Often the busyness of our lives can lead us to forget the inner vision or the real reason why we set out on our journey in the first place. We can lose our sense of creativity and joy as we constantly react to the shape which our days impose upon us. Staying open to this space – to our vision for our lives, to a deeper place of meaning, to nourishing the inner places of joy – is a challenge as we face deadlines and the demands for success. How do we keep in touch with our true inheritance today?
In that first hardly noticed
moment to which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light of the morning
window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow and spread
its branches against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?
David Whyte, What to remember when Waking
You can use relaxed attention and softening into awareness of your emotions to gain freedom from suffering. For example, the next time you’re feeling hurt and angry because you think your significant other doesn’t hear or appreciate you, rather than succumbing to these hindrances of mind, stay with them as body experiences. You may sense tightness in the belly and around the eyes from the hurt and some heat from the anger. Meet these body experiences with mindfulness and compassion by saying to yourself, “Hurt and anger feel like this.” This is softening into your emotions. You do not judge your feelings, nor do you try to get rid of the hurt or the anger; you simply stay with the sensations, and they will self-liberate in their own time.
