Connect to Your Spiritual Warrior

I hope you all are doing well. This week as I was preparing for my classes I realized that my message had not come to me. Usually it shows up at some point but this week it hadn’t.

I started thinking about the energy I needed to cultivate in myself and hopefully to put out in the world and so I shared Mark Nepo’s reading on being a spiritual warrior. It offers us a way of thinking about being vulnerable and authentic as the true path towards transformation.

Here is an excerpt:

It is true; there is such sadness in the world. But there is a difference between feeling the pain of things breaking, or drifting apart, and the sharper pain that comes from measuring the inevitable events of life against some ideal of how we imagine things are supposed to be. In receiving hardships this way, life is always a falling off. Life is hard enough without viewing all our pain as evidence of some basic insufficiency we must endure.

There is a beautiful Tibetan myth that helps us to accept our sadness as a threshold to all that is life-changing and lasting. This myth affirms that all spiritual warriors have a broken heart– alas, must have a broken heart– because it is only through the break that the wonder and mysteries of life can enter us.

So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way.

I take comfort from that Tibetan myth; that our hearts breaking is a necessary part of finding joy and when we feel pain and sorrow that we are moving towards transformation. It is powerful to remember that there is always lightness shining through the cracks. I am wishing you a week filled with light shining through.