Keeping a flexible mind asks for acceptance of both the gift and the responsibility thereof. Our senses move emotions, just take your favourite song for example. The sweet beat can stir feelings of fearlessness, awaken lust or make you want to jump to your feet and shuffle a beat.
Senses may be the ego’s unwilling servants. In many ways, the ego does steer us through everyday life as having a career, creating income, and loving a family requires us to be intellectually present. Even buying groceries in a crowded end-of-month store needs a determined self-centered ego as much as it needs calmness.
Honestly, contemplating too long on this, tires us (dare we say – even bores us.) There’s a mental tug-of-war between being an active part of a loving family and longing for distance and solitude. We want to grow in a meaningful career, yet we also want to sit on a rock in the veld and watch the wind play with the birds in the sky. But where these two theories meet, births the closest thing to reality, that we as creatures will ever experience. No need not seek “arrival”, nor perfection. What ego seeks is merely balance. Maybe we long for the mystery of darkness as much as we love the ease of light.
Sit for a while and listen to the ego speak. All it ever is, is perception. Shaped by the rational mind, the ego is convincing. It speaks with confidence, cluttering the channel to one’s higher self with nothing more than murky nonsense. But for alignment, a clear channel between the vessel and soul requires us to clear that channel with an honest presence, an acceptance or rather surrender to all that is. A loving kindness towards this very vessel we carry each day.
The ego offers the experience; the self extracts the lesson. Have we ever truly controlled either? Perhaps only our response. So how about stepping up to dance with the shadow? Sit down with what we try to hide.
You can’t enjoy a bath if you only open the hot tap. Balance needs hot and cold. Fire and ice can coexist. When you finally lean back, arms open, and let the current guide you downstream, you arrive where you need to be. How wonderfully these words hit the page, yet, how impossible we find to make peace with the fact that we are both the jester and the king. We breath with both inhale and exhale. Guess the invitation we wish to extend today is for each to release the unspoken, embrace the perceptual embarrassment, and join us in facing the unknown, with respect. To Take the sweet with the sour because life requires both. And given that there is no finish line, give a glass of water to those difficult friends of the mind. They listen to the things you feel you cannot tell anyone else….