Do Souls Cry?

Listening is such an important part of human activity. In fact, it improves communication between husbands and wives, friends, parents and children. We need to listen to several other things too. We need to listen, not so much to what other people say, but to the emotions behind the words. So I caution you now, don’t listen to the words people use, listen to the emotion behind the words. Don’t take the words to heart.

How many times have you said something in the heat of anger that you didn’t really mean? And how difficult it was later to
take those words back! In fact, you couldn’t. That’s the same with other people as well. They’re talking through a cloud of emotions and not everybody can speak clearly.

So you’ve got to listen to:

1. Your pain. What you are feeling in terms of pain inside. Sometimes your body speaks to you with a stomach cramp, it could speak to you by feeling empty inside, maybe you’ve been hurt by someone. Instead of blocking that pain, you need to look forward and understand what you need, to fill yourself and make yourself happy.

2. You need to listen to the pain of others. When people are in pain, they sometimes express it in the form of anger. When people are angry at you it is nothing more than a cry for love, a cry for acceptance, a cry to reach out. So don’t misinterpret the anger. Sometimes it’s the only way that people know when trying to express their need for a hug or caring or love.

3. You need to listen to God’s pain. That sounds strange doesn’t it? God’s pain? That brings up a number of questions. Do souls cry? Let’s think about that for a minute. We think about Life from a single lifetime’s perspective. In this very short and narrow lifetime, we start to make judgements on what should and shouldn’t be. We make value statements about the unjust death of a child, starvation in Africa, war in the Middle East, etc. and think to ourselves that God must have a purpose. Well think about how God sees everything for a second.

Imagine that you were a soul that lived many lifetimes and you had not a one lifetime perspective, but a twenty or even a one hundred lifetime perspective.

You would see everything from a soul who had been living twenty or a hundred lifetimes. You would see the intricate linkage of how one life affects another, how one thought affects another and how, within all this complexity of lifetimes in a linear fashion, there’s also the cross effect, where your being alive actually affects the lives and lessons of someone else.

Maybe, by you not being alive in this lifetime, you may affect negatively the circumstances affecting your family for instance. This nowhere made more apparent than in the movie “A Wonderful Life”. A man was given the opportunity to take a look at what life would have been like if he were not present in that life.

Yes, all of life is not meant to be easy, but at the same time, it’s meant to be a learning experience and never a struggle. The struggles are generated by our own notions of self-worth, fairness, guilt and fear. Learning can be fun depending on your perspective of it as well. By recognising that everything is temporary to begin with and nothing lasts forever, it makes you appreciate the ‘learning’ a little bit more. At least you will begin to understand that we cannot take things for granted anymore. That the best way to approach people and circumstances in our lives would be with an air of Gratitude.

Words of Encouragement

We need to use lots of words of encouragement, not only for other people but for ourselves as well. With all of our negative self-talk and being surrounded by mostly negative people, someone needs to get the ball rolling in reversing the negative flow, if not stemming it altogether.

These words of encouragement may encompass several lists of word that we’ve used on ourselves, they could even be our affirmations, sometimes we see them in our journals as well - words and phrases that we wished our parents had said to us when we were younger.

These could be words that you are putting together for your niece, nephew, son or daughter. These are words that you need to say to other people a lot. The amazing thing about a lot of other people is that they’re just like you, they need to feel accepted, they need to feel appreciated and they need to feel recognised for who they are. Maybe you could help them become more manageable by making them feel good about themselves.

I’ve changed the words of Confucius just a little bit but the implications are profound if you put this into your daily practice, "Say unto others what you would have others say unto you."

Motivation, Enthusiasm and Passion

Have you noticed how some people that are not very enthusiastic are also fairly unmotivated at the same time? They also don’t seem to comprehend this wonderful word called passion. If you find someone who’s passionate about their job, their loved ones or a particular activity that they’re involved in, a hobby or gift of creativity, you’ll notice that they also have a very high level of Motivation as well as enthusiasm.

