Tender Revolution Ep. 5: Awaken Your Animal Heart

Our animal heart is original innocence. It is what our blood and bones know as our birthright- the state of flow with life itself, where we open to each moment without holding back. This is the ecstatic state, free from shame and resistance to what is. In this episode, Catherine guides you in an exploration that expands your capacity for sensation and gives you a taste for what it means to live from an open, ecstatic heart space in all moments of life.

Transcript

Welcome to the Tender Revolution.

I'm Katherine Liggett.

Your body is nature itself.

Your mind feels that you're just a visitor.

You have an animal heart,

One that beats with the pulse of the earth.

This animal heart was built to live an ecstatic life,

A life where each moment fills with a rush of exquisite sensation,

Where there is only the one who is awake now and now and now.

Ecstasy is what we experience when we flow with exactly what's here.

It's a state outside of resistance,

Outside of right doing or wrongdoing.

It's pure innocence.

Not long ago,

You lived this way.

You were a child.

You knew what it was to move when you felt like moving,

To cry when you felt like crying,

To shout with joy when it overcame you,

To spend your days talking to animals,

Brushing the petals of a flower on each of your fingertips and feeling cold,

Smooth river rocks one by one.

What would happen if you lived like this now?

What would happen if you fully trusted your instincts to move,

To feel,

To experience in each and every moment?

The ecstatic life is the opposite of the perfected life.

Perfection assumes that we need to control our instincts to be acceptable,

To be lovable,

To be worthy at all.

And in so doing,

It steals our hearts to ourselves,

Drains all life from experience and we are left cold and unable to fill ourselves with our own perfect warmth.

What would happen if you fully trusted that your instincts are your perfection?

What if you fully trusted that your most basic instincts are innocent and kind and that if you fully released yourself to them,

You would find yourself acting with profound gentleness?

When you feel into these questions,

Do you notice how foreign this seems to really trust the innocence of our animal instincts?

It's because we've endured thousands of years of frankly,

Body shaming,

Of indoctrination that our bodies,

Most specifically the female body,

Are inherently untrustworthy at best and evil at worst.

Through the millennia of patriarchal brainwashing,

Ecstasy has been neatly consigned to the box of sexuality only,

As if that's really the only sphere of our lives in which we have permission to feel all the way,

To turn up the volume of sensation instead of numbing it away.

And just think about how severely that narrows the potential for human experience.

The idea that our whole lives could be lived in an ecstatic state is completely beyond anything we've ever been taught.

The ecstatic life threatens what we've been taught.

We've been sold a mythology of success that depends on rules and regulations,

Where things make sense.

The nice life,

The convenient life,

The risk free life.

That's about to change dear ones for the nice life isn't what you came here to live.

Under the plastic surface of the nice life is a shadow of consuming darkness,

A shadow that leaves everything it consumes gray and drained of vitality.

That shadow is called shame.

Niceness requires us to censor and deny precisely the things that bring us most brilliantly to life.

The aspects of ourselves that most align with the wild,

Juicy,

Unpredictable flow of life,

Death and everything in between.

Shame is that sensor.

It convinces us that our natural wildness is irresponsible,

Dangerous,

Or in the case of much religious doctrine,

Downright evil.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be nice,

Or rather kind to one another.

But what I am saying is that we've been fed a story that human beings need rules outside of our own authority to be civil and okay.

This idea comes from the old belief system that human nature is selfish and cruel,

Or in a word sinful,

Unless these tendencies are trained out of us.

But dear ones,

The story of original sin is nothing more than a patriarchal narrative of control.

In one dogmatic swoop,

It robs the human being of innate wisdom and authority and requires us to look to someone else to tell us what we need to do to be good.

Even if you were raised without religion,

The concept of original sin is so deeply woven into the fabric of Western society,

That it underlies your worldview to.

In fact,

It's so close that we can't even begin to see it until we really look.

We don't actually know what life would be like without shame permeating the air we breathe like an odorless invisible gas that poisons all life everywhere.

So you might ask how do we even begin to live ecstatically?

Well,

In today's exploration,

I want to give you a taste of how you can find somewhere now where you can relax,

Lying down or very comfortably seated.

When you arrive there,

Make any small adjustments that would make you just 10% more comfortable.

Find your breath here and close your eyes.

Sending the breath now a little bit deeper into your body into the abdomen if you can.

Gently softly opening the pelvic floor now with your breath.

