Resurrecting the Heart |
Issue 17
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In March 2023, I underwent heart surgery to repair mitral valve regurgitation. The operation was expected to take four or five hours, but it lasted ten. Partway through, they lost me.
When I woke, it felt like paradise—though I knew as little of it as anyone longing for lost Eden. There was gratitude and something deeper: resurrection. Was it a sign that the robot that operated on me was named Da Vinci? I later had half his Vitruvian Man tattooed on my arm, as if resurrection entered or emerged from me. I had been reconstructed, half-machine, half-mortal, and somehow more alive. After the surgery, I wanted to change a few things in my life. I let go of the courses I no longer wanted to teach. I focused on the work that truly moved me: meditation, mindfulness, and philosophy. But as one chapter closed and another began, I soon realized I was stepping into more than a new direction. I stumbled into an old trauma I hadn’t fully faced—something that years of meditation had only brushed against, never pierced. My self-esteem was devastatingly low. I realized that for years, I had only offered what others asked of me, not what I genuinely wanted to share. For years, I had been too polite to be honest. Beneath my practice and teaching, I carried a silent conviction that I was meant to suffer. My mother had suffered her whole life, losing two children, so perhaps I believed it was written into my own story, into my very genes. Through meditation—what later felt more like heart prayers—I began to see that resurrection requires a kind of death. To be reborn, I needed to let go of who I thought I was. This was not just a metaphor. It was real, visceral, and terrifying. For months, I could neither read nor write. As a philosopher and writer, it felt like a second death; meaning faded, and silence dominated. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul--a descent where every sense of self, purpose, and achievement dissolves. My children kept me going. Their presence, their laughter, and their ordinary aliveness were enough. Slowly, I began to feel the world again. It did not return through social media or mental activity, but through attention. I began to see that I was not alone. Aliveness is not something to achieve, but something to receive. I returned to the Satipatthāna Sutta for healing. This Buddhist text recommends being mindful of the heart-mind in all forms—wholesome and unwholesome, helpful and unhelpful. This helped me notice what I needed to die inside me: the ego-structures that kept me suffering. When they loosened, a space opened. I could simply be. I remembered that the Spanish word recordar (to remember) comes from the Latin recordi, to let something pass through the heart. The Pali term for mindfulness (sati) means “memory”, the memory of the present and not the past. Its opposite is forgetfulness. Of course, sati also refers to attention, as is “attend to”, “care for”, “watch over”. To remember is not just to think. It is to feel—letting experience flow through the heart without clinging. To remember is to love. Mindfulness is not about self-improvement or control. It is about letting go—especially our fixed ideas about who we are. Joseph Goldstein says, “Liberation is letting go of suffering.” I returned to a local Buddhist meditation sangha and started offering meditation workshops and stopped teaching academic courses, as I could no longer manage. This shift mattered. The truth of suffering—the first noble truth—became clear as both universal and personal: my own insecurity and my belief that life must involve struggle. This clarified the difference between therapy and spirituality. Therapy helps us reshape the self’s story so it becomes livable. Spirituality, however, begins where the story dissolves. The mystics and Buddhists agree: “I am nothing, but in love with everything.” This realization does not deny selfhood; it expands it. The boundaries of “me” and “mine” softens. What remains is intimacy with everything alive—the breath, the light, the trembling heart. Simone Weil wrote, “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” During my silent months, when I could not read or write, I finally understood her words. Attention becomes devotion—the heart listening to the world. For years, I tried to perfect myself. I wanted to become a better philosopher, writer, and teacher. Now I see that true transformation starts with subtraction. Resurrection is not a single moment; it is a slow surrender again and again. Sometimes, in meditation, I feel that the same intelligence which guided the surgeon’s robot now guides my breath. Life itself is always repairing us. We are restored not by striving, but by allowing. This is what I share with others now: not a doctrine or system, but a way of seeing. Love is not something we create. It is something we allow. Wisdom is not just knowledge. It comes from intimacy with life’s fragility. When I look at the small scars below my ribcage, I see more than reminders of pain. I see a doorway—a portal between death and renewal, between self and no-self. The surgery saved my body. The dark night that followed saved my soul. Perhaps resurrection is not about coming back. Perhaps it is about coming closer—closer to life, to others, to the quiet truth pulsing in every moment. Everything we seek is already here, beating inside the heart. |
Finn Janning, PhD, is a Danish writer and philosopher living in Barcelona. His work focuses on attention, existential philosophy, and contemplative practice. His writing has appeared in Epiphany, Under the Gum Tree, Philosophy Now, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.
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