If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as a feather. Through an illness, accident, loss or fright, one way or another, we are all faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgemental and more compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lessons and manage to become milder, while some others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only way to get closer to the Truth is to expand your heart so that it will encompass all humanity and still have room for more Love.
Having a strong faith means having a deep trust in life. Life offers us a lot of challenges, so things sometimes run smoothly and sometimes roughly. Yet it moves on, steadily, as the flow of our breath. Our breath reflects this life whether it just runs in a quiet and harmonious area or the waters are turbulent and agitated. When we get aware of our breathing, we can feel that it flows and flows even if this flow is sometimes excited or hectic. To trust our breath means to trust our lives, this is the foundation of faith.
Via breathing we can learn to make this flow not only quieter but also softer. By doing so, we imagine that the breath flows around our heart very gently, enfolding it softly. Then we enlarge the space which the heart fills and expand it beyond our personality, mainly towards people, who are in special need of softness. They are not like that because of bad intention, silliness or laziness but because life has formed them to be like that, like a stone on the riverbed gets its form by the power of the water and has never been asked whether he would like to be formed this way or another.
By expanding our hearts, we feel that there is no boundary but that our heart wants to reach all the other hearts and wants to connect to them. It is as if the whole creation would wait for this moment in which all hearts connect and find a common rhythm.
What hardens us is especially our tendency to exercise power, to be righteous and to follow only our own interests. There is always fear behind these motivations. We assume that we have to fight for our survival, up to the smallest conflict like how the cleaning the soup dish should be done or where the soap should be placed.
Anxiety makes us tense because we think that we can protect ourselves by hardness. Yet there is almost never a real threat which we should be aware of. We are in the movies all the time with a horror film on the screen, and we take the events on the screen for reality as if King Kong would come down to the audience any moment and get us at the throat. By doing so, we tense up without necessity – we go to the real cinema to get excited - , and this is not good for our well-being and health. When we do not conquer our hardness, we damage ourselves on the long run.
The Tao Te King says:
The living person is soft and pliant, and is hard and rigid in death.
All creatures and plants,
Are soft and vulnerable in life,
And dry and brittle in death.
Therefore it is said:
The hard and the rigid are part of death,
The soft and gentle are part of life.
This is the reason why soldiers who are too rigid
Do not triumph.
When the tree is too rigid, it will break.
The stance of the strong and the great is stooped,
The stance of the weak and the small is erect.
(Lao Tse: Tao Te King, 76)
We commit to life when we work on becoming soft. The Tao Te King reminds us that we should not mix up softness and weakness. Rigidity controlled by fear does not represent real power but is a cover of weakness. In this position we cannot recognize clear goals and meet sounding decisions. We get fixed to narrowed views and wrong interpretations.
The position of softness is the position of equanimity, of freedom of pressure and the need to fight. In the Eastern martial arts, the teaching is to gain maximum success by coming from placidity, which allows precise perception and fast reaction. When transferred to other areas of life, it means that the clearest power arises from relaxation, which connects us to reality in a way that we can choose the right thing in the right moment without effort.
But these are only skills for mastering our lives. The way to truth does not stop there, and even someone who is gifted with splendid success in life does not necessarily come closer to truth by this. Especially being fixated to success and becoming dependent on it, often goes with avoiding the look into the depths of one’s heart. People who are in love with their successes often tend to close their hearts instead of being grateful for the gifts they get, as they fear to diminish their accomplishments by softness and compassion, which would arise from gratitude.
So it is meaningless for the way to truth whether a life is successful or full of failure. For the wise person, gain means the same as loss. When he or she is able to open the heart so wide that it can include everything in this world, it contains everything without difference: the billionaire and the beggar, the film diva and the taxi driver.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
Having a strong faith means having a deep trust in life. Life offers us a lot of challenges, so things sometimes run smoothly and sometimes roughly. Yet it moves on, steadily, as the flow of our breath. Our breath reflects this life whether it just runs in a quiet and harmonious area or the waters are turbulent and agitated. When we get aware of our breathing, we can feel that it flows and flows even if this flow is sometimes excited or hectic. To trust our breath means to trust our lives, this is the foundation of faith.
Via breathing we can learn to make this flow not only quieter but also softer. By doing so, we imagine that the breath flows around our heart very gently, enfolding it softly. Then we enlarge the space which the heart fills and expand it beyond our personality, mainly towards people, who are in special need of softness. They are not like that because of bad intention, silliness or laziness but because life has formed them to be like that, like a stone on the riverbed gets its form by the power of the water and has never been asked whether he would like to be formed this way or another.
By expanding our hearts, we feel that there is no boundary but that our heart wants to reach all the other hearts and wants to connect to them. It is as if the whole creation would wait for this moment in which all hearts connect and find a common rhythm.
What hardens us is especially our tendency to exercise power, to be righteous and to follow only our own interests. There is always fear behind these motivations. We assume that we have to fight for our survival, up to the smallest conflict like how the cleaning the soup dish should be done or where the soap should be placed.
Anxiety makes us tense because we think that we can protect ourselves by hardness. Yet there is almost never a real threat which we should be aware of. We are in the movies all the time with a horror film on the screen, and we take the events on the screen for reality as if King Kong would come down to the audience any moment and get us at the throat. By doing so, we tense up without necessity – we go to the real cinema to get excited - , and this is not good for our well-being and health. When we do not conquer our hardness, we damage ourselves on the long run.
The Tao Te King says:
The living person is soft and pliant, and is hard and rigid in death.
All creatures and plants,
Are soft and vulnerable in life,
And dry and brittle in death.
Therefore it is said:
The hard and the rigid are part of death,
The soft and gentle are part of life.
This is the reason why soldiers who are too rigid
Do not triumph.
When the tree is too rigid, it will break.
The stance of the strong and the great is stooped,
The stance of the weak and the small is erect.
(Lao Tse: Tao Te King, 76)
We commit to life when we work on becoming soft. The Tao Te King reminds us that we should not mix up softness and weakness. Rigidity controlled by fear does not represent real power but is a cover of weakness. In this position we cannot recognize clear goals and meet sounding decisions. We get fixed to narrowed views and wrong interpretations.
The position of softness is the position of equanimity, of freedom of pressure and the need to fight. In the Eastern martial arts, the teaching is to gain maximum success by coming from placidity, which allows precise perception and fast reaction. When transferred to other areas of life, it means that the clearest power arises from relaxation, which connects us to reality in a way that we can choose the right thing in the right moment without effort.
But these are only skills for mastering our lives. The way to truth does not stop there, and even someone who is gifted with splendid success in life does not necessarily come closer to truth by this. Especially being fixated to success and becoming dependent on it, often goes with avoiding the look into the depths of one’s heart. People who are in love with their successes often tend to close their hearts instead of being grateful for the gifts they get, as they fear to diminish their accomplishments by softness and compassion, which would arise from gratitude.
So it is meaningless for the way to truth whether a life is successful or full of failure. For the wise person, gain means the same as loss. When he or she is able to open the heart so wide that it can include everything in this world, it contains everything without difference: the billionaire and the beggar, the film diva and the taxi driver.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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