Our personal plans work best when they align with a larger plan. This happens when we live not only for ourselves and our loved ones but for the world as well. Loving kindness fosters this responsiveness to a universal caring. (Buddhist Pema Chodron calls this kinship.) We extend our concern beyond our immediate circle to a universe without circumference. Nature does this too, in that it tailors each species to support others. Shakespeare reminds us in The Merchant of Venice that “such harmony is in immortal souls,” and loving kindness is an expression of it.
The balance of nature is not always harmonious, however. It includes room for occasional confusion and disorder. We notice the same chaos in our own lives, no matter how devoted we are to spiritual practices and how earnestly we do our psychological work. Yet there is something in us, too, something that is never spent and that irrepressibly survives the tumult of life. This something is the energy that contains us and the universe. This life force, the most reassuring given, is something that endures in us, through us, and beyond us, undamaged and integral, no matter what may have happened to us in the course of our lives
We make the effort to engage in spiritual practices, and then shifts follow that take us beyond the limitations of our ego. These shifts are supplemental graces, personified by the assisting forces in the hero stories. In most tales, the hero or heroine performs his or her task only with the aid of kindly forces, as, for example, Dorothy was helped by the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion. This is another example of how interconnectedness is such a necessary ingredient for human growth. Assisting forces turn the scared ego into a champion of love, the ignorant ego into a mentor of wisdom, the broken ego into a miracle worker. Nature then holds the ego tenderly, and the ego relaxes and let’s itself be held. That is the felt meaning and promise of a balanced person and world, of ego and archetype, of human and divine energies. The ego always wanted to be held like this, no matter how fierce its kicking and screaming.
There are balances we cannot effect or even imagine but that happen when love takes us one step beyond fear. The reason that love casts out fear is that love creates a feeling of safety. When we act with love, we feel so good about ourselves that courage blooms. We find the poise to be at home with the givens that scared us before (everything changes and ends, life is not always fair, things do not always go according to plan, pain is part of life, people are not always loving and loyal) They bless us with the gifts of the unconditioned universal Self: believing in our powers and being comfortable with them, letting go of control, practicing loving kindness, surrendering to this startling moment, daring defiantly to break through the gates that say “Keep Out” or “Don’t go beyond this point.”
May I trust the forces that help me know who I am and where I am going,
and may all those who doubt themselves and disregard their destiny
likewise be surrounded by inescapable evidence
of their limitless identity and destiny.
Extract taken from author David Richo : The Five Things We Cannot Change and the Happiness We Find In Embracing Them, Shambala Publications, Boston.
Emerging From The Dark Night 