Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The art of Seeing


I once heard an ancient Sufi story about a man who was out in his yard looking for his house keys. His neighbor saw him and asked him what he was doing. He told the neighbor he was looking for keys he had lost. His neighbor offered to help him look. After a long while of looking to no avail, the neighbor asked the man  “where exactly did you loose the keys?”  The man said “in the house” the neighbor replied “why then are we looking out in the yard for them if you lost them in the house?” The man said “because the light is better out here”.

I love this story. I feel it illustrates how many of us approach our emotional/spiritual healing process. We often look outside ourselves for the answers to heal our pain or discomfort. We seek parental figures, teachers, gurus therapists, doctors and advisors to tell us what to do. If we are lucky, someone will guide us and ask questions that lead us more inward. But more often then not, most will give us answers….tell us what to do. They will give us how to’s and tasks to help fill our time “looking for the keys in our yard” so we trick ourselves in believing we are doing the work but in reality nothing is changing. The reason we have painful patterns that we cant seem to change is because we never really identify the core issue and all the beliefs we attach to it along the way.

We would have to go inward to identify the causes and the unresolved issues tied to them. We cannot do what some one else tells us to do because they are not us. We cannot live another’s vision of us. We cannot manifest some one else’s expectations of us or our lives.

I had the kind of teachers that told me what to do “for my own good” and sometimes it was for my own good, especially when I was a small child I needed external direction. Many people tried to tell me how to fix my problems based on their life experiences. But that never really solved anything.  The teachers that stand out as the most impactful, who helped me go to new levels in my development, were the ones who witnessed my challenges and helped me navigate thru my journey within to identify my hopes and fears and more importantly my true strengths and purpose. They did not weaken me by giving me the answers or telling me what to do, they challenged me to figure things out thru my experience and emotional honesty. They offered me clues and tools but with the understanding that the experience was mine and that every decision was my responsibility. Therefore every success was mine but so was every failure. They loved me and encouraged me along the way even if I failed. Sometimes I was even celebrated for my failures because the real success was just in trying regardless of the outcome. By doing this, with out saying the words, they told me that they believed in me.
I realized that I wasn’t stupid or weak and I could go on this exploration even though I was scared. Here is where I learned that there is no courage if there is no fear present so fear in itself did not mean weakness. Not moving forward despite the fear was the weakness.
This was how I began to know who I was. Not by some one telling me who I was and what to do, but, by my experiencing myself, my internal world, the good the bad the ugly and the beautiful…. where the truth waited for me.
We do not require the light to see. We do require courage, patience and compassion. 
And there’s moreJ