Do not reject your own heart. When it aches, comfort it. Better yet, do not let foreign objects intrude to disturb your heart. The desultory matters that wring your heart, why let them enter? As in the days of speakeasies, ask, “Who is there?” before you open the door to let them in.

Your heart doesn’t need aggravation, dissembling feelings, hurts, protests and so forth. And yet you have somehow left the gates of your heart wide open for distress and you have restricted the passage of love. Is this not an amazing thing? It sometimes appears that you have it all backwards.

Perhaps your heart has a sign: “”Welcome, all troubles. Come right in. This is a good place for you. You can smolder here and grow fat. You can eject love and hog the place. You can belch in this heart you occupy. You can multiply. You can pull up a string of past troubles to ensure that I ache. You can whip me, a simple heart, if you wish, as much as you like. If you like to torture, come right in.”

Your heart did not put that sign up. You did. You drew it with your left hand, hardly noticing what you were doing. Beloveds, take that sign down. Replace it consciously. Make a new sign:

“Only love may enter, and only love may stay. Here lies a heart of love.”

And then send an eviction notice to any lingering troubles or dodging anxiety. Be firm. You are going to establish a heart of love. There is no room in your heart for woe, worry, wrangling, wrestling nor wretchedness, These warts might try to sneak in, calling themselves self-righteousness. But don’t be fooled. There is no need for you to prove yourself right.

The more right you are, the less you have to be, do you understand. The world does not rearrange itself according to your code of honor. If someone has wronged you, there will be no trial. You do not have to find them guilty nor yourself innocent. It doesn’t matter. Let the wrongs go. Get them out of your pulsating heart.

It is not so much that you walk away from troubles as it is that you let them go. There is no percentage in carrying a sense of wrong with you, no matter how right you are. Consider all the things you object to as hoodlums. You bump into them, but you don’t keep them. You don’t take them to heart. They are mere hoodlums, and your paths crossed. Don’t take hoodlums to heart. Do not enact retribution in your thoughts, for that is hanging on to the past, and a past that you didn’t want in the first place. Indeed, why, then, hang on to it?

Free the hoodlums of your thoughts. Let them go.

You are careful about what you eat. You don’t let everything enter your mouth. Well, then, do not let everything enter your heart. It is your heart, not someone else’s. It is up to you what intrudes or does not. Love in and love out is the motto of your new heart, because your beautiful pulsating heart is coming to the recognition of love as its force and its glory. When you can choose a heart of love, why would you choose anything else?

What your heart does is not up to anyone or anything but you. No matter how overpowering to your heart certain situations may seem, your heart is more powerful. You can ride the horse of your heart and keep it on track until it wins its race for love and gets the gold along with every other heart.