The Bus, the Big Woman, and the Awakened Heart
As the year draws to a close, like many of you, I am reflecting on what has transpired. I have much to be grateful for.
There is one event in particular that stands out.
It happened in May at a Ren Xue retreat with Yuan Tze.
My heart awakened again.
Not metaphorically. Not sentimentally. My heart literally re-awakened — as if something I hadn’t felt in decades suddenly became vivid, bright, alive. And I’m not talking about emotions or good feelings. I’m talking about the simple, shocking fact that I suddenly became good at feeling. My life changed completely with the awakening of my heart in ways described below.
Life was good before, but different.
I don’t remember a time when my heart was this awakened, this vibrantly connected with all of life… ever!
I never knew the value of an awakened heart until this year. Here is what I can say about it for sure.
If you want to know how to really live, you need an awakened heart also. That was the wisdom my newly awakened heart was showing me.
Why did my heart close in the first place?
A good case could be made for a ride in a station wagon in 1979.
Here is a story of how my heart closed and foreshadowing of the healing and awakening that was to follow.
The Day the Heart First Closed
It was the summer of 1979. I was fourteen. We were driving across the desert — a mother and her five children in a beige Chevy station wagon — heading west on Interstate 10 toward Disneyland.
It should have been a fun trip. But it wasn’t. Not even close to fun.
My father had left my mother some 6 months beforehand for a younger woman. My mother was heartbroken, overwhelmed, unable to cope; she was lost in a sea of emotion and we kids were sort of left to our own devices. We children were also unraveling; each in our own ways. My older sister tried to take charge. My younger sister tried to get everyone to just love each other. My twin brothers — only nine — were chaotic.
And then there was me.
I felt everything deeply. Every emotion in that family, in that car. Every tension. Every sharp word. Every unspoken fear. All the anger! Mainly I felt my mom’s misery, with no means of helping her.
I had no capacity to digest any of it. I could make no sense of it and didn’t know how to let it pass through me. So I reacted the only way I knew how: loudly. Desperately. Trying to protect myself through force of expression.
The car was a moving theatre of misery, and because I was the loudest, I was the scapegoat. The reason — supposedly — that everyone was unhappy. Something had to give.
Eventually my mother decided the solution was to send me home. Alone. On a Greyhound bus from Phoenix back to Las Cruces. A 9 hour ride from morning until evening. Meanwhile, they would go on to Disneyland without me.
This created a crisis for me. Inside I was feeling completely alone, without a single friend in that car. Worse than that, I was absolutely terrified. I had never been alone in a strange city before. I was a rich kid white boy from a small town, totally, until that moment, sheltered.
Reflecting on it today, those hours in the car did something to me. I wasn’t just overwhelmed — I was collapsing internally. I felt dirty, too loud, too much. I humiliated myself in front of my own family, and somewhere in that misery a deeper belief took hold: that I was the problem. Not my behavior. Me. I carried that false identity into every group I ever entered.
In the final stretch before Phoenix, the desert sunlight coming through the back windows, the luggage pressed against my legs, something in me broke. Sadness, fear, anger — all of it swirled inside me. As we drove into the city and toward the bus terminal, I became quiet. I wasn’t going to share the deep fear inside me. Not with them.
When we got out of the car, I felt my mom was afraid also. But the decision was made, and that was that. We bought the ticket and there was the bus; getting ready to leave.
She cried goodbye, and I waved her off, and turned my head with fake pride.
I got on the bus without a word.
That is when something else happened. Something unexpected.
Stepping Into Another World
The moment I stepped onto that bus, everything changed. In the blink of an eye, I found myself in a whole new world. The newness of it — this bus, the people, the smells, the sounds of voices — all of it brought me straight into the present moment. This was my first real taste of adventure, this moment of getting onto that bus. I was in the now. In the adventure. I had discovered my true home. Being on the road.
On a practical level, I needed to find a seat for the nine-hour ride. I walked slowly down the narrow aisle. Every seat was occupied. The farther back I went, the closer I got to the toilet. Its stink increasing with every step.
There was one seat free — two or three rows in front of the toilet.
The reason that seat was free? Because it was only half a seat. The other half was occupied by a very large Black woman who filled her entire seat and a good portion of the one I was to occupy.
