Living from the Heart

Author
Rick Jarow
545 words, 198K views, 13 comments

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When we are envious of somebody, it is because they are mirroring a place in us that does not feel abundant. After all, if you feel abundant, if you are overflowing, the symptom of abundance is that anybody's success makes you joyous. If anybody's success makes you feel anything less than joyous, that is a symptom of scarcity. So if we can resist being angry and focusing on the external and really look within ourselves, we may get very valuable information about what we need to be doing to make us feel better about ourselves.
 
Now, I want to be very clear here. The energy of the heart center has to do with giving and receiving. That means, it has to do with supporting others and receiving support from others. Supporting another person does not mean that you support their stupidity. It does not even mean that you support their behavior. If your kid comes to you and asks you for money to buy drugs, you do not support that behavior. But you can challenge that behavior without withdrawing your love and this is absolutely crucial. The heart center unites, the mind divides.You may not like what someone is doing. You may even be in a position where you have to reprimand, punish or condemn someone for what they are doing. But that is very different from withdrawing your love energy from them, withdrawing your compassion from them.
 
I heard a story that really touched me a while back. The Dalai Lama was performing the Kalachakra initiation, a great Tibetan Buddhist ceremony of empowerment in Dharamsala in India. In the middle of this very formal ritual, some Tibetan monks came running into the room, screaming, crying that the Chinese had just murdered hundreds of Tibetan monks. The whole ceremony was disrupted. Everybody looked at the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama stopped the ceremony and said to the people, "Now, we are all going to pray for the Chinese."
 
This may sound idealistic to you, this may sound impossible to do to you, but I invite you to think about it from the philosophical perspective of interdependency. From the philosophical perspective of karma that if you hurt somebody, you will be hurt. You need to be prayed for. 
 
If a 4-year old or a 3-year old comes up to you and hits you, you don't get angry. Because you have expanded beyond that level of consciousness. This is what we are trying to achieve in the heart center. To have the compassion, to have the breadth, not to react, but to respond from a different level.  And this will have everything to do with your prosperity in the world. 

-- by Rick Jarow, in "The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide"


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