A good example of this is when you watch people who are in love and have nothing but praise for their loved ones and nothing but joy and happiness to share with other, “Oh I love this woman, she is this and she is that and she is everything.” These wonderful three words, Motivation, Enthusiasm and Passion are divinely linked. They’re pretty much the ‘holy cow’ trinity of
power that a person has within themselves. If you can encourage growth in anyone of these areas, being passionate about something, whether it be something like fishing or painting or writing, it could be anything, you’ll find that you’ll be a
little more enthusiastic about that thing you were more passionate about.

As well, it would be the thing that would wake you up in the morning with a spring to your step and a bounce to your gait, instead of the normal dragging yourself out of bed. A good example is watching how children behave on school days. It’s such a chore to wake them up from Mondays to Fridays if not very difficult. You have to scream at the top of your lungs and threaten them and a half hour would have passed by the time they finally drag themselves out of bed saying “Oh, do I have to go to school?” But, when the weekend comes, you don’t even have time to get your bedroom slippers on before they’re bouncing on your bed, “What shall we do today Mum…Dad?” and they’re so enthusiastic because now, they’re out to have fun.

So there’s a fun element that’s involved in enthusiasm and passion, you feel very motivated and you jump out of bed. So imagine, if you love the job you’re doing, my gosh, how would you wake up in the morning? With a big bounce or would you be dragging yourself out of bed trying to pick up the broken pieces of the alarm clock that you threw against the wall?

Are you having fun in your vocation? In your relationships? In your home? How would you want to wake up in the morning everyday?

Beyond body, mind and emotions.

There is one thing that I have noticed in my 49 years of living and that is everywhere we look, it seems that life has one
stark purpose. Besides having fun, we are also asked to learn as much as we can.

From the time we are enrolled into kindergarten, we learn how to draw, we learn the alphabet and numbers, colours, about our friends and especially how to write our own names. In elementary school, we are taken steps further into learning the intricacies of language and mathematics and science and how the earth works around us. In high school, we learn about people we do not know too much about personally but we know them by reputation and their accomplishment.

People like Shakespeare, Sartre, Winston Churchill and other figures in history who have changed the planet in some way. It seems that the more we learn, the more all the mysteries of life seem to be peeled away a little bit at a time, like an onion, layer after layer after layer. The older we get the more we presumably have learnt in our years.

Not for everybody though is it true that the more years we have, the more learning we have as well. Some people have thirty years of experience and yet others have only one year of experience thirty times. It seems that some have the ability to learn and add on knowledge and in doing so, gained the ability to unlearn things that they have learnt earlier that may not be totally true. (Yes I know, truth is a relative term.) It seems that learning comes from everything that we do and
from everyone whom we meet and every situation that we get entangled in. (And every article like this one that we happen to read as well.) (And yes Miranda, every programme that you watch on television or every movie that you watch also influences your life decisions and shapes who you will be in the long run.)

I have heard some people lament that life had not given them a complete deck of cards. (No, they are not from Las Vegas!) Yet for others, that they had been given a ‘bad hand’ in life or they may declare that they have not enough money, or education, or opportunities or looks. Something genetic may not have been given to them so that they could go the distance and manifest those dreams that they thought were their reality (whatever they thought ‘reality’ was). They have cocooned themselves in this train of thought that if they had somebody else’s looks or opportunities or genes that they might have been able to achieve all those goals that they felt were theirs to begin with. Yet when you hear that old adage from great sages of renown, “Ask and you shall receive”, you ask why have I not received? It is very simple. The old understanding of the word ‘ask’ was not like we would ask a question, but really the word meant, ‘Claim’ and it shall be yours.

So what we needed to have done was literally as we learned more in life, from every mentor possible, (The mentors are everywhere and in every event and everything that happens to you, good and bad) we were to claim our share of this planet’s abundance and prosperity. (Again, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms. It does not matter what happens to you, it is what you gain from it and what it teaches you about who you really are.)

