A Mason's Work

Something I want to bring to, I guess, the sort of collective attention with what's going

in the world right now.

We live in very tumultuous times, and it's probably fair to say that a lot of people have

lived through equally tumultuous times.

And natural response to this, however, is to harden your heart.

Actually it is very sort of, I guess, popular to act in a way that is, prefers this sort

of survivorship bias where you endure outrageous amounts of suffering.

Culturally you'll see it in a lot of different sort of national cultures.

You'll see in a lot of different subcultures where people take pride in the amount of

suffering that they are able to withstand and endure.

And we've talked about the value and the role of suffering as a concept for, as a catalyst

for development.

But when you are enduring suffering and not learning from it, right, that isn't the

badge of honor that we like to think about.

You really want your suffering to sort of count for something, make it, make it something

you can progress from.

But the natural tendency in the face of a lot of this is to harden your heart, to make

your heart like a stone, to remove the emotional sort of sensitivity in your life.

And this is kind of a huge mistake.

When we harden our hearts like this, we close up and future emotional reactions become

harder and harder and more difficult to surface.

So much so that we will end up suppressing our emotions in a big way such that you really

can't relate to people anymore.

You see this a lot in the kind of traditional male culture where you're worth as, you know,

traditional sort of masculine parlance is, you just tough it out, you man up as it were.

And what happens in those environments is guys lose their ability to be in touch with

their own humanity.

That emotional content, that the ability to be present in both an intellectual way, but

also in an emotional way and a physical way, is really vital to the experience of being

human.

And it prevents us from othering as a verb, everyone else in the world.

That when we harden our hearts and we harden the way we approach, you know, people interactions,

we get away with treating other folks like objects.

They represent things now.

They're no longer people.

They are a color.

They are a religion.

They are the defining thing that you don't like.

And this all comes again from this hardening of your heart as a function.

So an important note here is that the entire function of the emotional center, the heart

is too hurt.

It does not ever not hurt when it's doing its job.

When things are amazing for us, you have this heart, my heart is going to burst.

It feels so amazing.

When things are horrible for us, they feel you feel like your heart is going to break.

Your heart's job is to feel these things, whatever they might be, and to have a, you

know, a powerful reaction to them.

And the moment you shut that off in response to adversity is the moment you essentially

stop being present and experiencing the full sort of depth of the moment.

This has long-term consequences as well because the repressed emotion does turn into an

internal sort of toxin to the way you think and behave.

Again, that othering takes place and it starts to erode your sense of self in a meaningful

way.

You start to objectify the parts of you you don't like.

And then, you know, later on, your sort of logical functions stop making any sense and

you end up committing horrible, horrible acts of violence or what have you.

You want to avoid all of that for sure.

And it starts by embracing the fact that your heart is designed for this kind of

aching pain that it expresses in good times and bad times.

And that avoiding that is it would be the equivalent of avoiding breathing.

You really, you just can't.

Breathing is a function of the organism as much as anything else.

So soften your heart.

Find ways to soften your heart if it's already hardened so that you can be present in

the moment and grow to be your best self.