit. 

There are a few ways that we might jump away from feeling our statement. We might try to “let it go.” We might try to justify. We might try to call the statement “wrong” or “crazy.” I am not implying that your statement is wrong or incorrect. I am only inviting you to pay attention to your bargaining statement. In the above example, I am not implying, “Your partner does not need to go to therapy.” We don’t know that. We only know that your heart has made a bargain and that it has given away its happiness for something that is not. 

Kick the Log and the River Will Flow

It’s important to take a moment here to clarify that when we ask ourselves these questions and when we listen to the whole sentence of our inner bargaining, we are engaging agency within our own hearts. If we are in an abusive or unsupportive environment then we may in fact discover that removing ourselves from that environment is what our heart needs. The 20th century psychiatrist Milton Erickson famously said, “If you kick the log, the river will start flowing.” If your partner needs support, you can pursue that. If you need to make more money to support your family, then figure out a way to do that. 

These solutions must unfold slowly and with curiosity. It’s possible that we have held ourselves in very uncomfortable, dangerous, or unhealthy circumstances precisely because we have not ever asked ourselves where we are bartering our hearts. This is serious stuff and the implications can be life-changing.

When we stop bargaining with the future we may discover that there is no hope of happiness in the present moment. If that’s the case, we can address it- slowly, and with reverence. This may in fact be the only honest way to address our needs in the present moment- without the fog of maybes and shoulds and could-bes clouding our hearts. The great 20th century mystic Sri Ramana Maharshi said, “Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true Self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes. Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.” When we start to address our inner transactions we can once again access our happiness.

I was once describing a chronic health condition to a friend, something that flares up in me periodically and that creates a lot of suffering in my body and in my mind. I said to her at that moment, “I feel like I’m broken. I feel like I’m losing hope. I feel like if I can’t fix this then I can’t be happy.” What I began to understand is that I had lost my ability to wobble like the raindrop because I was in pain. I had become rigid. Like the raindrop that collects around the dust particle, I needed to bring back my wobble. But because I was in constant distress I had become more and more stiff: “I will be happy when I fix this.”

Remember that resilience is the ability to fall in all directions and come back to center. The raindrop can wobble in all directions- but it always comes back to center. When we get rigid then things get dangerous. The bouncier a thing is the more it can fall this way or that way and know where to return. When something needs help and that rigidity starts to form then our system is telling us something. It’s saying, “Pay attention.”

I found that staying curious allowed me to keep living, not day by day, but second by second, holding joy and pain at the same time. I stopped bypassing my experiences. My mirror did not say, “You are the fairest of them all.” It did not even say, “Hey girl, you’re doing alright.” My mirror said, “Clear out the day- this is going to be a bad one!” But because I have cultivated curiosity, I was able to bring it way down. Moment to moment. Here is the fear. Here is the despair. 

My body still struggles, but the more curious I get, the more I’m able to wobble. I try new things. I’m deeply imperfect and I go back to bargaining every once in a while, but now I can say, “Oh! I’m bargaining my heart! It’s not worth it to me to do that.” Once I stop bargaining with my body, saying to it, “I’ll be happy once you get fixed,” then I can actually live. I might cry, and that’s ok. I pray. A lot. I meditate. I sit in the trouble. I remember the Goddess. I remember that Mother Earth hurts, too. I remember my humanity, as well as all of the animals and the plants. I remember the tides. The point is that curiosity can keep me engaged and it can stop my process from calcifying, from getting rigid. Remember, when curiosity goes away it’s a sign that things have gotten very rigid and closed down. 

Completing the sentence makes our actions more clear because we may finally see what we are trying to communicate to ourselves. We may even stop purposely punishing ourselves in this present moment and delaying our happiness based on a transactional thought. We may strive for more support where it’s needed and also accept wholeness and joy in this moment when that shows up, surprised and refreshing, at our heart’s door. We need not barter away our present peace for a future version of ourselves, real or unreal. 

Transactions Feed Transactions

More often than not, when we get to that goal: say it’s the ideal weight, or we land that new job, or we find that partner that we have wanted for so long, we realize that we are still dissatisfied. A new transaction appears. Unhappiness followed us to our goal. Our solution is often to pick up and make a new bargain, and the cycle continues. We simply switch from one bargaining statement to another.

