80 - Keeping Heart: The Spiritual Root System (Part 2)
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.
Basic premise of The Spiritual Root System:
Feed the roots of a tree, it will grow to produce much fruit.
Moving the metaphor to human behavior, a child reaches out to be affirmed as belonging and mattering by connecting to his/her caregivers.
The need to belong and matter is met by his/her caregiver responding by reaching back and affirming and attending to the child’s heart, made up of feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope.
This process grows the child’s confidence in being created as a feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping creature.
Through the confidence of being able to depend on connection, the child grows into a competent human being, who can use his/her mind to express their heart’s makeup as they grow into their giftedness.
Every human being is gifted and the world is in need of the “fruits” of those developed gifts.
Understanding the connections of the roots:
Reading the “roots” from left to right:
Feelings awaken a person to needs.
Needs connect to desire within the heart
Desire moves a person to longings
Longings draw a person toward hope.
Hope will return a person to feelings; hope is wishing or planning to achieve something a person doesn’t know for sure will happen. Hope requires the action of risk, which circles back to the need to deal with feelings.
The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart offer specific details about The Spiritual Root System, as does this podcast Living with Heart: From Birth to Death.
The “danger of hope”
Hope can lead to risk and loss; it can lead to victory and celebration.
If a person cannot tolerate risk, struggle, loss, and even celebration, then hope becomes something to be avoided or we try to suppress it because it renders us vulnerable.
Hope requires that we must contend with the other four roots.
Hope also puts us in a position of needing others and God to succeed.
To keep hope requires genuine, affirming people in our lives.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
(Proverbs 13:12, NIV)
This Bible verse speaks about postponing hope. Avoiding hope will hurt a person and make them “sick.”
We are created to hope, risk our hearts imaginings, and struggle with our longings for life fulfillment.
Hope requires that we face and deal with our feelings, needs, desire and longings.
Hope must be encouraged and affirmed by others in order for us to “keep heart” related to our struggle for full life.
We must have courage to hope. Courage means to have full-hearted participation in whatever matters to us. Courage and “keeping heart” are synonymous, though “keeping heart” means even more than courage.
We all need genuine and affirming people in our lives to encourage us as we live amidst a world of mockers, cynics, and skeptics.
The “naysayers” are people who are fearful of “keeping heart” because they have not had genuine, affirming encouragers in their lives.
If we don’t feed the roots, we don’t grow the fruits.
Many people have not been affirmed to grow “out of the heart” or trust the inborn capacity to face, feel, and deal with how we are created to live fully, love deeply, and lead well a life that leaves “fruit.”
If we do not receive the benefit of others’ affirmation to belong and matter as we are created, we often attempt to disconnect from feelings, needs, desire, longings and hope.
We tend to avoid the desire of the heart and diminish our inborn makeup.
We foreclose on the growth process of feeling our feelings, telling the truth about our internal experience, and trusting God with the outcomes. Episodes 23 and Episode 24, “Trust the Process.”
Living fully requires that we know how to struggle to live fully, love deeply, and lead well:
Life is tragic and yet God is faithful in the tragedy.
We are created through the growth of our “root system” to become able to contend with life’s struggles by needing each other and God.
Feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope are the strengths that allow us to “keep heart” as we remain connected to genuine, affirming other people and our fully-present, loving God.
We not only share our struggles, doubts and celebrations with others; we share them with God.
Very often we think of feelings as weakness, but they are the beginning of our great capacity to struggle and contend with the pains of living, as we pursue our hopes.
Feeding the roots makes us strong. The deeper the roots, the more the tree can contend with the winds.
The power of being fully present in life with our whole hearts makes us strong. We become the encouragers of hope, the ones who don’t quit, and the ones who reach out to affirm others’ hearts as we ourselves have been affirmed.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center