By Dean dela Paz
At about the same time I read JM Enage’s latest book ‘Heartset: Expanding Your Heart Consciousness’, I was writing on the macroeconomy that essentially started out declaring, ‘It is easy to be negative when we realize we have lost control of our destinies and good fortune given the challenges now facing us.’
The negative tones of the essay reflected what many felt not only about the enveloping desperation surrounding a global economy afflicted with wars and unprecedented violence but also, within the protected personal universes of those externally afflicted, cloying internal cancers, emotional challenges, health, and mental problems that threaten at the inner levels.
During the worst times of the pandemic, and even now as we try to attempt normalcy, victimized physically by the disease itself, and the emotional and mental crises from the fears, helplessness, surrender and desperation it caused, we were further victimized, perhaps even deeper, by our coping mechanisms. Some inflicted and imposed by the worst Draconian measures.
We needed to socially-distance. A number were jailed, some even killed for violating quarantine ordinances. We needed to isolate, afflicted or not. In all these, left and effectively abandoned to our own devices, absent adequate public healthcare facilities, we needed to virtually heal alone.
It is for these reasons that anyone who reads Enage’s heartwarming and heartfelt book discovers deeper comforts and cures for ailments vaccines and isolationism do not address.
All say the book is timely. But even more than that, it provides far beyond the mitigating and coping imperatives of the pandemic. In Chapter IV, referencing COVID 19, and in Chapter V where Enage identifies ‘’negative blockages’’ to our well-being, he shows where the book’s central theme is not only relevant at this particular time, but throughout its pages he shows where the book’s message is even more impactful, thus, providing enduring coping guides to life whether life for us is a series of challenges, curses, or blessings.
Enage’s premise, concurred in by the professionals he cites and validated by the research he has done, are tested in his own development as a person. Evident from Enage’s prose, through the readability of his thesis and by the manner he writes, we can see the balance he has achieved where he sees the heart, not as just another organ but as a ‘’thinking, creating, and remembering organ’’. This is the over-riding revelation thematic throughout his book.
Enage shows how our heart sets up our internal systems to deal with events that occur in our lives. He shows it is capable of cellular memories in addition to having the ability to heal, create and attract. Arrayed against life’s needs, the heart has seven facets ranging from loving, healing, guiding, and protecting, through to creating, calming, and empowering.
The typical dichotomy where the heart is concerned concerns the difference between employing one’s brain versus one’s heart. Enage tackles this differently . He argues it is not a question of one over the other. It is both, operating in harmony.
The reader is gradually introduced to this early in the book, but upon reaching Chapter X, Enage tackles even more multiple dimensions beyond the linear brain and heart relationship. Allegorically, Enage does not just take us with him through a single path in his own journey, but through different paths. Strangely enough, as we go farther into the book, the applicability of its central theme broadens. By Chapter XVII, he brings us from where the heart is a physical organ that merely pumps blood to where it is a portal to our souls.
Like something to be savored, meditated and pondered upon on nearly every chapter, the book is a slow leisurely read. It is also autobiographical. As Enage draws from his experiences, we virtually travel and grow with him, learning the lessons he learned and the validations from other authors who deepen the experience. Weaving both experiences and lessons, the book is effectively instructional and provides specific healing mechanisms moving from the physical in the early chapters to the profoundly spiritual.
Few books are as heartwarming, heartfelt and rich. Few are as endowing. Even fewer in social media. That is a supreme irony because this is the kind we all need now.
(Dean dela Paz is a former investment banker and a managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance and Mathematics professor.)
