The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence

By John J. Prendergast, PhD

An experiential guide for exploring the convergence of psychological healing and spiritual awakening that happens most clearly and powerfully in the depths of the heart
 
“The Deep Heart is what I call a living book, that rare gem of a book that is alive with the presence of its author . . . A book like this should be felt and experienced as much as it should be read.”  —Adyashanti
 
The great human quest is to discover who we really are—a discovery that changes our lives and the lives of those around us. With The Deep Heart, spiritual teacher and psychotherapist Dr. John J. Prendergast invites us on a pilgrimage within, using the heart as a portal to our deepest psychological and spiritual nature.
 
The “deep heart” is Prendergast’s term for our heart center—a subtle center of emotional and energetic sensitivity, relational intimacy, profound inner knowing, and unconditional love. “The heart area is where we feel most deeply touched by kindness, gratitude, and appreciation, yet it is also where we feel most emotionally wounded,” writes Prendergast. “Whether we realize it or not, the heart is what we most carefully guard and most want to open.”
 
Throughout The Deep Heart, Prendergast expertly combines the boundaried wisdom of psychotherapy with a spacious, embodied path to liberation, bringing attention to both the joys and pitfalls of each approach with the compassion of a friend who’s walked the path for decades.
 
In this experiential guide, Prendergast invites you to tune into your inherent wisdom, love, and wholeness as you journey into the deep heart. Through precise and potent meditative inquiries, insightful stories, and reflections drawn from Prendergast’s intimate work with students and clients, you’ll begin to open your heart, see through your core limiting beliefs, and discover the true nature of your being. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683643180

John J. Prendergast, PhD

John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a spiritual teacher, author, retired psychotherapist, and retired adjunct professor of psychology who has taught at Esalen and Kripalu and online. He studied for many years with the sage Dr. Jean Klein, as well as with the spiritual teacher Adyashanti. He is the author of the books In Touch and The Deep Heart. For more, please visit listeningfromsilence.com.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WITH THIS BOOK I invite you to look beneath the cover of your conditioned identity and take a deep dive into the heart of who you really are — your true nature. There is nothing more important to do, to feel, or to understand as a human being. Knowingly or unknowingly you have been searching for this your entire life. Like a beggar who has been sitting on a box of gold, the treasure lies radiant and intact in the very core of your being. You are fully equipped to discover it, regardless of your background and conditioning. You just need to look in the right direction with open eyes.

We all have a sacred calling that has very little to do with what we accomplish in this world. It is the calling of the sacred — the quiet pull of an implicit wholeness within each of us that awaits our conscious recognition. As this recognition unfolds, our relationship to life changes. Increasingly we find ourselves open to life as it is — and creative in our response.

Discovering the heart of who we really are is the essential human quest. This discovery changes our life and the lives of those around us. Our life increasingly becomes an offering — an upwelling and outpouring. No matter how our outer life changes — and it most certainly will — an inner light will spontaneously radiate out for the benefit of all beings.

As we attune with the heart, our approach to life reverses. Instead of feeling empty, agitated, and disconnected, we discover an inner fullness, peace, and sense of seamlessness. Instead of imagining that we are either a deflated or inflated, unworthy separate-self, we discover that we are a unique expression of a greater loving whole. Rather than anxiously willing our way through or avoiding life, we feel ourselves trusting and following an underlying flow of intelligence and love. Instead of being whipped around by fears and desires, we feel a growing inner stability and sense of spaciousness, no matter what is happening. Rather than feeling like a lonely wanderer in a desolate landscape, a stranger in a strange land, we find our self at home wherever we are. The heart area is the portal, par excellence, for this discovery. This is my work and great love. I would like to share it with you.

A Window into the Deep Heart

For almost four decades, I have worked as a depth psychotherapist and more recently as a spiritual teacher. These roles have allowed me an unusual window into the hearts of my clients and students — into their most painful emotional wounds as well as their essential radiance of being.

I had little conscious knowledge of this territory when I first began this exploration. I was drawn to this work in my twenties with mixed motives. I had already been meditating for years and instructing others how to do so, but I found that I often felt anxious in social situations, despite the tranquility I experienced during meditation. I had relatively little insight about what was beneath the surface of my conscious mind other than a profound silence I could tap into while meditating. I knew that I wanted to face myself more directly, to be of service to others, and also to make a viable living. Beneath all of these motives there was a powerful underground current that I now recognize as a love for the truth and a relentless call to know myself.

Within a two-year period in my midtwenties, I went from a six-month meditation retreat in the Swiss Alps to law school, then to an ashram in South India, and finally to an unaccredited, alternative graduate school in San Francisco. Looking back, I can imagine that my parents experienced a kind of whiplash trying to keep up with my bewildering change of directions. Fortunately, they kept their doubts and anxieties to themselves (bless their hearts), as I was on my hands and knees feeling my way in the dark toward my inner calling.

Over the next fifteen years, I became a licensed psychotherapist while also immersing myself in meditation and self-inquiry. My primary teacher at the time was Jean Klein, a European master of Advaita Vedanta that was strongly seasoned with Tantric Shaivism. I had met and immediately connected with Jean (pronounced with a soft j as they do in France) five years into my graduate training. During this period, I was driven by a curiosity to understand how psychology and spirituality intersected, but after several years of exploring both domains, I discovered that the apparent division between them was only in my mind. I realized that all thoughts, feelings, and sensations were expressions of consciousness, and I couldn’t find any human experience that was not essentially spiritual. During this time, I also began to train and supervise masters’ level counseling students at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco.

