In the busyness of life, many of us have lost touch with our hearts. Yet, the heart holds life’s most powerful qualities. In Ren Xue - a mind-body practice - reconnecting with oneself begins with cultivating the Five Essential Heart Qualities, or the Five Xin: Trust, Openness, Love, Gratitude, and True Respect. These qualities are gateways to restoring our health, happiness, and overall wellbeing.
Trust
Trust is the first heart quality because it is the key that unlocks the door to all of the other heart qualities -openness, love, gratitude, and true and deep respect. When trust as a quality is established as unconditional in your heart, there is no more irrational fear, and we can explore all the possibilities that life can offer. Trusting ourselves, and life in general is the key and a foundation for leading a wise and fulfilling life.
Openness
Openness as a quality of the heart means your heart has become open. Trust is the foundation for openness. The first person to benefit from an open heart is yourself with the presence of warmth and openness with true self confidence. The next to benefit from your state of openness and open heart, is the rest of the world including everyone and everything that comes into contact with you.
Love
Whether we are aware of it or not, it is love and connection that we are really pursuing in life. We may be distracted and think it is something else, but it is love. True love begins with having natural and healthy love for ourselves and then we can extend this love out naturally to the world. True love is magnetic. We can look inside ourselves and find the conditions we put in place that get in the way of love and we can change and evolve into the true and unconditional love.
Gratitude
Gratitude is like a tool we can learn to use and refine to make our life truly worth living. When we are lacking in basic gratitude we are experiencing dissatisfaction on some level. We are essentially sabotaging the quality of our own life because of our fixed expectations not being met. This can keep us in fight or flight mode, all too often experiencing stress. True gratitude brings us to the present moment where we can enjoy the reverence of that comes with being humble and being in a state of gratitude.
True Respect
The real true respect and reverence is a heart quality and state of life which feels deeply harmonious and even a feeling of being in awe of life itself. It is the result of having the first four heart qualities established in oneself. This true respect is not only an act, It is a natural state we carry in all moments when we are truly centered and relaxed. Of course it is a quality that anyone can cultivate and manifest and it is truly a manifestation of wisdom.