Message for Today from Rev. Padma Devi - When Life is Difficult

Sometimes when bad things happen people say, well that’s how life is so you’d better get used to it. Sometimes they suggest we just need to toughen up and get on with it, because that’s how things are. And sometimes they might add, that’s how life is if you are a woman/black/indigenous/gay/disabled/poor etc.

But it is NOT how life is – if we observe the process of life as it flows through Mother Nature, we see it is a joyful giving to itself.

When we arrive on earth as babies, we are born into a human world that holds a lot of trauma – all the trauma of history, the collective trauma of humankind. We can see the results of this collective trauma everywhere in our society, especially in our politics and our aggression towards each other.

So perhaps we can stop saying that’s how life is, which means we just accept it - and say instead, that’s how life is when it’s hurt. Then we see we have possibility for change. The possibility to heal ourselves and to offer healing to others.

When we acknowledge this collective hurt, we can stay open, we no longer need to armour our hearts. When water falls from the sky as gentle rain, if it falls into a river it is in the flow of life giving to itself. That precious life-giving water flows, circulates, condenses as cloud and falls again as rain to continue giving to life. It is healing, it is health.

But if the gentle rain lands on a frozen surface, or on barren rock it takes a long time for health to return because first it has to melt the ice or slowly dissolve the rock over aeons of time.

When life is difficult, our first instinct is often to close our heart to protect ourselves from pain – but in fact all we are doing is closing ourselves off from the source of life which sustains and nourishes us. We close ourselves off from the very thing we need most – connection.

So I would like to offer you this gentle meditation which will help you to plant the flower of gentleness and healing in your heart and mind, in your life and in the world.

Most of us have touched that experience and want it to be permanent, but we keep trying to plant that beautiful flower on a rock or on ice and no roots are able to grow, so we have to keep planting it over and over again.

I hope this meditation may help to soften that rock and melt that ice, that inflexible mind, that armoured heart - to soften into gentleness, until you become a beautiful garden where your open heart can blossom and flourish.

Om Love, Padma Devi

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