Dear Spirit to Spirit friend,
This wonderful piece is written by
spiritual teacher Jeff Carreria.
For your contemplation.
A Parable of Fully Living
"The story starts during a very busy afternoon in a big chaotic city. You wake up to find yourself running through the streets. You are busy finding ways to earn money so you can buy things at one of the hundreds of stores all around you. It is very loud. The traffic, the voices, the horns - noise everywhere. You don’t know why you are struggling so hard to buy things you don’t really need, but you feel caught. Trapped in repeating patterns of activity and habitual ways of thinking that keep you working and working and working to be happy.
Then one day you decide to stop. You don’t know what else to do. You just stop. You sit down and you find the courage to stop paying attention to everything around you, and then, through a combination of effort and luck, you manage to let go. It all stops. The noise, the activity, even the inner compulsions that were driving you, stop, or rather they keep going, but you stop listening. For a while you are simply mesmerized by the peace and the quiet. You feel so wonderfully at rest. You’ve never been so free and happy.
After a while you notice something. You hear a sound. A delicate beautiful voice singing. It is so subtle and compelling you can’t help but listen. You realize that this sound was always there, underneath all the noise, but you couldn’t hear it. It was too soft and too precious to be audible among the clamor of the busy street, but now it’s so obvious and so unimaginably glorious. The sound, the lovely, heavenly sound, moves you like you’ve never been moved before. Your heart opens. Tears flow freely, not of sadness, but of relief. You’ve found the voice of the divine, your one true love. You look around and the world is transformed. Yes, all the bustle is still there, but you see the light beneath it all. There is a sublime perfection just a fraction of an inch below the surface. The world and human life are magnificent, wonderful. You see a new possibility.
In the clarity of divine light, you see something special. You see specific potentials and possibilities that you are uniquely and perfectly suited to manifest and bring to life. This
is why you were born, why you came into this life. You came to bring exactly these possibilities to life. Everything is clear and simple. This is your new life.
The mission seems impossible. How can you accomplish such a majestic task? You are not adequate. You’re not smart enough, not brave enough, not beautiful enough, and certainly not enlightened enough. But you don’t care. You will give everything that you are and everything you have to this holy act of creativity. You will be everything you can be. You will face your shortcomings, make mistakes, make amends, fall, get up, find support, learn, grow, keep going. You will live, completely and fully, and one day this life will be over, and you will leave fulfilled. Not because of what you received or even what you accomplished, but because you gave everything you had to give. You lived completely. You will leave behind a full life, and all the love that such a life can be."
In Gratitude & Love, Joanna
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