"Follow Your Dream", original art. How Does Your Heart Speak To You?

Follow your dreams. Such a cliche. We heard it so many times it might sound completely mundane to us.

"Follow your dream, oil on 6x5feet canvas.

But it's one of the golden truths, that will never get old. It's right up there with other timeless wisdom adages such as “Listen to your heart”, which most people confuse with “listen to your emotions” or even worse “listen to your mind”.

Most people don't realize that heart has nothing to do with the voice in your head (mind) or with the way you feel emotionally. Your thoughts are conditioned by your past upbringing- parents, environment, school.... (list is long and rather depressing:) Emotion is just a meeting point where your mental activity (thoughts) meets your physical body and manifests as emotion, which can be experienced as negative or positive feeling inside your body.
Way too many people confuse their emotions with their heart speaking.
But your heart is not conditioned by any mental or emotional activity, any past conditioning. You were born with an open beautiful heart and you could hear it very clearly. Because heart speaks through silence. The silence of mind. It is only when you stop over thinking things and acting out all the emotions which flood your system due to incessant mind noise, that you can come back to inner silence.

Believe it or not, Follow your Dream started as splash of turpentine on a messy background.

A great way to do that is to take a regular break from everything. It can be as short as 3 minutes. Just stop whatever you're doing and sit down in silence for a bit, and close your eyes. And by everything I mean – this is not the time to think about what you gonna cook for dinner or if the 3 dragging minutes passed yet. It is the time to exhale deeply, take a nice sigh, and let all of it go. All of it, even your idea about how this pause should be done properly. Just let it all float away in this beautiful moment of surrender.

Detail 1. The magician represents the Higher Wisdom, which I think is always supporting us, whether we are aware of it or not.

Hint- when you're at your busiest moment and keep on rushing and just the idea of taking a break seems totally impossible to you- that's probably the moment you need the break the most! Vast majority of our super-important tasks that we execute in stress can be actually postponed for 3 minutes without threatening the course of our life :) Those 3 minutes of complete letting go can break the cycle of stress you've been uselessly caught up in since morning...or since few decades!

This is a good start and great habit to learn. If you do this often enough, you'll feel a neat difference in your life very fast. Your mind will slow down and surprisingly enough- it will be much more efficient and sharp than before, when it was just restlessly racing all the time, busy to judge and analyze every second of “perceived reality”, trying to come up with solutions how to make it “better”.

You have to go through a dark forest to reach your dream, and even then you face a wall that you have to cross, a huge step in the unknown. Will you find the courage?

Then slowly slowly, in a moment of beautiful silence, a very precious thing might happen. You'll hear your heart again. It will leave you with no doubt that THIS IS YOUR HEART. It floods you with bliss (which is another level of physically experienced feeling, but this one is not caused by thought but rather the absence of it). In such moment you realize that your heart was always there, patiently waiting for you to come back to it, after all those years when layers and layers of conditioning covered it up and dimmed its light.

When your heart speaks, it floods your whole being with insight. It can be in form of visions (which is very often the case for me- that is how I get painting inspiration!), an instant realization or just a profound all encompassing feeling of Love and Peace. Some form of “instant download” that does not happen in time. Time is the realm of mind, timelessness is where your heart lives. And suddenly you know. You know exactly what to do. And what to say. And how to love without restraint, without conditions.

If you follow your heart's dream, one thing is inevitably bound to happen: you will transform from a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly.

And what does your heart have to do with your dreams? It's simple. Your heart has but one dream- for you to remember your natural state of wonder and happiness. All our dreams are derivatives of that one primary dream- to be happy.
Chances are, the dream is a WE dream, rather than ME dream. Remember the moments when you felt truly happy. Didn't you feel the intoxicating urge to share it with others? True happiness is never selfish. It just wants others to feel the same.

My dream is to create art that will open people's hearts.
What is yours?
I'm curious.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and following me.

Much Love on your journeys,
Jan
@jankasparec