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Toward a Sacred Discourse: Reconceptualizing the Heart Through Metaphor

University of Waterloo, Canada

In this article, the author takes as her subject the lived experience of the heart. She presents an autoethnographic case to examine the regions of spiritual inquiry and discourses of the sacred. In mystical traditions, the heart is often conceptualized as a site of liberation or enlightenment. Entering this inner territory of the heart through the tacit knowledge of poetics and the body, the author explores how a metaphoric turn in her research illumined a heart practice and discourse, how somatic images became a bridge to lived experience. She discusses how mining three concrete metaphors, evoked by a set of experiences in the field, moved her study of the heart. The field in which this project is situated has three dimensions: the author’s poetry, lived experience, and images and conversations arising in her teaching practice.

Key Words: spiritual inquiry • autoethnography • poetics • embodiment • metaphor

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