Here are some wonderful passages from the book "Alchemy of the Heart. This time the profound lessons for the soul are about "The Power of Gentleness" and "The Secret Room.
In our book The Seven Energy Centers, we talk about gentleness as a receiving mode, where unnatural, coercive human actions and reactions give way to the natural movement of the heart. Gentleness is a nurturing, giving attitude that takes no offense. Gentleness is the opposite of brittleness, rigidity or resistance. Fragile things can break, but gentleness is flexible and can bend. As a wise commentator once said, "Blessed are the pliant, for they will not buckle.
Twentieth-century T΄ai Chi Ch΄uan master Cheng Man-ch΄ing taught that true mastery and energy come from gentleness and not harshness, from flexibility and not violence. Wolfe Lowenthal who published the master's teachings said he taught that gentleness, sensitivity and compassion are the secret to mastering the martial arts of the East. 'Man compensates for his inner weakness by becoming aggressive and defensive,' he said, but 'hard energy blocks the flow of ch΄i (our energy or life force); it is a disjointed expression of a fraction of our potential power.' Soft energy, on the other hand, is compatible with ch΄i and does not block its flow. For example, the strength of an arrow comes from the elasticity, softness and liveliness of the bow and string, the master taught. "It is a paradox," he said, "that true softness can only come from strength.
The power of softness and openness, as opposed to harshness and narrow-mindedness, drives the principle of meaningful dialogue. The late physicist David Bohm, a founder of the dialogue project at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), says the word dialogue stems from dia (through) and logos (the word). So dialogue describes a meaningful process that arises from, and flows forth around, the participants. In an article on dialogue, David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett explain that dialogue is neither a debate (because in it one opinion wins over another) nor a discussion - a word that has the same root meaning as percussion and concussion, which have to do with breaking things down. In a true dialogue, we suspend our assumptions and freely exchange ideas and information. By doing this, we arrive at a point that none of us could have reached on our own.
Successful meetings take place when we achieve a balance between advocacy and inquiry - when we not only explain our own point of view, but when we also inquire. Instead of always promoting our own case, we can ask questions to try to understand another person's point of view. That way we make the most progress.
The heart is the place of great encounters. It is the place where we meet our True Self and where we meet God. Every time this encounter takes place, there is an alchemical transformation and we are never the same again.
From Christian contemplatives to Buddhist meditation masters, the mystics of the world have discovered the magic of communion with the Divine in their hearts. They describe the heart as the midpoint between this world and the spiritual world. There, halfway between heaven and earth, they say, we can seek and find our essential reality.
Each spiritual center, or chakra, offers us a different way we can perceive and receive God. Through the heart chakra, we can choose to experience God as love, compassion, charity, comfort, gentleness, sensitivity, discernment and appreciation. Or we can choose to misuse the creative energy flowing through our heart and express it as hatred, aversion, anger, selfishness, irritation and neglect.
The secret chamber of the heart is a passageway to cosmic dimensions. 'The small room in the heart is as big as this vast universe,' says the ancient Chandogya Upanishad. 'The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and everything that exists now and everything that does not exist.'
When we move through our heart chakra in meditation, there is, as it were, a door at the back that leads to the secret chamber. There, seated on a throne, is our inner teacher, our Higher Self. This beloved friend, who offers divine guidance and spiritual connection, has different names in different spiritual traditions. The Hindu tradition describes the indwelling spirit living in the heart as "the inner Self, no bigger than an inch," also known as the Atman. Christian mystics refer to the inner man of the heart or the Inner Light. Jesus discovered that the Higher Self is "the Christ," and Gautama discovered that it is "the Buddha. So that Higher Self is sometimes called the Inner Christ (or Christ-Self) or the Inner Buddha.
The special acoustics of the secret chamber of the heart, allows us to hear the "still small voice" of God and our Higher Self, and receive the divine guidance and understanding we so desperately need. So often we think we are too busy to stop and listen. Yet the secret room is not very far away. It need not take much time to slip inside for a brief conference call with your inner teacher.
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