Panache Desai, Martin Buber, Donald Trump, and Wholehearted Living

Recently I’ve started listening to Panache Desai’s Call to Calm 21-minute meditations at 6:00 a.m. P.S.T. He began creating them daily on March 16, and the other day was his 100th episode. I am grateful for his reminders of love and energetic embodiment during this time of physical distancing. (You can also see recorded versions of them on YouTube.)

The other day he was talking about the heart and gratitude, and I’ve been thinking about the word wholehearted ever since. When I breathe and pay attention to my heart, it feels like I’m trying to find someone I lost at the mall. I can’t feel my heart! If no one had told me it was in my chest, and if someone asked me to close my eyes and point to my heart just by feeling it, I’d probably point to my stomach. I don’t even feel my heart beating! 

There is the common advice to follow your heart. Great. I’m following a someone I lost at the mall. 

If I get really, really quiet, I can begin to feel the movement of my heart. It helps if I put my hand on my chest. What if I paid as much attention to my heart as I do to Facebook?! Would my  heart like that? What would I do? Just hang out? I can’t scroll my heart. Can’t click likes or crying faces. I don’t get to read about other’s political beliefs or see their selfies. I don’t get to see if anyone thought the photo I posted was as funny as I thought it was. I don’t get to see if I still have friends out there in the stratosphere. I’d be too busy paying attention to the slow thump thump thump of the slippery fist that keeps me alive. 

What does it mean to do something wholeheartedly? Is my whole heart committed to my life? Am I reserving parts of my heart for resignation, bitterness, hatred, ambivalence? I imagine my heart like a puzzle, the pieces different colors for how committed to things, people, ideas I am. Is there anything for which my heart is 100% committed, where every bit of me says yes, leans in, sacrifices the idea of self for the dedication to another? 

That was and is the best part of being a mother, the fact for the first time in my life, I was happily and completely living in service for something other than myself. Wholeheartedly committed. My friend jokingly describes being the mother of a small child the slow drip of the minutae, and yes, there was that, the sometime mind-numbing boredom of being with someone with a limited vocabulary, but mostly there was stunned joy: looking into the eyes of another and seeing only love, feeling only love. 

As I was listening to Panache Desai talk about the heart, I realized that any time my entire heart was not in love with what I was doing, I was missing out. I am my heart. If I am only partly committed or present for something, then chances are good I’m like that with almost everything. I don’t think your heart is truly something you can sometimes pay attention to and sometimes not. It’s like those people who go to church on Sundays and pray and say nice things and then spend the rest of the week kicking puppies. Chances are good they were still kicking puppies in their minds even as they were under the roof of some sort of god singing praise on Sunday. 

Then I started thinking about whether I wanted my entire heart to be dedicated to say, breakfast, to putting labels on olive oil bottles, to driving to the post office, to talking to that one person who drives me insane. What do I love? When I look at everything around me closely: my pajamas, my choice of coffee, my car, the driveway, I don’t adore these things. They aren’t…spectacular.

What is spectacular? 

 When I was younger, I used to love fashion magazines. I had a habit of not being able to close one and put it away until I had chosen a photograph of someone I’d rather be. Her. Her. Her. Her. That model. That model. That fake air-brushed image. I was in training to not only ignore my heart, but to deem it less than: You are not as good as her heart. 

To love something fully is such a relief. The body loves to love. The body softens, sighs, feels at home. It’s like becoming part of an equation: I = That. 

Sigh. 

What if there was a law of nature that your heart had to be in complete alignment with everything you did and said? Either you lived wholeheartedly or you died and got buried? Oh! Toast with jelly! I love you! Oh, grouchy guy at the post office! I love you! Oh! gopher hole! I love you! Oh! COVID! I love you! You are spectacular because I see you wholeheartedly. You are a whole-body experience.

Martin Buber wrote a book called I and Thou, a book about the importance of relationships that I read as a freshman at Kenyon College. My religion professor, while lecturing about Buber, told us also about the concept of I am that, and I spent the semester walking around Gambier trying to feel it: I am that rock. I am that man. I am that lake. I am that tree. 

It’s so much easier to see yourself as separate from someone because then you can feel superior and safe. Trump is an asshole and an idiot and I am so much better than he is. I would never run a country, a world, into the ground the way he does. I am better. 

Things get a whole lot more complicated for me when I see no separation between us. Then I have to have compassion, empathy, and actually have to shoulder more responsibility. Instead of just thinking about how crazy it is that Trump has kids from Mexico locked up in Texas, if I am Trump, then I have to actually go to Texas and see what I can do to help, since I’m the one that caused the problem. 

Another reason not to live wholeheartedly: less responsibility.

If I’m going to wholeheartedly love my pajamas, I will probably spend a lot more time choosing them in the first place because if I have to love them, I might as well really love them. 

If I have to live wholeheartedly, I am going to be more mindful of whom I ask to dinner because I am going to be 100% present, and I’m really going to experience the event. If someone says to me, “I have to vent,” and doesn’t ask if it’s okay, if this person just starts dumping all their trauma on me, if I am wholeheartedly in my heart, either I am going to fall in love with what they are saying, or I’m going to have to say, “What you are saying is hurting me because I’m feeling like you don’t even see me because you’re so busy throwing up your life all over me, and I am wondering if we could talk about something else?”

Is that wholehearted? Can I say no wholeheartedly? Is that okay?

Having a heart is so much work! How was I born with this thing and didn’t get a manual?

Some might argue that A Course in Miracles is the manual. 

Some, of course, might argue that it’s not. 

If all the pieces of my heart say yes to the fact that I can’t sleep, yes to the fact that it’s 4:19 A.M. and that I have an hour and 41 minutes before Panache’s next meditation, then I have no problems. 

Huh.