Softening

Something has softened over the last few days. I don't know if it was caused by some wonderful conversations I had with my co workers, my own reflections, a few moments of being real with my students, a couple focused sits, a conversation with an old friend, or the stress of my students lessening a bit. My guess is that it was a combination of all of those things. Regardless, I feel more at peace with the current state of my job and life.

I had really gotten into a negative spiral of emotions that was holding me down. The power our emotions can have over us, and how they can affect is quite amazing. Once once negative seed is watered and manifests into our mind consciousness it becomes so much easier for other negative seeds to be watered and manifested. In fact, they are probably watered at the same time as the initial seed was and just took longer to manifest.

I have been reading little bits of Thay's book, Understanding Our Mind over the last couple of months. I finished the first section on Store Consciousness a few nights ago. I was struck by the last verse in that section which focuses on Great Mirror Wisdom, when our store consciousness reflects reality as it really is. That part caught my attention because a large part of my job is to be a mirror for my students. I am supposed to be able to help them reflect on their experiences by showing them what they did and by making their own thoughts and emotions more visible to them. That is a very difficult thing to do because all to often my students are caught in their emotions, as I am at times, and cannot see what actually happened. They sometimes think they did a perfect job and cannot accept hearing things that suggest otherwise. Other times they believe they did a bad job and cannot accept hearing that they did a good job.

So being a mirror of reality for my students is more than just reflecting what is. It requires knowing them at some deep level so I figure out how they need to hear things so that those observations are beneficial for them. I guess this doesn't differ all that much from the practice of Shinning Light. Sharing truth is of no use unless there is a situation and relationship already in place to facilitates truth being heard and accepted.

As the Rain Falls,

Sam