The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.
When we need it most, it is nearly impossible to see ourselves with compassion from the slit of a narrowed mind all tensed for battle.
We are so unused to emotion that we mistake any depth of feeling for sadness, any sense of the unknown for fear, and any sense of peace for boredom.
Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.
What is most healing about bearing witness to things exactly as they are, including my own part in my pain, is that when the voice of the pain fits the pain, there is no room for distortion or illusion. In this way, truth becomes a clean bandage that heals, keeping dirt out of the wound. To voice things as they are is the nearest medicine.
Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money.
Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness.
If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.
Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.
So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean.
I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.
Where love is deep much can be accomplished. – SHINICHI SUZUKI.
Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?
The wildflower’s reward for trusting what it senses but doesn’t yet know is to become what is was born to be – a flower whose inevitable place is realized in a small moment of Oneness, as it joins with elements that were here before it came alive and which will live on once it dies.
It’s such a simple thing, but in a moment of ego we refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door. Time and time again, we are offered the chance to truly learn this: We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.
Since speed and confidence are the traits of success we are taught to strive with, it takes added courage to welcome time and humility into our lives.
In loving ourselves, we love the world.
Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in wind, we find our way by following the spirit’s voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real.
And kindness is enlivened and released through the risk of immediate care. It is the practice of allowing compassion to guide us, the practice of uncovering our intimacy with all things. Together, meaning, truth, and kindness connect everything, forming a lifeline we can hold on to, no matter the storm.
Because we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don’t assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.
So in your days, when feeling narrow and needing to broaden, when feeling less and needing to deepen, put down what seems certain and reach for what seems clear. Know you are a sun rising and falling along a tenuous horizon, like all the suns before you, strung between forces that both enlarge and shrink your sense of life. It is a beautifully difficult set of tensions that only those blessed to be alive can experience. Like hot notes on timeless strings, we are music fingered by the gods.