Dear ,
In this newsletter I want to share a story of the amazing book "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff.
One day, K’ung Fu-tse was standing at a distance from the pool’s edge, when he saw an old man being tossed about in the turbulent water. He called to his disciples, and together they ran to rescue the victim. But by the time they reached the water, the old man had climbed out onto the bank and was walking along, singing to himself. K’ung Fu-tse hurried up to him. “You would have to be a ghost to survive that,” he said, “but you seem to be a man, instead. What secret power do you have?”
“Nothing special,” the old man replied. “I began to learn while very young, and grew up practicing it. Now I am certain of success. I go down with the water and come up with the water. I follow it and forget myself. I survive because I don’t struggle against the water’s superior power. That’s all.”
When we look closely at this story we can see the turbulent water as a metaphor of life itself, especially when it becomes turbulent and difficult.
The old man’s secret and salvation was to accept the superior power of the water. Had he fought the water within a short time he would have been exhausted and drowned or he might have been rescued by K’ung Fu-tse and his disciples most probably in a very miserable state.
All this seemed like a miracle to his “rescuers”, and he a “ghost” with a supernatural power.
But the only thing he did was to follow the water and forget himself. He went with it, we could say, he trusted that he was held in its rhythm until – in the end – he would have ended up in a safe space from where to continue with his life.
How often do we struggle, when life is giving us a hard time? How often do we fight against what is although we know that it is something we cannot change? And how tiring and exhausting is this fight? In the end we have lost our strength, our voice, our direction and our motivation.
How would things change if we just accepted the situation we are in? Not by giving up, but by going with it – up and down – like the water, learning to “go with the flow” and with this connecting more to ourselves and our inner wisdom instead of trying to force changes that simply won’t happen? Trusting that by acting this way we finally “climb out onto the bank” with more understanding and strength, ready to “walk along” in a new direction “singing to ourselves”?
I wish you a lovely month of November and the ability to see when “following the water” is the better option.
Love and light
Ursula
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