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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected]. 

Keeping Heart, by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections; each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover. 

Visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource of the “Feelings/Needs Chart.” It integrates the essentials of The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart that lead to the experience of the Gifts of the Heart. 

On page 23 of Keeping Heart, there is a sentence that shows the dark side of avoiding love’s requirements:

“Avoiding love’s demand, though, requires that we hide our hearts, and, therefore, remove ourselves from living this life.” 

Contact is not connection

We experience a vast array of what we call “connections” through all forms of technology that has given us the internet and its multiple forms of social media that offers the illusion of “connection.” We call it “interconnected.” 

However, it does not actually give what it says. We are “inter-contacted,” not actually connected. 

There are multiple forms of contact, but we still remain disconnected from each other, and even ourselves. 

Sadly, loneliness and relational isolation are two of the most talked about forms of misery in our society today, even though we have more pervasive contact than ever before in the history of humanity.

When Caesar connected the Roman Empire with roads, it led to people groups being connected—for better or worse. The technology of today is not a road to connect us. It is the technology that actually keeps us from “facing each other,” which is where genuine connection begins.

Contact is like watching a movie. In a movie, we experience life vicariously, which means “not really in it.” Even more, if we watch it alone, we experience life vicariously in isolation. We do not share a lived experience in reality

True connection is a shared experience in reality.

Contact does not feed the heart. Connection feeds the heart.

Connection requires that a person shares the experiences of their emotional and spiritual lives with another who is capable of doing the same. 

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