How much of our time do we spend bracing ourselves against the possibility of someone else’s reactivity?
When we fear to break a rule or make a mistake, how often is that apprehension based on the anticipation of having to deal with someone’s anger, sadness, or disappointment?
Bumping into people’s reactive emotions is unpleasant and depending on how much power they hold, dangerous too.
How do we stay open and vulnerable when we’re always braced for impact? And how, when we’re avoiding the possible wrath of others’ displeasure do we pursue the calling of our intuitive heart?
How do we gird for reaction without tightening, without building defenses, or deposing our integrity?
Perhaps the question is, how do we go the way of the heart and deal best with the inevitable pushback from the fear-based beings that oppose it?
Follow the current of true integrity, come what may.
Bare your open, unguarded heart for all to see. Meet the world with compassion and firm resolve to honour the calling of your soul in each living moment.
It may be that we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. So all things being equal, you might as well sing your soul’s song.
Nietzsche spoke of the ubermensch, the overman, who was beyond good and evil. Rumi wrote that “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field”.
The conditioned, rule-based being derives their moral orientation from outside and cannot imagine or trust the spontaneous, living ethic of the awakened heart.
We meet this challenge as much inside as out. Our turning away from our true, intuitive course in the world is mirrored in our inner struggle. The voices of fear and anger and grief rise to deter us from our path in the forms of people and situations in the world, and also as the formless voices in our inner world.
These voices only have the power that we endow them with. The voices of the tempter and the fearmonger. Living from the heart is a path of courage and compassion. It is not the path of indulgence or suppression, it’s the way of what-is, of Truth. And everyone who walks in the Way is a catalyst for the awakening truth in others.