Once while living in Oregon, I went alone into the high mountains on a vision quest. I had been edgy and irritable in the city before leaving and had hurt my kids’ feelings. In camp, when I had slowed down and became centered, I realized just how much I had hurt them. I felt bad. My heart felt cold and constricted. Spirit said to me then, “turn the pain into love, Eugene.” I did so. My heart warmed and opened, and I felt so much love pour out of me. All that pain and anguish at hurting my kids turned into that much love for them. I knew they felt it back home too.

Around that time, I was working with a woman. Her husband didn’t love her, and she was trying to find her own way through life. In the middle of our work, her husband had a heart attack and asked to talk with me. Surprisingly, he opened up to me, told me that he had never loved, that he had always felt closed off and isolated from everybody. He told me that this was why he had had his heart attack.

When we feel love, our hearts open wide and feel warm. When we lose love through fear or hurt or anger or sorrow, our hearts constrict and become cold. If they stay closed, as my friend’s did, they become permanently constricted, and eventually falter, often fail. Some of us would rather die than open our hearts to love. Many of us do. Not me. I got the message up there in the mountains that day in Oregon. Sometimes I forget, but if I do, I have my mantra to help me open my heart again – “turn the pain into love, Eugene.”

No wonder so many folks in our culture are having heart attacks. They have so little love in their hearts, certainly not enough to keep them open and warm. I hope that everyone learns this, as my friend’s husband finally did in Oregon.

Carl Jung once said that power is the absence of love. Too many of us are into power, into having our way or else getting angry. “Turn the pain in love, everybody.” We need more love in this world.