Be Soft in Your Practice

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“Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silver stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course, it will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves and cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight, it will take you.” ~Sheng-Yun

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the value of heroics.

I am thinking particularly of the heroics that get mixed up with the cliche’ of “making a difference”.

Many of us long to make a difference. The sad part about it is, how little credit we give ourselves for the difference we already make. Yes, we are meaning making creatures who want to know we are contributing, this is part of what it is to be human. What is also human is to allow comparison to enter into our mind that undermines our contributions.

I hear this often with clients: a doubt that undermines a trust in the mundane. These days we think we have to jump higher, shout louder, run faster in order to be effective. And yet we also know, it’s the tortoise that wins the race.

Yes, I am saying all this against a back drop of many challenges on the planet right now!

There is a part of us that hungers to trust the deeper processes of life; a part of us that knows to cover more ground we have to move slowly. I’d suggest that we re-enchant the mundane. It is after all the little moments that make up a day and all those days we live that make up a life. It’s also the little actions that make up our response on both a personal and collective level.

Heroics are sometimes necessary. Yet, something niggles at me when I hear people suffer over their beliefs that they don’t feel they are making a difference. That’s a tender place and often it’s from people who ascribe to a view of interconnectedness with all life. How can we on the one hand believe we are interconnected and at the same time think that our smallest efforts or our quiet presence cannot make a difference?

Perhaps the heroic view of what making a difference means gets in our way of the satisfaction of doing what is within our means to do. We all have limits: on our time, our attention, our financial means, etc. Yet, I know it is possible to respect those limits and allow them to illuminate the generosity intended in the gestures of how we make a difference.

We can follow the stream and have faith in its course. No heroics needed.