I slid into the space beside her. She turned her head slightly and smiled gently down at me. I looked up at her.
A few minutes after the bus pulled away, she began humming. Her whole body vibrated with the sound, and that vibration flowed directly into me.
It was as if she were a doctor of the heart. First the smile — the first I’d seen the whole trip. Then the sound — her beautiful humming voice. And the vibration — steady, warm, alive. All of it soothed me, relaxed a body so tense, so ready for battle, just minutes before. I felt the tension releasing. I felt good.
It was better than that. I felt held by this woman and her voice. Cared for.
I felt like I belonged there next to her.
And for the first time in what felt like forever, something familiar slid across my face: a smile.
It has been almost 50 years since that bus ride, and I can now see the deeper meaning of this experience — the station wagon, the bus, and the big humming woman.
The bus and the woman are the perfect metaphor for my spiritual journey. The bus brought me into presence — out of the storm of my mind and emotions. The big woman brought me into the heart — into warmth, kindness, and human connection. Presence took me out of the storm. Her humming welcomed me into something deeper: a rhythm of mercy, a frequency of grace.
Coming Full Circle — Germany, 2025
Since that period of my life, whenever I have been a member of a group of any variety, inwardly or even outwardly, some version of that old family wound played out in me or around me. Feeling unwanted. Feeling like an outsider. Feeling ashamed. Feeling like the one who will be expelled.
The Germany retreat was no different. The same fears came up. The same sense of being on the outskirts. The same emotional weather patterns. Except this time, something new — something essential — was present.
Of course, I had presence. That wasn’t new. I had thirty years of cultivating it. With the gift of presence, I was able to survive this repeated reenactment of the trauma of betrayal and abandonment. Survival, after all, was my MO.
But in Germany in 2025, at this retreat, I got something better than survival: I had finally made it to the back of the bus, to the big woman and her heart-healing welcome — not in form, but in essence. The same awakening frequency that found me at age fourteen found me again at age sixty.
But there was a crucial difference. This time, it wasn’t a stranger from outside me coaxing me back into wholeness. It was my own beautiful heart awakening on its own! I had found the way to my heart and was ready for it to come alive again!
If presence had guided me out of the storm, it was my heart — finally alive, open, and awake — that welcomed me deeper into the deeper truth of who I am, and what this life is all about.
Now, I wish to share with you what I learned about the heart, why it matters, and how the heart can awaken, without the drama.
PART 2 — THE FIVE QUALITIES OF AN AWAKENED HEART
Disclaimer
My experience is first hand, but to explain and to help guide people to a similar experience I draw heavily on the wisdom of Yuan Tze and Michael Alan Singer. However, I am not representing Yuan Tze or the Ren Xue / Ren Xue Qigong movement. I am not representing Michael A. Singer or speaking on his behalf. What follows is my own understanding of their heart teachings, informed by my life, my practice, and the awakening of my own heart. This is not doctrine. It is a path — offered in case it serves you.
Why an Awakened Heart Matters
Presence taught me how to survive. It showed me how to step out of thought, how to rest as awareness, how to be okay even when the emotional storm was violent. But surviving is not living.
At the retreat in Germany, I finally understood something I had never truly seen: presence is only half the path. The other half is the heart — the awakened heart.
Presence says: “This is not who I am.”
An awakened heart says: “Everything I experience arises in me, as me.”
Presence is the bus.
The awakened heart is the humming woman.
Together they open the door to a different life. But before we talk about the beauty of the awakened heart, we must talk about the cost of a closed one.
THE COST OF A CLOSED HEART & THE POWER OF AN AWAKENED ONE
A closed heart makes life small and fearful.
- Trust becomes fear in disguise. Doubt about life predominates.
You “trust” only what is familiar, predictable, and safe. This isn’t trust. It’s the illusion of control. - Openness becomes conditional.
You open only when you feel good. The moment discomfort appears, you retreat. - Love becomes a deal.
“Do what I like and I will love you. Do what I don’t like and I will withdraw.” Ghosting, canceling, unfriending — love reduced to transactional thinking. - Gratitude becomes a strategy, not appreciation.
Forced positivity or a list of complaints. No depth. No nourishment. - Respect becomes either fatalism or entitlement.
Life feels too big and you feel too small. You settle for less and call it realistic. - Life becomes flat.
Color fades. Energy drains. You numb down and call it maturity.
A closed heart doesn’t just hurt — it shrinks your world.
THE POWER OF AN AWAKENED HEART
- Life is rich and vivid.
Color returns. Texture returns. Meaning returns. - Every encounter has value.
Nothing is wasted. Every person is a teacher. - There is a wealth of energy everywhere.
Even difficult experiences give energy because they reconnect you to your being. - You stop begging for love or protecting it.
You don’t chase love or guard it. You become an expression of love and a receptacle of love. - You help ease the suffering of the world.
Not by fixing people, but by not adding your own contraction to the collective. - Respect becomes awe, not humiliation.
The vastness of life ceases to crush you and begins to lift you. - Innocence returns.
Not naïveté — but a fresh, open recognition of life itself.
This is why the awakened heart matters.
The Five Qualities of the Awakened Heart
Yuan Tze teaches that the awakened heart naturally expresses five qualities:
- Trust
- Openness
- Love
- Gratitude
- Gong Jing (Deep Respect, or Awe)
These qualities are not techniques or states you manufacture with effort. They are what the heart naturally expresses when given attention and the freedom to be as it is.
In my experience, these heart qualities are also mind qualities you can apply in the service of connecting with your heart, and learning to let your heart be unconditionally awake!
THE FIVE QUALITIES — IN DETAIL
1. TRUST — “Stay With”
Trust is the doorway. It is a decision: “I will stay with what is here.” Trust interrupts the reflex to leave — to distract, to tighten, to numb, to interpret, to judge. When you trust your heart, you trust your feelings to be what they are, and you trust yourself to stay with those feelings. The feelings are of the heart, and the simple act of staying with them ignites the awakening process of the heart. It is the crucial first step.
Inner instruction:
Simply say to yourself, whenever you find your attention being pulled out of the experience: “Stay with this.”
“Stay here.” “Stay.”
Keep bringing your awareness back to the sensations of the moment, no matter what the mind or emotions are saying.
Once trust holds, openness becomes possible.
2. OPENNESS — “Relax With”
Openness is another word for vulnerability.
There is the comfort zone. There is the zone of overwhelm, and between these two zones is what we can call the learning zone. When you remain open, the learning zone expands as the other two zones shrink. Evenually you realize that everying is the learning zone.
Openness is not passivity. Rather, it is the courage to allow the experience to happen without resisting or tightening around it. If trust is the choice to stay with an experience as it is, than openness is the choice to relax, to release unneeded effort. It is releasing the effort needed to overcome resistance. Trust takes effort, openness is the release of this effort. So that all that remains is you being there, still, not reacting.
Inner instruction:
Relax with this feeling.
3. LOVE — “Be With”
Love is a natural recognition of truth of existence. Love is the fact that every single thing that happens to you in this life, happens in your awareness. In a sense the whole of your life is a creation of your love; your awareness. When you trust yourself to be there, and you relax such that you can notice you have always been there, then there is love.
Love is what appears when trust and openness remove interference. It is the recognition: “This experience is arising in me — therefore it is not other.” Love dissolves separation and reveals the inherent intimacy of existence.
It is not something you do. It is something that reveals itself when the heart is no longer bracing against life.
Inner instruction:
This too can be loved. I am you looking at me.
Love is the sun emerging once the clouds of resistance have parted.
4. GRATITUDE — “Recognize the Gift”
Once you recognize love, gratitude comes uninvited. Gratitude is not forced appreciation or a list of things to be thankful for. Gratitude arises when love recognizes itself. It says: “I get to feel this. I get to experience being alive.”
An important aspect of gratitude is that we begin to appreciate the challenges of our lives. Like me in that station wagon and the miserable family drama. All of that was to create an unmistakable contrast the moment I got on that bus. No family drama, no contrast, no lesson!
Everything becomes a gift because everything reconnects you to the simple miracle of being.
Inner instruction:
Recognize the gift.
Gratitude is the natural warmth of existence itself.