So when we stop operating on hidden agreements, we may have the information and the answers to make real choices. Sometimes we can make clear choices internally. But it’s also possible that saying yes to the heart may mean standing up for our well-being or for a loved one or making a choice where we need to make a shift in our lifestyle. 

Move slowly and honestly. Taking away transactional thinking can have profound effects. Investigation does not lead to passivity in our lives: the heart is luminous, silent, and powerful. When it becomes an active partner in our lives, when we have direct access at all times to the mirror of life inside of our being, the reflections start to change. Be open to what your heart is saying and the rest will unfold. It may tell you to change something in the real world.

Let’s go back to your original statement: “I will be happy when…”

Write it out one more time:

Can you bring some wobble to it? Can you be curious with your bargaining statement? When curiosity comes in, does the statement change? Is it really something else altogether? Did it start in one place and end up in another? What does it look like now?

If we believe that there is something for us to gain, some more perfect version of ourselves waiting just around the corner, then we will forever be trapped in hope, anticipation, worry, and anxiety. These are the core aspects of clinging thought upon which our suffering grows and blossoms. Transactional thinking needs fuel to perpetuate itself. These forms of mind-created desire are how we barter away our awareness in this present moment and give up our peace.

As transactional thinking, desire always takes us away from being present with ourselves. When we get curious and explore desire, we find two broad categories of desire (or attachment). One form of desire is deeply unhelpful and it tends to drive the vast majority of our thoughts and emotions, particularly the reactive ones. It is where suffering is birthed. Almost all forms of thought-driven suffering fall into one of the four subcategories of this kind of desire.

The other form of desire is small and particular to the heart path, but because it is provisionally helpful to us, it deserves to be named and appreciated. We will get to the helpful form of desire, too, but we must first address the less helpful kind. 

Desire that Doesn't Help 

The types of desire that do not help us in our self-inquiry practices are always time-based, goal-oriented, and constructed of fixed thought patterns, binding us in the scaffolding of fear, lack, craving, and pain. Desire has four forms: two that look forward in time to the future and two that look backward in time to the past. 

For each projection outside of the present moment and into the future or past, there is a positive and a negative desire polarity. There is a positive and negative future desire and a positive and negative past desire. This is the same desire, but we use different words to describe it, so we don’t often see that the energy is the same vibration radiating outward, saying “I will be happy when,” toward the future positive and negative, and the past positive and negative.

1. Hope and Anticipation

Forward-looking, positive desire is called “hope” or “anticipation.”  It is the term most closely associated with the common use of the word desire. It is when we desire an outcome and believe that this outcome will make us better or more whole. Transactional thinking falls into this category. 

When we hope for more money, hope for a better job, hope for a happier relationship, hope for more ease with our parents or children, hope that the world changes or that politics line up more closely with what we think is “right,” then we are pushing our current pain into the future with a futile hope that out there somewhere in time we will get better or find a solution or be more complete. 

When I was a young woman I thought I would be happier if I lost weight, stayed very thin, and looked a certain way. I outgrew this thinking by doing deep and profound work on falling in love with myself and my body, just as it is. 

Then I encountered this body image problem again as a parent when my own daughter was quite young. When she was very little she all of a sudden stopped wanting to go to the beach. We had loved going to the beach and this sudden resistance, which included tears, was very confusing. After some prompting, she finally said, “I don’t want to put on a bathing suit because my legs are fat.”  

I was shocked. Our family does not use words like “fat” and I did not know where she had heard the word nor how this had become hooked in her mind. I could not get to the bottom of the story, until I realized that I did not need to. I simply sat with her and completed the sentence. I said, “I think I hear what you’re saying. If you’re saying ‘my legs are fat and so I’m unlovable’ and you think that you can’t be loved by me or daddy, then I want you to know that it’s not true. No matter what you look like, no matter what shape your body is in, I will love you and daddy will love you, exactly how you are.”  I knew I had struck the chord. She looked at me and cried, and we hugged. It took a few more conversations saying this same thing, and then one day her fear vanished and she was perfectly ok to put on a bathing suit and go to the beach again. 

You may be familiar with this feeling now if you find your own subtle thought agreement: “I will find peace when…”  This is the exact mechanism by which we barter away our current peace in exchange for a theoretical peace that we believe will be discovered in the future. Another name for hope or anticipation is craving. We crave something powerfully, and this creates suffering. By pushing the resolution to our current agitation into the future, we engage in one of the most painful forms of attachment and desire that leads to the breakdown of those very jobs and relationships that are creating frustration in this moment. 

