You are where you need to be, doing what you need to be doing with exactly the right person at exactly this moment. And that is true even if the person you are sitting with right now is “only” you.
The Heart of Healing, p. 53

This is a challenging, beautiful book by friend and mentor Mary Ann Iyer, MD (previously, Mary Ann Wallace). Dr. Iyer has been practicing and teaching insight meditation for over 40 years. She is also a board-certified physician and has founded an integrative medicine center in Oregon.

This book will help you heal the wounds of the past and the current habits and patterns of acting that are not in alignment with your heart’s purpose. Dr. Iyer (formerly Wallace) in this book writes of patients who suffered from physical pain and seeming disease, but found through work with Dr. Iyer that the causes of the diseases included fixed mental constructs and emotional imbalances. This work is called mindbody medicine and integrative medicine.

You can heal the wounds of the past and from current habits and patterns of acting that are not in alignment with your heart’s purpose. As Dr. Iyer writes,

We must look at every facet of life with deep reverence. Every molecule of form that shows up in our experience brings us an opportunity to embrace life with love, compassion, and respect. If we do that, we will turn within ourselves with that same deep love and compassion.
The Heart of Healing, p. 8

When we turn within with deep love and compassion to look at the mental constructs and associated emotional pain, we find that the constructs are not actually here; They are done; they are gone, stories from the past. What is left is a sense of profound innocence and vast love.

I created this painting as part of my own work with Dr. Iyer’s book. The book’s appendix has instructions for meditation, meditative journaling with or without art, and other ways we can work with love, compassion, and respect to heal.

I created a depiction of the mental constructs (the structure in the painting) of which Dr. Iyer writes. The fires signify the emotion of aversion (anger, fear, ill-will, not liking). The waves of the ocean in the painting signify the waves of emotion that Dr. Iyer writes are just energy moving through the body.

The painting shows lightheartedness, joy, when these internal energies and constructs are seen with awareness of their ever-changing magnitudes.

And, of course, behind all the changing sensations, emotions, and intricate, gargantuan mental constructs, we see that our true nature is actually love (signified by the heart).

Metaphorically speaking, attending to the inner emotional framework could be seen as that lubricating force that is analogous to blood flowing through our arteries. When those arteries are clogged-when we no longer attend to our relationships or to our heart’s desire-our life’s blood gets clogged and can no longer nourish the heart that is central to ongoing function as a human being.
The Heart of Healing, p 3-4

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