While
lying in bed late one night this week, talking with my husband about ‘life
events’ that have recently arisen, groping for perspective, feeling inundated
with yet more “events” to deal with, day after day, recognizing how I continue
to live from habituated patterns, *reacting* to life events – usually
resisting them - still identified with the little me always swimming up
stream, trying to keep my head above water, feeling drowned by the stream of
life - he made this statement: “Life is a stream of events. Events will always
happen. Events come and go.” The context of his statement was to say – if
we see that life is always a stream of events, then we won’t feel so
overwhelmed by them, they won’t trip us up as much because we can adapt and
adjust and manage them. Sounds a little
like the Tao to me – to see that no matter what happens Life is a Flow, and we
are in that Flow as well. It was helpful
to begin to see a way to re-orient my way of going down stream…
He also
shared with me this prayer that he says silently to himself every morning as he
faces each day:
“Equip me
to respond to life events as they come today.
Help me to adjust and adapt with Divine Purpose, and discern what is needed.”
I asked
for clarification on his meaning of “with Divine Purpose”:
In
essence, he told me, what this is saying is, meeting life as it comes by
“plugging in to the Divine” (his words) – the Cosmic “Flow of the Universe” –
meeting the “events” of life through seeing the Divine Flow, or Cosmic Flow, of
all things, and through *awareness* of our Inner Divine Beingness – flowing
with life as it happens, not getting *focused* on the obstacles/events, or
seeing the events as obstacles, allowing them to distract – which I tend to
do. He said by seeing that everything *is*
the Divine Flow, we can be assured that it is flowing the way it is supposed to
– no matter what happens… When you don’t
fight it, you can begin to experience the harmony of the Flow.
Wow! B knows nothing about Taoism, but he has
intuitively “tapped in” to “the Tao” ~ ~~~ The Flow… Amazing…
“Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish,
and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature. “
“If you are willing to be lived by it,
you will see [the Tao] everywhere,
even in the most ordinary things."
Lao Tzu
