In Part 1 of Twilight: a story of love, sex and raw power I gave the analogy of the human heart space being like a sea anemone – if someone sticks their finger in a sea anemone it will close up and then after awhile open again.  Eventually, if you stick your finger in a sea anemone too often or too forcefully it will either not open up again because it is too damaged or it will only partially open.  The vast majority of humans on the planet have damaged or dysfunctional heart spaces.  After sex love is our biggest preoccupation.  Most dream of having the two together.  We often talk about someone having a broken heart, or that they never got over a lost love or that we never felt loved by our parents or a spouse or our children……….the list is endless.  In fact it is virtually impossible to arrive at adulthood with an intact and open heart space simply because we have all been “damaged” for lifetimes. 

It is difficult to say when our heart spaces first started taking damage, I do have some theories which I am not going into here.  However, I think the Adam and Eve story from the Christian bible gives and good metaphoric account of the first incident.  For those of you who don’t know the story -Adam and Eve are in the garden of eden, everything is perfect, not a care in the world.  Then Eve eats the forbidden apple from the tree of Knowledge (The red apple on the front of Twilight) and of course Adam followed her example.  We will ignore the fact that Adam has never taken responsibility for his choice to eat the fruit at this point.  In any case after eating the apple both Adam and Eve hide from god, they realise they are naked and they hide their bodies.  After this they are turned out of Eden and Adam and Eve and their descendents (us) have had a hard life every since.  If you take away any moral and religious overtones out of this story, to me it is about the first wound to the heart space.  Every child experiences the horror at some stage that mommy or daddy is displeased and may not love them, they become self-conscious, they are separate, can be isolated, punished etc. etc.  So to protect themselves from the pain they begin to close over their heart space. 

Every time our heart space sustains damage we die a little, we shut ourselves of from the world piece by piece.  Until one day we realise there is nothing left, darkness doesn’t come all at once, Twilight is the first time we realise that day is turning into night.  Darkness brings fear and death.

We are all taught from a very young age that love comes from outside of us and so we clamour to get it, to bask in it.  The concept of love coming from outside makes a very good mechanism for control and punishment.  The cycle has been playing out for centuries, maybe ever since Adam and Eve.  I wonder what the world would look like if we all understood that love comes from the inside and that no one can ever take it from us or withhold it from us because we have an unlimited supply of our own.  One thing is for sure in the short term our society would collapse and then have to reform itself on very different foundations. 

If we all had whole and healthy heart spaces there would not be any lack of any kind.

At present if you have been hurt enough that you have closed your heart space it feels very painful on the inside and yet you still long to be loved and to love.  Yet to open you heart again would seem to invite in more pain and so it feels like you are dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t.  So how do we get out of our current predicament?  Were it seems difficult to find some one who won’t trample your heart space?  Especially since the only reasons people trample your heart space is because it often happens as they try to protect their own.

The first step is to begin to love yourself deeply and completely warts and all.  Not and easy task for most but not an impossible one for anyone.  We can all do it, we just have to want to.  You begin, step by step to heal your emotional wounds and patterns rebuilding and freeing yourself of lifetimes of conditioning.  I believe as we engage in this process we will create a new heart space, one that is not so fragile by design, it will no longer carry within it the original wound of  childlike self-consciousness.  Instead it will be strong in the absolute knowledge that we cannot be separated from love no matter what.  The new heart space will neither be wide open and fragile nor will it be closed shut.  It will be radiant and strong, the love that flows from it creates love of every kind in its path.  No longer will it be a sea anemone flailing around in the water hoping for some nourishment to float by.