Bringing Heart to Life....

I completed my oneness course today and the instructor asked us to share what we learnt with people in our sphere of influence. She said that if we as individuals were happy , then we make others happy around us and that makes a happier world.

Whilst that sounds like "hippy shit" it does make sense at another level because we cant really make anyone happy unless we are happy within ourselves. Our inner state dictates what see or draw our attention to in the outer world.

Whilst we all know that we have to think positive , one of the things that struck me in this course was their focus on intention and how we fuel it with passion. And the instructor drew our attention to how passionate we are about the things we don't want in our lives. This is true, at different points in my life, I have noticed how I have spent alot of my energy on things I am fighting against instead of things I want to attract into my life. This is true of others around me too. Spending time talking about people you don't like or behaviours you don't like about someone else makes you the same as them. It creates a separation - "us and them" and it creates divisiveness or conflict. I try not to get sucked in but at times I do and its really hard work... just monitoring my thoughts. In the last day or two, I have been working on not fueling negative thoughts about others and instead I look within to listen to what the real issue is. What is it about this person that creates that reaction in me and i acknowledge the emotion, then it goes away. What it tells me is that I can struggle with the outer world and "fight" my battles but it keeps coming back with a vengeance unless i address the source of the issue. Its like having a rash due to an allergy, I can take medication to stop the reaction but I havent solved the problem ...i can only solve the problem when I know what I am allergic to. Masking it or suppressing the symptom will only provide temporary relief.
I am not proud of myself when i think of the times that i can been critical of others around me... because i should have known better but then again this is another thing we do...we beat ourselves up when we realise we have made a mistake. I have spent the last year and half being angry about behaviors of people around me. Disappointed in the way things evolved, and the games people played ... wondering why someone would choose to talk to others behind my back but not directly to me ...why winning at any price seems more important than honest communication and friendship.When trust in a relationship is lost and when doubt creeps in, its hard to repair the friendship. But if i hold on to resentment, it only hurts me and I contaminate the world with my anger. So I chose to forgive and let go, I sent all those who hurt me, love and forgiveness and I also asked them to forgive me. By doing this, I acknowledged the pain and I let it go. I freed myself and I freed anyone I was in a deadlock with.

I work with someone who is very sensitive and tends to take offence easily and she is passionate and she tends to talk to others about people she does not like. There is always a campaign against someone, some drama going on. I hope she too realises that the drama comes from inside her and not outside, that its too easy to blame someone else for our unhappiness but ultimately , we are all responsible for our own happiness...no one else. We may not agree with everything someone else does but its important to allow others around us to have their own learning. Empathy is a great teacher, if only we walked a mile in someone else's shoes , we can feel their pain. Generosity of spirit is a great virtue and its an essential quality if we want to heal ourselves and our world. Its easy to say that its someone's else fault and if we do that we deprive ourselves of a growth opportunity and the opportunity to shine our greatness into the world. And when we deal with our own hurt or pain, we heal at many levels, ourselves, our friends and our world. This will be my focus from this point onwards, just working on me and listening to what i am feeling. Another key distinction at this course had to do with relationships, my instructor highlighted that we often say to our partners " I don't understand you " and she said that we cannot solve a relationship issue with the mind. Understanding something comes from the mind, not the heart, relationships cannot be understood, they have to be felt. We have to feel what the other person is feeling in order to relate to them. Reminds me of a something I read in school, " it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye by Antoine De Saint-Exupery.