Jean Klein passed away in 1998. Three years later (and quite unexpectedly), I began to study with my second primary teacher, Adyashanti. Being with Adya catalyzed a number of profound openings that I will describe later in this book with the hope that they may help you find your way through similar terrain. I feel incredibly grateful for Adya’s presence, teachings, and highly attuned individual attention. The gifts of these teachers illustrate the critical role that a genuine teacher can play in the unfolding process of self-recognition. I strongly doubt that my own understanding would have emerged without both Jean’s and Adya’s help.

I began to share my understanding in two self-inquiry groups and colead residential retreats for psychotherapists with my friend and colleague Dorothy Hunt, who had been invited by Adya to teach a few years earlier. After several years, Dorothy, with Adya’s assent, invited me to do the same. Although I did not seek this role, it is one that I have grown into.

As my understanding continues to develop, both through teaching and a natural process of unfolding, I can often sense an essential dimension of being within my clients and students and help them attune with it. In my experience, most psychotherapists rarely contact this level or, if they do, often fail to recognize its significance. As a result, they confine their clients to a level of healing and integration that overlooks or misunderstands the most liberating resource in the core of their client’s being. That said, I believe that there is substantial value to conventional psychological healing work, and I strongly support the critically important service that mature, kind, and relatively clear psychotherapists offer to their clients. Their dedicated work in the basement of the psyche can help set the stage for a spiritual realization to unfold.

Conversely, spiritual teachers who are emotionally immature and lack empathy will fail to recognize important dimensions of their students’ hearts. This oversight can lead to teachings that are dry and abstract — cognitively brilliant and profound, but emotionally disconnected or poorly attuned. Following their teachers’ lead, students can avoid being with vulnerable feelings such as shame, fear, doubt, or rage, and then continue to be ambushed by them, particularly in intimate relationships. Their spiritual practices will also be obstructed by unresolved emotional material. This phenomena, known as spiritual bypassing, is extremely common in spiritual circles.¹

Our sense of meaning springs from the heart, as does our

sense of oneness or communion with the whole of life.

The capacity for teachers to sense and share on an essential level with their students is a function of resonance or mutual attunement. We recognize in others what we sense in ourselves. When this attunement happens, we enjoy a shared experience of communion. While this type of meeting does not belong to anyone, there is no greater intimacy. When the heart has awakened, reality meets itself in an utterly simple, spacious, and loving way. It’s a joy and a blessing when this unfolds between people. It’s as if one is both a beautiful flower and an admiring gardener at the same time.

The Heart as a Portal

In one of my previous books, In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself, I described four subtle somatic markers that commonly arise as people get in touch with their inner knowing: openheartedness, spaciousness, groundedness, and a vibrant alignment and aliveness. These subtle markers are facets or essential qualities of our true nature. They are also portals — primary entry points leading to the essential. If you explore any of these portals, they will lead you to the same source. For instance, if you fully investigate the sense of the ground, you will discover a nonlocalized groundless ground that has a loving tone to it. So, too, when you let go into the deepest dimension of the heart — what I call the Great Heart — you can feel yourself at one with the ground of being. In this way, the portals of the ground and the heart beautifully converge in the same nonplace of our true nature.

This book builds on this earlier work by homing in on the heart. The heart area is central to human experience. It is where we feel most affected and touched, both emotionally and spiritually. Our sense of meaning springs from the heart, as does our sense of oneness or communion with the whole of life.

This does not diminish other ways of sensing our true nature. The whole body participates in the unfolding of inner knowing whether or not we are consciously aware of it. Some people may never explicitly sense the heart area or the interior of their body at all and still profoundly realize who they really are. Others will have easier access to different facets of inner knowing than the heart area. It is important to realize that there is not one right way for this understanding to emerge. Nonetheless, the heart area seems to be the most common, central, and easily accessible portal to true nature for most people. Accordingly, it deserves a book of its own.

Whether we realize it or not, the heart is what

we most carefully guard and most want to open.

The awakening of the heart is supported by a clear mind and a sense of inner stability. For example, we need to be able to unhook or disidentify from our core limiting stories in order for our attention to drop into the heart. This takes substantial clarity. Further, we need to feel a core sense of safety in order to keep our heart open. This requires intimacy with the region of the belly (or hara) that governs, among other things, our instinct to survive. These central facets of our experience — what we could call the head, heart, and hara — work together as a team, supporting one another. Each has a critical role to play in the discovery of our true nature.

The heart area is where we feel most intimately touched by kindness, gratitude, and appreciation. It is where we feel most loving and loved. It is where we point when we refer to ourselves and where we feel the full poignancy of our human existence, richly flavored by both joy and grief. It is where and how we know ourselves and others most intimately. It is where we simply are, free of any definition. And it is where we move from when we are most at ease and in touch with ourselves. When the heart has awakened, we are intimate with all things.

Conversely, the heart is also where we feel most emotionally wounded by the words and acts of others, especially when we struggle with our own sense of worth. It is where we feel the impact of our harshest self-judgments and where we feel most hurt by the judgments of others. When we find it difficult to accept and love ourselves, our heart feels numb or disturbed. It is where we loathe and reject ourselves, it is where we are least kind to ourselves and others, and it is one of the primary centers of shame. It is where we feel brokenhearted when we have lost someone dear to us. It is the seat of despair, and it is where we feel most alone, empty, alienated, and disconnected.

It takes incredible courage to open our heart. The French word for heart is coeur (from the Latin cor) — the root of the word courage — and it takes enormous courage to explore the depths of the heart. We are sometimes more willing to risk physical danger than to open our heart to another and risk emotional wounding or the loss of what we take to be our self. Whether we realize it or not, the heart is what we most carefully guard and most want to open. I welcome you in this courageous exploration into your essential

Reviews for The Deep Heart

[brian johnstone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very helpful guide to discovering inner peace through the stabilization in awareness by developing heightened sensory awareness. Especially ideal for the mature seeker who feels stuck in their progression of realizing Truth.