Life is a rich banquet of opportunities all around us, but a lot of people seem to be starving for some strange reason. In the pages of this book, we will explore some of the reasons why people are starving and maybe we will begin to understand a little bit more about why we have not achieved all the things that we needed to achieve and have not gotten the things we needed to have. Along the way, we will find out why love, as we have called it, hurts; why some situations are painful; why some people ‘suffer’; and then at the end of it, after understanding it all we will come to a point when we can finally ‘ask’ or ‘Claim’ that which was ours from the beginning; abundance, joy, happiness and peace of mind.

Practical Ways To Change Your Luck

Luck is largely the result of taking appropriate action. When we’re passive, we don’t take sufficient charge of our affairs and we become victims of all kinds of ‘bad luck’.

Take for example the woman who claimed that the dry cleaner ruined her slacks. She would probably end up saying things like, “Well, he ruined my suit too.” What she is unconsciously doing is revealing that she knew she was taking chances with the new cleaners in her life. When she starts on a level of activity with different cleaners, she’s going to create the same problems again. Another person talking about how she may have wasted the day, may reveal her thinking pattern in saying “Well, it always happens.” She allowed it to happen.

When we permit ourselves to accept such ‘bad luck’, there are usually reasons. We may fear that we can’t or shouldn’t take any action and some of us have unconscious fears. Others tend to blame society for what goes wrong in their lives. As it seems society has helped create the drug addicts, the alcoholics, the derelicts, but if we place the blame on others, it leads us away from looking within and facing up to our own responsibility in what is going on. It also promotes passivity. If we continue to carry our childhood grievances with us to feel overwhelmed by bad luck, because everything is our parents’ fault. For example, we won’t make any attempt to improve our world, regardless of who is to blame.

It’s all up to us to take charge of our lives as best as we can and to take it from here. I believe that once you recognise your own role in creating less than perfect situations, you are able to make changes, and that’s when things get better.

Where fate, destiny and luck are concerned, all of us have been given certain resources and abilities and disabilities. What you do with what you’ve got helps determine your luck. “The fault” as the Shakespearean quote goes, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves”. The more we act to change our luck, the more we take charge and the more secure we feel. The minute a person does something positive, he feels good, he feels less angry because mastering an activity are conditions of a healthy life.

All kinds of signals will help you recognise when to let go of a bad situation or cycle of activity. Repetition is a red flag - a sign that you should make a change. Some people may say “Well, I’m so unlucky in love.” Yet, each time they end up picking up a person with an alcoholic problem or an inability to be faithful, then they start repeating frustrating failures and errors in specific areas of their life again and again. The accumulation of bad results often make us conclude that we
have ‘bad luck’ in choosing husbands or wives or any of a thousand other things.

If you begin to see a pattern of things going wrong, you need to ask yourself “What is my role in this? Why do I feel bound and trapped in the situation? What makes me complain about it rather than do something about it?”

In effect, you need to be self-critical. One of the aspects of self-criticism is to have the ability to evaluate and criticise your personal relationships. Perhaps you have problem-ridden friends who are emotionally dependent who lean on you so heavily, it’s an emotional drain. So you ought to examine your excuses for wasting time with emotional dependants. “What really lures us into this?”

People get sucked into their friends’ problems because they really want to be sucked in. It prevents them from doing more difficult things. It’s possible to be caring to friends without letting them absorb all one’s time. So if you feel pressured and overburdened, examine your own role to see if you’re not being too agreeable.

Sometimes, when we’re anxious about things, or bothered by them, we tend to put them out of our awareness. Many of us avoid paying attention by daydreaming about being on an island in the Caribbean or turning to alcohol or maybe even eating or going out and spending money on something we don’t need. These are actions that deflect good luck and they often occur on a day of misfortunes.

Instead of escaping from frustrating experiences in this way, why not ask yourself “What can I do that will make me feel more competent.” Forgo the drink or the telephone chatter or the refrigerator raids, instead do a task, even some household chore you dislike, like cleaning out a messy closet.

That single small accomplishment will promote new feelings of pleasure and security because you’re pleased with yourself for taking charge. Making little changes makes you like yourself better and when you begin to like yourself better, you begin to do more useful things to improve your life in small ways which can lead to positive changes in bigger ways. That, of course, is luck.