2. Worry and Anxiety

Forward-looking negative desire is called “worry” or “anxiety.”  Doctors have long understood that the physiology of stress does physical, emotional, and mental damage to us and even contributes to our survival metrics. While it may seem strange to call worry and anxiety forms of desire, it becomes clear once we see that the desire is inexorably linked to the outcome or the cessation of the object of our anxiety. 

In some ways we might even say that anxiety is the anticipation or excitability that some future outcome is resolved, passed, or dissolved. The body does not know the difference between excitement and agitation. We get the jitters in both states.  Likewise, by deeply tuning into our anxiety we can see that we are full with a form, albeit an uncomfortable form, of excitement. 

The anxiety of an intense phone conversation or work deadline really translates as: “I am excited for this terrible thing to pass. I can’t wait for it to be resolved.”  If you ever have anxiety about showing up to a social event, you might really be thinking, “I’m excited for this event to be done so that I can come back home, put on my comfortable clothing, rest by myself, with no one to impress or talk to or share small chat with.”  And if we follow our full sentence, it might be: “I will be happy when this social event is over so I can go back to being comfortable and quiet in my own space, wearing my pajamas, where I don’t have anyone to impress.”  

Anxiety is not only social. It is deeply connected to our trauma patterns, the physical body, and even spiritual crisis. Almost all forms of separation from the infinite is a kind of anxiety, and so anxiety is what comes through when we feel isolated, separated, in spiritual conflict, or in a place of dispassion (dispassion is the term used to describe the spiritual instinct, “This is not real,” which is a recognition of transcendence but without the direct experience of transcendence). 

3. Nostalgia and Rose Washing

Backward looking desire that is positive is called “nostalgia.”  This is when we idealize and rose-wash past states, thoughts, events, and relationship agreements because we wish to return to those times. We believe that we left our happiness behind and that if we can recreate those circumstances, we will again feel whole in this moment. 

We are bartering our peace and happiness with the past and giving our power to our imagination and memory, often in a way that does not reflect the truth of the past so much as a selected and amplified cross-section of past associations. This is when we believe things were better then, more complete then, and if only we could return, we would be happy. 

Some people recall high school or their time in university as “the best time of my life.”  They have conveniently forgotten the stress of break ups, scholastic failures, being rejected by that love interest, major exams, family unrest, social drama, and all of the complexity of living life, and only remember a feeling of having fun or being accepted or having less responsibility. Any time someone says to their partner or friend, “Why can’t you just be the person I used to know?,” they are expressing a painful form of desire that is tied into a transactional thought that includes rose-washing. 

If the present moment is full of pain and agony, then nostalgia only fuels the agony by keeping us attached to memories- some true and some partially truthful or even totally false- that nonetheless have the power to resolve the pain of the current moment.

4. Shame and If-Onlys

Backward-looking negative desire is called “shame” or “regret,” and it is almost always associated with trauma or negative memory. Trauma itself is not a form of attachment but is rather a type of experience. But some ways we interact with our experiences, especially the shaming and regretting patterns, are a form of painful attachment. 

Desire is how we bargain with the experience of trauma and turn that experience into shame. This is when we wish we had known better back then than we do now. This is when we apply our current perspective retroactively. This is when we  willingly wound ourselves deeper by blaming ourselves for not knowing in the past what we believe we know now. 

I can think of no thought that holds more suffering than, “I wish it had been different if only I had known.”  I have a friend who was married to a narcissist, and for years she would shame herself by saying, “I wish I had seen it!  The signs were so obvious. Now I know exactly what narcissism looks like, and just imagine how much happier I would be now if I had known then. I can’t believe I let myself be abused like that.”  This translates as, “I would be at peace now if I had never experienced the pain of living with a narcissistic partner.”

The desire here is to have a different past, to be a better person within our own purview when we investigate our memories and actions, and to project our current state of process as an idealized imperfection on our previous states of process. Shame is indeed one of the most painful forms of desire we cycle because we compound the pain that we already feel connected to those events with our deep judgments. 

We also add blame and we direct that blame in real-time toward those events. We magnify the original wound by shame, making it more real and dramatic by this force. We make the would more permanent by bringing shame into trauma. 