5. GONG JING — DEEP RESPECT — “Bow to the Mystery”
Deep Respect is the culmination. Not reverence as fear, but reverence as awe. Every being is more important than your thoughts about them. Life is vast. Existence is ancient. And every moment is bigger than your opinions. You begin to see the inherent perfection in everyone. No one needs to be fixed. If you sense the divinity of the whole, you realize everyone is an expression of that divinity, so how could it be wrong? It doesn’t mean you don’t help or have compassion, but your compassion is no longer an expression of pity. It is now an expression of love.
Inner instruction:
Bow to the mystery.
Deep Respect is humility without humiliation, wonder without overwhelm, surrender without defeat.
ENDING/BEGINNING — The Heart’s Homecoming
The longest journey is the journey from the head to the heart. These 5 steps make the journey that much easier.
The Sequence Matters (Trust → Openness → Love → Gratitude → Deep Respect)
Trust is the beginning. The openness of vulnerability comes after trust. The intimacy of love is the gift of being open. Gratitude is the natural fragrance of love. Deep Respect arises when we realize our appreciation with our sense of intimacy with the unlimited unending universe. We can just bow our heads as a result.
If you don’t know where to start, always start with trust.
Yuan Tze teaches that the innate qualities of the heart shine through when the patterns that obscure them soften. In my own experience, the moment contraction eases — even a little — the heart begins to reveal itself. These qualities are both expressions of the awakened heart and practical reminders that help the mind get out of the way so the heart can express itself fully — and experience life fully.
By the grace of life — in the form of Yuan Tze, in the teachings of Michael A. Singer, and in the mysterious wisdom that has carried me this far — I now carry the grace and love of that bus within me. The presence that pulled me out of the storm at fourteen is still saving me from my own entangled patterns. The big woman in the back of the bus — her warmth, her humming, her unspoken mercy — is still here inside me welcoming me home. Welcoming me back to me.
I am the boy stepping onto the bus and the man finding his heart again. I am the path down the aisle and the seat beside her. I am the humming and the stillness it created. These are no longer memories. They are resources. They are skills. They are part of the inner architecture of who I am.
And I pray — with the same sincerity that saved me as a child and found me again at sixty — that you, too, will discover your own bus, your own humming presence, your own path back to the heart. May you find the courage to trust. May you soften into openness. May love reveal itself to you. May gratitude warm your days. And may Deep Respect — true awe at the mystery of being alive — lift your life into something luminous. May your heart awaken, again and again, in ways that surprise you and set you free.
RESOURCES FOR YOUR OWN HEART AWAKENING
Heart Initiation Series — with Alan Steinborn & Elena Mironov (Sparkling Retreats)
A four-hour evening designed to open the heart and restore inner trust — through guided somatic embodiment, Yoga Nidra, cacao, meditation, and the deep vibrations of the gongs. This five-part series explores the five qualities of the awakened heart: Trust, Openness, Love, Gratitude, and Deep Respect. Each session blends guided inner work, embodiment practice, meditation, and the living transmission of two teachers who have walked this path. A direct, experiential introduction to heart awakening.
👉 Event page (Heart Initiation I — Trust):
https://dasgongbad.com/en/event/heart-initiation-i-inner-trust/
Yuan Tze — Tong Yuan: The Heart Practice
Tong Yuan is the method Yuan Tze developed specifically for awakening the five heart qualities. These guided meditations are gentle, profound, and uniquely effective. They support the heart in remembering its natural state and help you cultivate these qualities directly in your lived experience.
👉 Tong Yuan (English):
https://renxueinternational.org/tong-yuan/
Michael A. Singer — The Untethered Soul
A modern classic that teaches how to step out of the mind and into the spaciousness of awareness — a foundational skill that makes heart awakening possible.
👉 Available in Switzerland at Orell Füssli:
https://www.orellfuessli.ch
Michael A. Singer — Living from a Place of Surrender (Audio Program)
This is Singer’s heart teaching in his own voice — perhaps the clearest and most powerful explanation of how to stay open, how to let go, and how to live with an unconditionally open heart.
👉 Sounds True (Audio Program):
https://www.soundstrue.com/products/living-from-a-place-of-surrender
Additional Resources (Talks, Podcasts, Articles)
- Yuan Tze — Articles on the Heart & Patterns of the False Self
https://renxueinternational.org/blog/ - Yuan Tze — Video Teachings
https://renxueinternational.org/videos/ - Michael Singer — Teachings & Podcast Archive
https://michaelasinger.com/podcast/