Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we’re doing here.
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.
When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul’s energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.
Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered.
To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.
When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.
In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are.
Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.
Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
Walk long enough and we all trade places.
We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are.
Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.
As the seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.
If I dare to hear you, I will feel you like the sun and grow in your direction.