On Listening

 When you are listening, in that moment of focus and attention, your anger and your sadness disappears, and your worries and suffering are gone. All of these temporarily stop—they do not arise, and they are not present.

 

At the moment when you are listening to the other person’s voice, you are not listening with your anger or sadness. You are not listening with your mind. At this time, your deeper obstacles will naturally begin to clear themselves.

 

When you are listening without being in a mental or analytical state, the energy that you have always possessed can naturally expand. Your heart becomes extremely stable, and your perception becomes sharper and clearer.

 

Because there is no interference—because you are directly receiving and listening to this energy—it becomes very pure. And this purity brings forth the inner “stability” within you.

 

At this point, when you begin to practice the Letting Go Method, the power becomes much stronger. The deeper your inner stability is, the stronger the force of your letting go becomes.

 

By Suzhen Liu

 

If you enjoy Suzhen Liu’s writings please check out her latest book, “Discover Love Within—Release Your Suffering” available on Amazon. 

https://www.amazon.com/Discover-Love-Within-Release-Suffering-ebook/dp/B0G4L29MVN

Heart-centered living (video)

 A friend needed to get a job done but his daughter invited him to draw with him. He resisted but when she insisted they drew and sang together. He felt the moment had completely transformed. This is heart-centered living, away from the mind to the heart. We can consciously make this shift.

5 minute YouTube video attached below:

https://youtu.be/Wou8fmHyCSk?si=Ox6OIdi21r5xyFwQ

Timeless energy

 Thoughts and emotions are portals to what lies beyond conditioned mind, but first we have to face the memories, belief sets and human energies that they represent. The here and now is always an opportunity to break through a deeper level of consciousness and connect with a timeless energy that is always at our disposal. 

Viktor Frankl described this portal and the opportunity to open ourselves to a higher frequency of being when he observed: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We don’t choose. We connect with timeless energy!

How Thoughts Influence the Movement of Energy

 It is essential for the mind to remain calm. The power of the mind should never be underestimated. When I was still a beginner in Qigong, I often tested how our thoughts influence Qi. For example, when I thought of someone I disliked and allowed that feeling of aversion to arise, I could immediately feel my Qi becoming tense. But the moment I thought of someone I truly loved, as soon as the feeling of love surfaced, my Qi relaxed instantly.

 

From these simple observations, we can see how powerful our thoughts are. When we have many inner obstacles we cannot transcend, our Qi becomes tight and unable to relax. As a result, we cannot resolve our issues or relieve our physical discomfort. Our physical discomfort or illness is always connected to our mindset. If we cannot transcend these mindsets, the illness cannot be eradicated.

 

Qi is intimately related to our thoughts. Even if you are an advanced Qigong practitioner, if you cannot go deep into the mind and the soul, you cannot bring true comfort to the body through Qi alone. We need not only to cleanse the physical body, but also the subtle body. If we cannot reach the deeper layers of the mind and soul, the physical body will inevitably be affected. When we cannot touch the energy beneath the level of consciousness, we remain only at the surface level of awareness.

 

The discomfort in our body is the accumulation of decades of thoughts. When we lack awareness, a single negative thought can tighten the entire body—not just one area—and this tension manifests especially in the weak or vulnerable places, eventually becoming illness. Therefore, major physical issues cannot be resolved without awareness of our mindset.

By Suzhen Liu

If you enjoy Suzhen Liu’s writings, please check out her new book, “Discover Love Within—Release Your Suffering, available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Discover-Love-Within-Release-Suffering-ebook/dp/B0G4L29MVN

 

The Fire of Love

 At Satsang a friend shared this memory. He was under a lot of stress and was focusing on something that was really important to him at that time. His 8-year daughter must have felt his fragile mental state so she walked up to him and said, “draw with me!” He said every fiber in his body told him to keep working at that moment but there was a voice telling him to draw a picture with his daughter instead so he did. As they were drawing he suddenly felt like singing and so did his daughter. As they were sitting there together there was so much love suddenly that he felt the significance of whatever occupied his mind before burning in his loving heart energy.

I had this experience this year as well, the heart as an incinerator burning the impurities of life away.

All that is at our disposal!

 I remember a painting at work which spoke to me. As the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words. It depicted a man getting out of his pickup truck carrying four gallons of water. He was walking towards his house by the water and as he turned around he saw the magnificence of the ocean. His facial expression was hard to describe but to me it told the story, “why am I carrying four gallons of water if all that  is at my disposal!”

We cannot just say, “stop identifying with thinking and emotion.” If they show up there must be something inside us that made them meaningful to us, incredible as they might appear at that time. Yet, we can have that pivot to the grander energy realizing the insignificance of the personal. This pivot is the disidentification with the “body, mind, world matrix.” S (ilence) is the spiritual yardstick, as is E (nergy) surging within and the L (ove) for the F (low) of life.

Our self is minuscule in the presence of S-E-L-F. See it moment by moment and there is nothing personal remaining to identify with.

We are from the Source of Infinite Possibilities and shall return

 Our son recommended watching the movie Whiplash, a story about—in his words— the Rocky Balboa of drumming. I felt sad to see so much pain for what I felt was a misguided obsession, but who am I to judge. We are all manifestors of this “body, mind, world matrix” of infinite possibilities. Each to their own!

Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson strove to be the best at their games. We can only stare in amazement at their will-power to bend the limits of the possible and their willingness to incur the pain to accomplish these feats. Can—or should—we spiritual folks likewise hunger for God? 

Each to their own! One option we always have is to remind ourselves that we are of this Source of Infinite Possibilities. We can fall back to It while striving just as we can get encapsulated by It in the silence of our being. As the 13th century monk Meister Eckhart observed, God is Home—we have gone for a walk.