21 July 2006

Giving softly

The difficulty with giving is that what's given must be given softly – appropriate not just to the energy of the circumstance but to the energy of us bound up in the circumstance. Effective giving requires you not just to be generous but to have the confidence and ease to feel and know (your place in) the world your giving creates before it is created, and to have the sensitivity to allow your giving to bring that world into a more natural state – one of less torture and greater connectedness. This is where yielding comes in – tuning (turning) into the situation to such a degree that a subtle mutual transformation takes place – our listening changes us but similarly our opening and entering and joining changes the situation.

The weekend passed was a remarkable experience. There was such a mist of connectedness in the room that techniques of yielding were not required to interact successfully – it all seemed to happen naturally. The togetherness combined with the willingness and good nature of the participants and the energy and experience of the Master were sufficient to create an environment that drew people out of themselves and into that mist – a natural place of power and rejuvenation that all beings yearn for on some level. This is precisely the mist the Master dips into to uncover the secrets of energy he shared with us at the weekend – the Guardian, the Tree, the Dragon, etc. In a way that mist is softness which I think is why it is so rare. Softness requires you to give but not from your self-confidence – your feeling of self – but from your tender and open vulnerability. The giving of softness is almost like a leakage – a fluid seepage from raw grazed skin, but all over and on an expansive scale. Perhaps the abiding memory of the weekend for me was seeing and feeling Jane Colling descending the stairs as she arrived on the Sunday, energy and spirit first, softly seeping into the space to its furthest corners, feeling everything and affecting everything. Truly soft people don't know how to keep their energy in. They may be (and often are) shy and sensitive so thankfully aren't into spreading their coarseness over everything they encounter, instead they bestow a fineness which helps bring others out of themselves and into the mist their presence evokes. People are naturally drawn to softness because it is so attractive and nourishing, but unless they are soft themselves, or deeply respectful, they will generally take advantage of it – they know no better – for the average person the world exists for them. So soft people need to find strategies for living different from the usual, strategies that will not only help them survive but will help them fulfill their destiny which is always a matter of energy rather than fate or design. The biggest foolishness is for soft people to think that they can afford to live the average dissipative life. They can't, not without really hurting themselves and reducing their power. For them a completely different set of rules – moral, ethical and spiritual – apply. The work is to find them and then to live them.

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