Muse of Intimate Belonging
companion in your tenderness & heart connection
DOMAIN: Values & Relationships
QUESTION: What animates your sense of purpose?
INVITATION: Open your heart and tenderly relate to every aspect of life.
This is the second installment in a trilogy of posts that introduce the Wheel of Wisdom’s Muses of Belonging. In part one, you’ll find important groundwork for understanding the role of these three Muses and how they inspire us toward a felt sense of wholeness or belonging—which, in my view, is fundamental to human creativity.
In that post I invite you to try on the idea that when you feel alienated from your wholeness, the Muses of Belonging speak to you through a triad of feelings that can guide you back to the creativity that is inherent in belonging. Doing so makes your experience of life and your responses to life’s circumstances more generative, compassionate, and inspired.
Now meet the second Muse…
Muse of Intimate Belonging
Your emotional body is like water: soft, fierce, and easily moved. If your heart is closed and guarded, feelings will coagulate and get stuck in your physical body. When your heart is open, it can transmute dense emotions and keep feelings flowing.
Your undefended heart not only regulates emotions, it reveals your Intimate Belonging. Feelings of sorrow and loss are signals to widen your heart and embrace emotional vulnerability. That kind of intimacy creates heart magic, and your purpose for being resounds in everything you do.
The Muse of Intimate Belonging beckons you to live with tenderness and experience value in all human emotions. When tenderness is daunting, you can ask this muse for help by turning toward your heart, where her gentle presence will encourage you to soften your defenses. The relational practice of asking and receiving as well as listening and giving puts you in touch with the beauty and naturalness of human vulnerability. This allows healing to flow between your heart and the hearts of others.
Things to consider when you feel sad:
Can you relax into your own tenderness without covering it, avoiding it, deflecting it, or wallowing in it?
What would change if you were true to what’s inscribed in your heart?
My Experience of the Muse of Intimate Belonging
With quiet gentleness she trickles like a brook in the center of my chest. She speaks in hushed tones within me, letting me know she is the Muse of Intimate Belonging:
“Whatever you feel, we feel together. We commune in the heart.
“When you feel the warmth of compassion, I am with you. When your heart beats with purpose, I celebrate your fullness. When you lose contact with what matters and feel bereft of meaning, I am here, calling you back to your heart.
“When kindness flows through the chambers of your being, when your sincerity is laid bare, then do you feel we are one. Then do you feel your heart’s significance. This is belonging.”
One stormy morning, when I didn’t want to get out of bed, I thought of the Muses and asked myself: What is my predominant feeling right now? As soon as I posed the question, a dozen tiny sensations arose in response. The most predominant among them was a subtle buzzing at my sternum. Once noticed, that sensation quickly sank into a heaviness that spread across my chest and face. It would feel good to cry, I thought.
Although my mind couldn’t determine what had prompted this sadness, I knew that sadness was a call from the Intimate Muse. Closing my eyes, I felt for her aqueous presence inside me, encouraging me to be with this unexplained sorrow, to welcome my tenderness.
“Tears are not trouble,” she soothed. “Let them open and cleanse your heart.”
With that, I released my protective grip and let the water flow. Rain outside was showing me how. It was not long before sunlight broke through my heavy clouds. I felt refreshed. More connected to my essence, I became softer and lighter and ready to embrace the day.
Under the tutelage of the Muse of Intimate Belonging, I’ve come to recognize that feelings of sorrow, loss, and heaviness are invitations to pay attention my heart. When I compassionately tend to my own heart, I increase my capacity to tenderly attune to the hearts of others. It is this tenderness or heart-relatedness that imbues me (and whatever I’m doing) with a felt sense of connection, meaning, and purpose.
Suggested Exploration
Cultivate your own practice of connecting with Water as a Sacred Element. You might try paying close attention to the flow of a river or stream. You could try standing in the rain or create your own bathing ritual. To enhance your relationship, you could create a Water altar in your home or use stream-of-consciousness writing as a means to start a dialogue with Water.
However you interact, the aim is to attune your awareness to the consciousness of Water—to encounter it as a life-giving ally and transmitter of cosmic intelligence. Let yourself become more aware of water within and around you. Let it model how to flow with what is and how to be both gentle and fierce.
What a wonderfully written piece. I feel its words trickling in and seeping into the corners that felt that they no longer were feeling the Flow.
Thank you, Helen for sharing the different ways to integrate what comes through.