Every inhale softening into the pelvic floor,

Releasing and every exhale drying it very gently back up without any effort at all.

Believe it or not,

Our diaphragms and our pelvic floors are designed to move in synchrony with each other and I learned this from my pelvic floor physical therapist.

But most of us are so tight in our bellies that we stop the breath under the diaphragm and it doesn't move into the pelvic floor.

So I'd like you to just experiment with softening on your inhale as low as you possibly can take it.

Opening the pelvic floor like a flower with the inhale and with the exhale observing how it naturally very subtly draws backward.

Like the flower closing very small movement here.

Opening to your pelvic floor is connecting to your root chakra,

The place of safety in your body.

The place of anchoring to the earth.

Anchoring to your instincts.

For dear ones,

We must feel safe enough in our bodies to trust our instincts and thus trust the earth herself.

Breathing in any way now that feels natural,

Maybe that's with the pelvic floor,

Or maybe you end that experiment for now and come back to it later.

As you return to your natural breath,

I invite you to open your mind's eye to an experience where you felt fully alive,

An ecstatic experience.

Where you felt beside yourself with sensation,

With enthusiasm,

With joy.

You are lit up completely.

Perhaps you're going way back to your childhood for this memory.

Perhaps it was more recent.

Allow your imagination to really amplify and bring you right there now.

Dropping into your body at that place and time now.

Noticing what your body feels like.

What are the sensations that are here?

What does your heart feel like?

Name it.

Perhaps expanded,

Bright,

Open.

What are the words that describe it?

Keep breathing into your heart at this place in time.

You might bring one or both hands to your heart space here.

And see if there's anywhere in you that resists feeling the sensation as fully as it possibly can be.

And just love and soften into that resistance.

It's okay to be afraid of sensation.

Everything in our culture teaches us to be.

See if you can hold that fear in your hands as you continue to expand.

Just hold it and say thank you for protecting me.

I love you.

In this expanded beautiful state,

We'll go through the five senses and really notice.

So what do you see at that time and place?

What do your eyes perceive?

See it fully and completely.

What do your ears hear?

Hear it fully and completely now.

What do you touch?

Feel it completely now all over your body.

And what do you taste here?

Allow the taste to fill your body.

Sensing the whole field of feeling now.

Allowing it to fill you with the feeling that you're feeling.

Allowing it to fill your whole heart,

Your whole body.

Is there anywhere in you that's stopping the expansion?

Is there any voice that says this is too much for me?

If so,

Just hold that part of you so tenderly and say,

I see you.

I'm here with you.

Ask it what do you need,

Dear one?

And see yourself meeting that need.

Return now to your expanded ecstatic heart,

This animal heart of complete innocence and joy.

Is that resistance still there?

Whatever you notice,

Just hold yourself as you gently start to return to this room that you're in now.

Deep breathing here.

And whenever you're ready,

You can open your eyes and return.

Notice what your heart feels like right now.

Know that it's your birthright to live just like this.

And I wish you joy and fun in your experiments with bringing your full range of sensation into every moment and truly trusting that your animal heart is nature itself and is so very trustworthy.

Thank you so much.

Reviews

Beautiful, poetic, moving. Thank you so much Catherine.

Brought up so many tears, surprisingly. Will be coming back to this one.

Thank you! This was so helpful in reconnecting with parts of myself I had forgotten. 💕💕

Filled my animal heart with so much joy, love and gratitude 🙏

Loving these gentle awakening podcasts🤗

Revolutionary, thankyou for helping me to sew here i was holding myself back from the full spectrum of human experience
So much gratitude from you 🙏

Absolutely beautiful, I was able to connect with my heart deeply🥰.

Inspired and such a boundless way to be! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Wonderful. The message of this meditation is staying with me today!

Wonderful practice!

This was beautiful and healing. I felt safe to explore the pelvic floor in its connection to the breath and I normally wouldn’t be able to bring my awareness there while maintaining a sense of safety. Thank you so much.

💖I could not agree with you more regarding the culturation, mythologies, patriarchal suppressions ~ you guided me to my most favorite spot in the northern woods of Wisconsin, a trail in the Northern Mesic Forest where I explored with my sister ~ pure beauty ~ thank you💖

Beautiful experience listening and doing this meditation. Thank you for helping me to make conscious connection with my own animal heart and to remember a time when I felt ecstatic and free and so alive in The Mendocino Woodlands years ago walking on the gorgeous fern-lined paths under old redwoods!