We All Have A Spark
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“Dance of the Inner Spirit” by Nancy Hom
I remember when I was young, one of my favorite things to do was to dance and sing, everywhere, all the time. If I was outside playing in the mud, I was singing, if I was indoors helping do a chore, I was dancing as I was doing it. Friends and family who would come for a visit would often be cajoled into playing games with me, swinging on the trees on the hill behind the house, or walking the tall fence.
I wonder, when did I stop dancing everywhere and when did the singing turn silent?
In our last program with Mark Nepo titled “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen” Nepo made the point that our vibrancy can get dimmed when we forget to take time to listen to ourselves and others deeply. As program participants, we were led on an inner journey to the deep wells of our inner being, where we were invited to explore the particular, soulful, and often painful experiences of our lives. We learned to take the time to listen to what needed to be heard; the often unwanted parts of ourselves finally getting to be acknowledged and tended to.
Amazingly, when the particulars of one person’s life experience was shared in a poem or a story, a universal sense of connection and oneness emerged. Although the details might be different; characters with different names, wearing different clothes, or living at a different time, universal themes of love, loss, courage, grief, joy and redemption became the threads that wove individuals into a connected tapestry of recognition and warmth.
In Creativity and the Heart of Love we have the opportunity to continue on this journey of deepening inner and outer connection by getting in touch with what Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls “essence love”.
In his most recent book: Open Heart, Open Mind, Rinpoche describes how our sense of self can become rigid, that we can become fixed on who we believe ourselves to be, so much so, that we lose a sense of lightness, our connection with ourselves and others. We lose our ‘spark’. In this space of rigidity, we forget how others suffer like we do, we forget that we need others and that they need us, we forget how to dance and sing. We forget who we really are.
For many of us, this spark-like quality was vibrant when we were young, but slowly became layered over with what Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes in the short video below as “fixation on fear”.
It’s been a long time since I was climbing trees, running around singing, and inviting others to play, but I do remember the spark that was alive in me then. The real question is: Can I make a commitment to keeping that spark alive?
What about you?
