Once there was a samurai who approached a monk and caught him off guard. He went up to the monk and he said, “I want you to tell me about heaven and hell.” And the monk, startled, said, “Oh you mean-tempered man. I don’t have time to bother with you.” And the samurai got so angry he pulled out his sword, and he went back toward the monk, and the monk said, “That is hell.” The samurai caught himself, and he stepped back. And the monk said, “Now that is heaven.”
There’s that aspect of ourselves that the samurai proved to us – the crucial difference between being aware of an emotion, and being caught up in it; being aware of an energy and letting it take over. When you lose yourself, you lose the essence of what you believe. For example, when you get into groups of collective consciousness, or family systems, or things like that, you may have the best of intentions, yet you start blending in. You lose your essence.
It is important to hold that sacred place and that sacred ground. In the book Little Prince it says “It is the heart that sees what is right. To the eye truth is invisible, but to the heart we know what truth is.” We know what it’s like to show up and be who we are and speak our truth from every aspect of our being. It’s truly profound to be in that space.
For more inspiration and information: http://templehayes.org/