Heart Matters Hurt

Over the weekend I got an email from one of the women whose story I shared on this blog (Heart Matters). She is hurt and offended that I used her nightmare for a story on this blog. She is also upset that I shared it without her permission and without having spoken to her directly about her situation. She feels my writing about it insinuates to the reader that I was directly involved. She believes it was unprofessional of me and that I used her pain as a lesson to promote (my) business.

It's true: I did not tell her I wrote the blog. And I chose not to get involved in her situation. I heard much about it from mutual and close people in our lives who are upset by it and asked me to get involved. Since I wasn't asked by her, I chose not to get directly involved, and I stand behind that choice. To this day, I have not spoken to this woman about her situation. She is well supported and my feeling is that I have nothing to offer into it but perhaps more confusion from hearing what one more person thinks about it. What she does is entirely up to her. She will make her decisions based on the beat of her own heart and nothing I believe or say will change that.

This doesn't mean that I have not been impacted by her situation or that I did not have my own responses to it... one of which was to share what arose for me on this blog because that's what this blog is about. Adventures Of A Year To Love is about my experiences around love in life: what it means, how we hold it, ways we break it or build it, how we create separation from it or build bridges to it, what blocks us from it, etc. And this blog is filled with my observations based on things I have both experienced and witnessed in the world related to love.

This woman's story touched me deeply and I felt inspired to share it, to put my questions out there, to give my perspective on an unfolding situation related to love, one that many people I know have dealt with, including me: that of feeling betrayed by those you trust and love the most.

For me, feeling betrayed put to question the ability to trust in my own heart. When I felt betrayed by my (now ex) lover several years ago, after questioning their behavior, I began to question my own even more deeply, and to wonder whether I could trust in my own instincts about love. To question the guidance of my own heart was far more scary to me than wondering about theirs. It meant that I could not trust myself much less them. And if I couldn't trust myself, than who could I trust?

That question led me into years of intense spiritual work to heal the parts of myself that kept me from trusting my own inner guidance, my intuition. Today I listen to and trust in my inner guidance, even when the direction it leads me is not perfectly clear or comfortable. I trust in my deep connection to our Source - to Spirit or God or the Divine, whatever you choose to call it; and I believe that Source is always present in my life because I welcome it here in every moment. And I trust that the callings of my heart are a reflection of the movement of that Source through me. And so I trust...I trust myself because I have faith in and deeply trust the Divine Source that moves through me.

When I wrote the blog about this woman's story, I wrote it because in a moment of quiet, I felt inspired to write it, not because I planned to write it. That's how this blog works; it's born out of a spontaneous arising of something within my being. Despite what some people may believe, it's not a planned out promotional tool for my business; that has never been its intent (although I recognize that some folks use blogs specifically for that; and that by their nature, blogs afford a certain degree of visibility online).

Adventures Of A Year To Love is a personal accounting of my experiences and observations on love in this life. It was born out of a blog I started in 2009 to record a year-long journey exploring life and death in a deep and intimate way (Adventures Of A Year To Live). At the end of that year, I found myself naturally shifting focus from a year to live to a year to love. For me, this blog is an organic movement of energy through me...period. I don't blog in a scheduled fashion or with a specific purpose in mind; I blog when I feel inspired to blog, and I blog about whatever I feel inspired to blog about, in this case, related to love. 

And so I wonder: In writing Heart Matters spontaneously, anonymously and without permission, did I unintentionally add to this woman's sense of betrayal? Her email suggests so, and for that I am sorry. Her heart does not need any more hurt than it is already feeling. Yet I will continue to write about whatever inspires me around the subject of love because that is what I feel called to do and that is what I choose to do.

Look out my friends... You may recognize yourself in one of my blogs some day!