Perhaps you’ve heard it said that the thymus gland atrophies after childhood, and it probably does in most people. But that means that they can't feel true love in relationship to somebody else. The pink has to suffuse the thymus gland so that you can feel the essential appreciation and liking, as a wonderful pleasure in the presence of the other—a liking that makes you want that person to be happy. One of the main issues that blocks the thymus gland in relation to the pink essence is the association of softness with passivity, femininity, weakness, or helplessness, as we have discussed. So people who are blocked in that area will use other capacities when it comes to matters of the heart. For instance, if you employ will in the matters of the heart, you are using something in a place where it doesn’t belong. So if you are with a lover and you say, “Okay, let’s do this relationship” from a place of will, it is not love, so it won’t work. Matters of the heart require receptivity, understanding, sweetness, compassion, openness; it’s not about making things work based on effort.

So, in any area of your life, you could use will to actualize various aspects of presence, but that will tend to block your heart. It will encase the thymus gland with a hardness, which is the will that you are using to accomplish your aim. The thymus gland might want to accomplish whatever aim you have set, but since you are using the hardness, that hardness accumulates around the thymus. So, in any matters of the heart, if you only use will, that will tend to calcify the heart, the thymus. If you tend toward a desire to be masculine and hard in order to protect yourself, you will tend to use will in matters of the heart. But when you see through the calcification, the rigidity that is created by the improper use of will, when you recognize and see through the wounds that are there, it is like a pink piece of flesh getting softer, which then becomes like a rose that unfolds. When that happens, it is possible to feel “I love.” This is because the thymus gland is the place of identity. It is the place where the true I is.

Similarly, to be able to experience the pink in the personal sense, that is, in relationship to another, it must be experienced in the heart center, which is in the middle of the chest. Specifically, it needs to be experienced in the thymus gland. The thymus gland has to be active and functioning for you to be able to really experience “I love you.”