Sacred Self Healing Arts

“It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link…He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.”
― Paul Tournier

The famous Rumi quote reads, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a garden. I will meet you there.” The desire to be validated as right, or prove someone else to be wrong, robs us of this peaceful place of understanding. Perhaps being right or wrong is missing the point completely. I have to admit, this has been a long time struggle for me. I’ve had plenty of moments of stomping my feet and yelling from my platform, demanding that everyone see it my way. The right way! 😉 But time, life, and a little wisdom is teaching me that everyone has a perspective of their own, and it’s developed through their own experience. A garden grows crops and produces fruit by giving it nutrients and life. When we let go of “rights and wrongs”, we enter into that garden of growth with others, and love is inevitably the outcome. Perhaps understanding is the bridge between letting go of right and wrong.

Have you ever really broken down the word, understand? It’s two words put together. Let’s switch up the order for a moment and experience the word from a slightly different perspective, stand under. This simple change in order of these two words gives it a whole different meaning for me. The first visual that comes into my mind is a bridge. I imagine standing on a bridge and looking down at rough waters. The thought of going under the bridge to get into the rough waters is not all that appealing. Yet, to just look at the challenge from above does not give a person the full range of experience to truly know what it is like to actually go down and get into the storm. We can only guess, or assume what that experience is like. So perhaps to truly understand, we have to climb down under the safe bridge we are standing on and dive into another person’s experience. Not that we have to take on their troubles or stay under the bridge. But to crawl down into their view and try to see it from a new perspective will surely change the perceived experience.

My waters have been quite troubled this past year. I hired a life coach who came highly recommended! My first session with her was two hours long. She held space for me to empty out my troubles. She reflected back my experience so eloquently and extended her heart of compassion with no judgment. My time with her has been so impactful and I’ve been able to move through my process of grief and sadness with her guidance. This is the experience that brought me to life coaching. So many of us crave someone to “stand under” the bridge with us. We crave to be heard. By being heard we feel seen. When we feel seen we feel loved. Do you have some challenging relationships in your life? I think we all do. Often times they are the ones closest to us. Perhaps you could try out active listening today. To hear your loved ones with no agenda. We do the practice of active listening in our house. When we are all talking over each other trying to prove our point, this is my cue to bring out the talking stick. Whoever is holding the stick gets the platform. The others need to listen with the intention of truly hearing. We follow up what they said with reflecting back what we heard with no opinions, just a reflection. Through this process, we feel heard but we also hear ourselves. To have the space to hear ourselves is both liberating and eye opening. When we have the freedom to express and to trust that we will be heard, our nervous system can relax enough to diffuse the chaos that comes from fighting for the platform. To “stand under” is a beautiful act of love and I believe that with patience and careful cultivation, troubled waters can eventually transform into a garden of growth and peace.