Strength and courage

If you do not feel strong and courageous on your path, look within and around. Are you treating yourself and those around you with care and compassion? Are you being treated by those around you with care and compassion? Are people shouting? Are you succumbing to fears and doubts? Love has been marketed and mythologized as an elusive ghost that has to grace one’s life. Yet other cultural perspectives would see any aspect of reality within the realm of choice. The choice to love may not appear or seem easy, and so the option is entirely written off as a nifty feature of cognitive bias. That CUT! sure can spell drama. Is the film rolling yet? At the beginning of anything new there are often a great area of unknowns that can cause falls. If one is lucky to simply stumble, practising to choose love grows stronger and easier. However, if you go in real deep and find yourself in the abyss without any rope, practice the rip tide technique. Let yourself float out and eventually you’ll come back up before you sink completely. Sound bleak? The abyss is funny because it’s inside out and outside in. Before this Cookie gets too spunky in abyss seasoning let’s get back to sipping the tea of courage and strength. Over time, following the choice of the heart feels more and more what we humans like to call natural. This word usage tends to point the meaning of natural toward the word habit. And this is not to mar the use of the word habit, not a bit. Your heart has this habit of beating for you, circulating an energy current. The size of that current, while a habit, still has a lot of bandwidth for you to play around with. You can grow that current of energy, the subject many schools of theology attempted to teach. The nature, or habit of following the heart, is a way of being guided from within. Not from external voices of approval or often voices that aim to shape you into what they think you ought to be. External landscapes have a tendency to shift and change. So often those landscapes shift and change, people tend to proclaim decade after decade the world is ending! Attachment to attachment can circumvent the focus on building from the heart. Alas, presuming we are still right here, your heart is beating and always with whatever “you” are, regardless of what you think you might be. For all that transcends generations and withstands time, works in tune with Mother Nature. This nature or habit of generating life has its connection with the human body through the heart. Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. – Lao Tzu This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe