Today is 11/11. May we all be blessed with peace, unity, love and light, across this whole planet. May the angels of healing surround each and every one of us and allow us to release our trauma, our sadness, our rage, our ego, our fear. May the holy Spirit of light illumine each one of us, that forgiveness, release, acceptance and peace may wash through us and transform our minds and hearts, in accordance with the plan of all ages. Unite this planet in love, in generosity, in abundance and in co-operation. May the force for good permeate all things, all thoughts, all words, all deeds.
-63- Act without striving. Work without interfering. Find the flavour in what is flavourless. Enlarge the small, increase the few. Heal injury with goodness. Handle the difficult while it is still easy. Cultivate the great while it is still small. All difficult things begin as easy things. All great things begin as small things. Therefore, the True Person never attempts anything great, and accomplishes great things. Lightly made promises inspire little faith. Trying to make things easy results in great difficulties. Therefore, the True Person regards everything as difficult, and is never overcome by difficulties. (The Tao Te Ching 63)
I’m going to take away ‘Act without striving’. My Excitability/Stuckness zig zag, aka my Hard Start/Hard Stop protocol, are linked to striving – that turbo charge aspect. My poor Aspie brain. It works SO hard, just to keep life moving along. And in fact, when life isn’t Hard Start/Hard Stop, it almost doesn’t know what to do with itself. It needs either hard stim, or silence… I don’t know. How shall I approach my day today? I was woken at 4.30am and I’m frazzled… :/
I worry that without striving, I come to a halt…
And this is where your qi-flow keeps you gentle in motion. You are always in motion anyway – breathing as you do, pulsating as you are, through space and time.
Grant me the liberating insight.
STO [service to others, vs STS service to self] is the great liberator.
I see. Ok. Tell me more.
You often think your work is all about you. This is an act of both ‘striving’ and ‘interfering’.
Yikes…
First assess the field, and then see how you can contribute. The angel stepping in from heaven (in that film, WoD) doesn’t come along with a ‘profession’ or a service offering! He accompanies, assists, tweaks the circumstances, bears witness… The people that have really assisted you have got to know you first. Remember how jarring it was when they thought they knew all about you?! Projection.
What’s actually out there?
Madness. Humans are insane. We are ego-driven decimators. I grieve at what I see going on in the world. I lament in my heart. And then, could it be that I hide from it? Do I need to get on my feet. And be the antidote I wish to see? But this activism stuff. What does it do in the end? I have come to feel our work is about inner alignment. It’s no longer about impacting UPON the world (for good or ill) but rather it’s about holding that frequency of peace in a chaotic world… It’s about inner sovereignty in all circumstances.
Yet it’s no fun……! At least in marching for change, or lobbying govt, or even moaning about ‘the world’ you get to…
…feed the hungry ego. It’s not a nourishing meal, is it?
Have you considered the degree to which you personally hold the very frequency of peace which you long to see in the world?
Oh man…. Alrightalready… I know. I’ve bumped up against a layer of unhealed stuff in recent weeks. I really need to do some good TRE. And swimming probably. And another course of MBCT. And daily qigong. It’s so endless, and boring, this healing business…
*tumbleweed*
Ehem. And yet I seem to want ‘everyone else’ to heal…. Ok. I hear the problem here. The little bit of shadow work to be done.
Maybe I need to decide what it is I want to dedicate myself to and get busy with that, starting small but consistently. Tracking my progress daily against my own ideals. ‘Cultivate the great while it is still small.’ says Lao Tzu. Stop trying to do ‘great things’ via ‘making things easy’ via ‘lightly made promises’. But actually recognise ‘everything as difficult’ and decide to be selective in what I seek to achieve with each day. Example:
Today is my goal:
- to ‘do my emails and do the train journey’ OR is it…
- to foster peace, unity, love and light in this world? Hm?
Could I hold myself to account on aims such as these? And if I did, day after day, tiny bit by tiny bit, would I find peace in myself; would I find that my habits shifted; would I become less critical of others and less ‘afraid’ for myself; would I become humbler and also more effective in the world?
So, at the end of each day, if I humbly and honestly asked myself, ‘What did I do today to foster/realise PULL in the world?’ would I learn new things? Would I develop new courage?
I’ve been thinking about the problems with my gut. What’s the association? Possibly: a gutsy person who trusts her gut = a person bravely follows her intuition. It’s about courage and about determination and it’s about following instinct.
Filling the lower dantian is about gathering qi… for good purposes. This blog post talks about the lower dantian representing:
- rootedness
- purpose
- action
Yes, if I can get ever more grounded, then I will be of greater use…
The grounding begets the usefulness; the usefulness begets the grounding.
And then we can get comfortable with spending time on this planet, right? Feeling that we are living in purpose?
The heart wishes for no more than to act as a channel between this world and the unseen.
Yes. I think it would be good to hold myself to account at the end of each day. I’m getting a bit ‘saggy’ with my sense of mission. I zone out on Twitter at the end of the day, goggling at the ‘state of things’, without either appreciating what I’ve been granted during the day, or noting what I have offered up to the world in terms of my commitment to a personal dedication or Aim. Tracking my small inputs to fostering PULL, like I track my FitBit, might be focussing, relieving and humbling in a helpful way.
I need to hold myself to account, to get out of the awful habit of criticising others, or waiting for others to shift… I also need to liberate myself from the vaunting and self-aggrandising I’ve counted on to secure my economic advancement. I sense there is another way. From STS to STO.
I’ve got a good deal of work to do, in dedication, in action, in mission, in purpose.
I am defining my dedication
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dedicate
I am dedicating myself…