The trauma happened, but instead of working with that directly, we apply shame onto the wound and barter away any agency over our process. When we start to see that we are bargaining our present heart with a past experience we can begin to gain back that agency within ourselves by recognizing our wholeness. 

When my friend started to reclaim her bargaining statements, she stopped blaming her ex as much and started saying things like, “I’m noticing this new manager at work is a narcissist. I can see the pattern now. It’s very clear to me and I recognize it right away. I was able to stand up for myself in that work situation yesterday because I could see the situation clearly. It felt good to stand up for myself.”

There is a form of this past-negative desire that is spiritual in nature: resolving karma. Some people feel that the spiritual path has a lot to do with cleaning up past life traumas. This is the same mechanism as this particular desire but with fancier words and a fancier purpose. “I will find peace when my karma is seen and resolved.”  

Just think: whole cultures have kept oppressive social structures going for thousands of years by saying, “Well, the reason you’re so poor and have a terrible life is that you were a bad person in a previous life. You are just paying the price for that bad karma now, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can’t help it and you have to live with that. Your poverty is your own business, and the best thing you can do about it is try to improve your karma this time around so that you can come back in the next life with more success.”  This very problematic and abusive justification is only possible when operating on this particular form of shame-attachment.

I do happen to believe that past-life patterns are some of the traumas and activations that we face in the current time. But again, when we get curious, the stories that unfold or that are seen do not need to be bargained with. Patterns are simply seen. Once a pattern is seen it loses its power. 

I have a handy tool in my kitchen that can grab a tight jar lid and help it to open. Curiosity is like that. When something is tightly wound up and keeps the jar locked up then we need help opening the lid. Seeing our patterns, whether they come from this life or from other more mysterious places, whether they are karmic or energetic or universal, is more about being able to open the jar lid and look inside. The Goddess loves to look inside. There is nothing like opening the jar lid and taking a good look inside the jar. This takes the pain out of our shame and our if-onlys. 

Desire That Helps

For many of us there is a deep driving force that propels us on the spiritual path of self-inquiry. This positive desire centers on wanting to wake up from the thoughts and patterns that hold us in suffering; wanting to abide in peace without having that peace contingent upon circumstances, memories, or projections. This is the desire to achieve spiritual peace and the ability to come home to the heart in all places and at all times. The great spiritual teacher Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj calls this “earnestness,” the one helpful form of desire. It is an eager and available dedication to our own unfolding.

This quality keeps us practicing the things that help us, whether it is meditation, or walking without distraction, or taking small pauses throughout the day to check in with our hearts, or joining a community of like minded seekers. 

Earnestness is another word for curiosity, though it is perhaps more organized and committed to that central desire of awakening to the heart. We may not be there yet. Some layers might be hidden. We may be carrying more patriarchal patterns in our hearts than we know. We may not know how to linger in the heart. We may have glimpsed moments of the heart or moments of total silence but are not yet established in that wisdom. Earnestness is what we use to track the inner progress of our curiosity and steer it deeper into our experiences.

Earnestness means that we are willing to stumble through the deeper layers of ourselves no matter what we learn today, tomorrow, and next week. We know we will keep going. It means we are available and committed to awakening our curiosity. 

Like the proverbial finger that points to the moon, it is the type of desire that directs us to look at luminosity. It is the finger that points. It cannot take us all the way there, for awake curiosity is independent, free, and already complete within our hearts, but when our eyes follow that path, we know our intention more clearly. 

When we begin to clean up our desire attachments and begin to reveal the heart we realize that the heart is perfectly capable of interacting with flexibility, resilience, and clarity because it is responding from the present moment. Acting from the heart center means being able to access a space inside of ourselves that is big- big enough to hold the complex and the difficult, the hard and the beautiful. This is a worthy place to live from and it always allows our experiences, those reflections in the mirror, to dynamically shine outward and return back into the heart core.

I stood before a silkworm one day.
And that night my heart said to me,
“I can do things like that, I can spin skies.
I can be woven into love that can bring warmth to people;

I can be soft against a crying face,
I can be wings that lift, and I can travel on my thousand feet
Throughout the earth,
My sacks filled
With the
Sacred.”

And I replied to my heart,
“Dear, can you really do all those things?”
And it just nodded “Yes”
In silence.
So we began and will never
Cease.

Rumi