The Song of the Human Heart
"My book 20 years in the making, The Song of the Human Heart is a constellation mapping the way back home to human belonging." — Shireen Qudosi
The Song of the Human Heart is about a return to belonging and remembering the intimacy of what it means to be human. My book 20 years in the making, The Song of the Human Heart is a crafted storytelling that turns decades of lived experience into a constellation mapping the way back home to human belonging.
Human belonging is grounded in faith (the opus of a Great Intelligence), identity (an expression of the symphony of the human soul), and in intimacy (the practice of heart-led knowing). The way back to authentic human belonging is through compassion (a recognition of love as the highest form of intelligence). Belonging is the salve for separation; it is humanity’s homecoming. Belonging is the godhead of faith and the signature of identity.
The Song of the Human Heart casts light on the architect of control: The Distortion. The Distortion keeps us from true belonging. The Distortion embeds infinitely self-propelling programs of control within belief systems. The Distortion has humanity imprisoned through a subversion of faith and identity. The Distortion is an entity that lives in the rot of separation. It has survived unseen for thousands of years by taking everything we orient toward as humans — beauty, truth, balance — and inverting it. The Song of the Human Heart works through the layers of self-destructive paradigms and belief systems, parasites that we have accepted as our own with religion and culture as the carrier. The story of our identity under Distortion gridlocks humanity into nesting dolls, each separating the wholeness, or holi-ness, of our being into finite expressions of enslavement that can never represent the symphony of the human soul. We can never be free as a human race until we unmask the Distortion, which has for the vast majority of people across time hid openly in a type of perception filter. The Distortion is more sinister than evil, a master puppeteer at the apex of the cult of control.
For humanity to truly be free, we have to recognize the web of Distortion and once again remember the song of the human heart — the drum beat that connects all life. We cannot “fight” the Distortion because even opposition and conflict is its handiwork and entraps us in its system, its language, its tools. Insead, we build the ships to sail into a new frontier, to journey home in the greatest exodus humanity has ever known.
The Song of the Human Heart merges autobiography with non-fiction, my personal observations and life, professional field notes, dreamwork and extra-sensory experiences. The work engages readers in a conversation across touch points that have shaped my life and perspective: Islam, colonization and supremacy, radicalization, the sacred feminine, the sanctity of childhood, and more. I reflect on my own layered experience across each touch point, weaving an intersectional story that highlights the intimacy of relationship within the human experience. Each chapter looks at the story of humanity through a unique lens: the story of language, story of God, story of separation, and so on, leading the reader to the threshold of a new human story, and an invitation to the greatest exodus humanity has ever known: the return to the god-self.
The Song of the Human Heart took 20 years to come into being, in part because I had to go through various life cycles and experiences to fully embody all the themes the work journeys through. The last two years have been the most intensive. I’ve experienced several initiations — some of which we all collectively experienced over the last few years — and others are deeply mystical and continue to guide me toward a new edge of human freedom and imagination.
Many of you have supported this work in one way or another over the years, especially as it has changed forms. Many of you have been so very patient and trusting with the process. With my whole heart, I thank you for that trust. For me to write a book about detachment, I had to first detach from the inherited story I was born into and discover an authentic self, an authentic voice. I was also afraid to write my book until I realized I was the book — that there was nothing more to learn or study and that I had experienced all I needed to experience for at least this work to come through. I spent over a decade researching and studying Islam and the global arc of extremism, until I came into embodied awareness that my entire life is a hall of mirrors, of shadow and light, arcs, crevices, and creases of layered human experience — that the proverbial sand beneath my feet at the ground of Islam’s origin story, for example, is not sand, but the dust of billions of lives that came before who never had the freedom or capacity to have their stories heard and seen. And even still, in that space of death — death of life, death of dreams, death of possibility — there is the wellspring of new life, of reimagining.
As I have finally mapped the complexity of this grand story and finish editing The Song of the Human Heart and finding a home with a publisher, I have begun raising a 501c3 non-profit as a vessel for practicing the work: The Foundation for Human Belonging. The Foundation for Human Belonging is a gently pulsing light for the many others who, in the deep well of their hearts, feel something is in great dis-ease within this realm called Earth — who in the periphery of their hearts sense the presence of an otherness, of a distortion. The Foundation is a space to practice the calling of our hearts.
Thank you for taking the time to read the introduction to The Song of the Human Heart and the development of The Foundation for Human Belonging. I welcome your thoughts privately in intimate conversion please, so that we can connect authentically. I welcome your continued support and thank all of you for being companions on this path. I feel in my bones there are more changes ahead within what I can only describe as my continued shedding of the old human story and deeper immersion and embrace of mysticism. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I hope we will see its sunrise together.
