Season 7: Episode 79 - Keeping Heart: The Spiritual Root System (Part 1)
The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at chip@chipdodd.com. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at bryan@vothcenter.com.
Keeping Heart by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections. Each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.
Please visit chipdodd.com to download the free resource, The Spiritual Root System. This resource describes and illustrates the specifics of each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.
The Spiritual Root System (SRS) explains:
When we “feed” the “roots” of how we are created, we will grow the “fruits” of a full life, one that blesses one’s self and others.
We feed the roots through relationship. That is the most complete nutritional support for human beings.
The nutritional support encourages us to “keep heart” amidst an exhausting pace that can wear us out, drain us, and lead us to experience the discouragement of “losing heart
1. Feelings awaken us to being fully alive, and they push us toward our needs.
If I feel, I will need.
For example:
a. When a person is sad about a loss, they often need comfort, or they need a listening person in their lives to help them.
b. When a person is fearful about some difficulty or danger, they often need help to deal with a challenge, or they need to be rescued from a danger.
The identification of feelings, leads to the needs of others and God.
2. Having needs lead a person to communicate their desire. Desire moves a person to ask for some form of connection that brings them to greater capabilities of living fully and loving deeply, even when life hurts.
The book Needs of the Heart describes the many essential emotional and spiritual needs that we are created to have met through expressing them.
3. Desire expresses the inborn energy of our craving to survive and even more, to thrive. We desire survival, of course, but we were created for more. We were born to crave a level of fulfillment that we can numb or deny; however, it still remains a part of how we are created.
4. Longings are awakened and expressed through desire. The Voice of the Heart describes in detail our longings, that which we can experience, but never have completely fulfilled this side of heaven. We long for a:
justice that stops injustice
safety that allows us to rest without any vigilant watching for danger
peace that is never disrupted
home that we never need to leave
Even though we cannot have these things in completion, we still long for them. This longing can be painful, and yet we dare to pursue it anyway.
5. Hope is the eternal flame within us that cannot be completely extinguished. God has created us as image bearers of hope. He gave us the incredible gift of hope. Longings move me to hope, and hope returns me to feelings.
As soon we hope for something, we will need to face, feel, and deal with fear.
Hope is a wish, a hunger, or a thirst for a fulfillment that leads us to take a risk in order that we may find fulfillment of our hope. We don’t know if what we hope will occur or not, thus the fear.
We cannot hope without dealing with our feelings.
Hope returns us back to feelings, needs, desire, and longings.
The process of feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping is how we grow.
We are created to speak up, reach out, and crave connection.
We are created a specific way. We must either deal with or “run” from our essential makeup.
This process of growth is an expression of courage. We need encouragement from others and God to maintain courage, or “keep heart.”
Watch this video, Tronick's Still Face Experiment
Tronick's Still Face Experiment is a clear expression of our inborn craving for connection. Relationships are the “food” that shapes our growth.
We have a strong tendency to “foreclose” or “shutout” our hearts. We attempt to escape how we are created when those who matter to us do not see us, hear us, or attend to us.
Book recommendation:
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld is a beautiful children’s book that expresses how we are created to express our hearts and how they need to be attended to.
We are feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping creatures, created to seek life to the full, and we do so by living fully in relationship with ourselves, others, and God.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center