Tending your Heart Fire

Talking the heart talk is one thing, but walking the heart walk, and for the long haul, is quite another. This heart path has its moments of hard, but the fulfillment outweighs the need for it to be easy. So now we know we want to not just be on the heart path, but STAY there, we need some ‘tools’ - some filler and fuelers that help us tend our heart fire. 

We want to burn brightly with love for what we do. Having a j.o.b isn’t enough - we want JOY. If we feel that, our children feel that and it’s absolutely a win-win. 

What we don’t learn in our initial teacher training is: in order to serve little hearts well we need to serve our big heart well. 

Yes, ours is a role of service, but in order to serve well we need to feed our own needs. The more ‘full’ we are, the more we have to give. It makes so much sense, but this giving to self doesn’t always come naturally. Saying it is easy, but doing is quite another. 

We tend to very easily slip off our own importance list.  We pour our energy into others, and just hope there’s some excess energy and time left over that we can dip into for ourselves.

But leaving ourselves to chance doesn’t serve us well. It doesn’t make it easy to keep at this heart work. So we need to be more intentional about our own wellbeing, and our own HEART FIRE.  

Our belly fires and heart fires are a big part of HOW we keep our heart at the heart of teaching. And how we stay heart-filled for the long haul, keeping heart even in hard times. 

We need the zest from our belly fires, but there is more than just that passion. We also need the deep belief in what we do, the commitment to doing way more than ‘good enough’, and the big picture view of what a heart approach means collectively and long term. 

That is our heart fire. It holds that brilliant combination of soft and strong that we need to truly be heart-centred. Soft as in our warmth and ‘heart-lens’ way of looking, and strong as in our determination to come with heart, always. To keep being aligned with our heart-centred values, and not be swayed from this path.

We need our fires, and yet we don’t learn about these in our teacher training. We perhaps learn that a “good teacher” has passion, but then we are painted a bit of an unhelpful picture: that our fire is lit when our career begins, it hopefully stays burning, and when it does fizzle out we ‘call it a day’. But don’t you see a more complex picture than that? 

Think of your own fires (both belly and heart) - have you noticed they flicker sometimes and blaze at others? That sometimes you’re ‘fired up’ and other times you wonder how you can lift yourself from the smouldering stage? And that you can be low flame for a wee bit, and then bounce back - and your career is not over, by any means? 

This is because our fires aren’t a one-time thing to light and forget. They are ongoing. And we don’t just have to leave the state of them to chance - hoping they stay alight. We actually get to TEND our fires. To take actions to stoke them - to be both the keeper and the recipient of their warmth and wisdom!

And this isn’t just an “if we have time” but an essential if we are serious about this ‘heart stuff’.

Because if we feed our hearts, we can nourish the hearts of another.

That’s how it works. 

Even the nicest of us will be totally drained if we focus only on the hearts of our children, and neglect our own. We’ll burn out that way, but if we take responsibility for our heart fires - we will BURN BRIGHT! 

We don’t set out to neglect our belly and heart fires, but it does happen. In the busyness of this teaching ‘business’, how we are doesn’t always make the importance list. Especially if we don’t have someone else’s heart voice in our ears reminding us. 

It really is helpful to have something that whispers to us on the regular - reminding us to tune in and to tend to our fire. Little nuggets of inspiration that nudge us to serve up our own soul food are just what the ‘heart doctor’ ordered. We need gems that speak to our WHY but set us up with some HOW. 

We’d love our heart fires to be something out in the fresh air, not smouldering away privately. In our sector we don’t hear about our fires enough. We may hear about fire in the belly, and that this is what makes a “good teacher”. But even then we are just left to it. And our fire is left to it. 

We’d like to see more of us championing the fire in our hearts, and to learn how we gauge both, and what we can do to keep them aflame, for the long haul. And we need to hear that taking on the role of ‘Chief Fire Officer’ is not a chore, but a choice - and in fact, a game-changer! 

We all have a lot on our plates. This year certainly hasn’t lessened that. And this is exactly why heart fires are forefront in our minds. We could have said, “oh, we’re too busy and we’ve had too much stress to even consider them”, but doesn’t that just mean that the time is exactly right and RIPE for such a focus?

This is a time that our fires are likely to have been affected, and we probably won’t have spent much of our teaching journey learning stoking-techniques.  

It may not have even been mentioned in our training, where the focus was so heavily on learning how to be with children that learning how to be with ourselves was entirely overlooked. 

But these things go together - the child, and us, the doing and the being. 

We truly cannot serve others well if we can’t also serve ourselves what WE need. If we feed our needs, we are also fueling our fire! We need to put ourselves and our own wellbeing back in the picture. Then we really can be the well-beings, the wise beings, and the warm beings that our children deserve. 

If who we are matters, then how we are matters, and the fire within us matters. We want it bright in our belly, and warm in our heart. 

We tend to be fed the myth that the fires we have for our career (calling) are something that happen to us. They start at the beginning of our journey, burn depending on our circumstances, and then when they fizzle out we ‘call it a day’. But that is not the case at all. 

Our belly fires and heart fires are part of our ongoing journey, and our ongoing responsibility. To not just notice when they wane and stoke them in reaction, but to put ‘logs’ on preemptively and keep it going. Our heart fires keep us warm, but we can also warm them. They don’t just happen to us - they are IN OUR HANDS!

That sounds like yet another responsibility to add to our already long list, but this one is truly worth our while. Just a little bit of time, a little bit of care, from a myriad of different ‘how to ideas’, and we can breathe life into those flames. Keeping them, and us going our calling long. 

P.S. Our Heart Fire programme lets you take your belly and heart fires in your hands. No longer relying on ‘luck’, you’ll be inspired to keep these burning through your own actions, your own care. And just as our fires aren’t a ‘one hit wonder’, neither is this a one-read kind of resource.

Often we’re led to believe that going on a course is the one way to stoke our fires. Yes, it IS one way, but there are also so many more. Our fires dim for a multitude of reasons, so we need a multitude of possible ‘fixes’. And we’ve built that collection of ‘kindling’ for you. One useful and usable piece each week, to add to your fire and keep it burning. Click here for more info.