BEING SHAPED BY OTHERS

“The whole world could praise Sung Jung-Tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself. The whole world could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope. He drew a clear line between the internal and the external.”

~ Chaung Tzu

These words were spoken by Chuang Tzu in the fourth century BCE I read them fifteen years ago and taped them to my closet, so I could be reminded not to let the opinion of others shape me.

I have changed a great deal since then: what I do, where I live, who I am. Many things have come and gone. The closet to which Chuang Tzu’s words were taped is holding someone else’s clothes. But the words are in my heart, though I still struggle not to be shaped by what others think.

This is at once the clearest of spiritual intents and yet the hardest to stay true to: how to stay open to what others feel and not to what they think. We cannot live without being affected by others, but we are only real when we let truth and love shape us from within. Our want to be liked, our want to avoid conflict, our want to be understood - all these traits tease us away form taking the voice within seriously.

Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in the wind, we find our way by following the spirit’s voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real.

~ As you breathe, feel the Earth beneath you holding you up as it slowly turns about its center.

~ Breathe deeply and feel how you are like the Earth.

~ Inhale cleanly and feel the many things that you hold up.

~ Exhale cleanly and keep turning about your own center.

The Book of Awakening

~ Mark Nepo