Dear Cindy,
Thanks for looking after me
recently. I had a great time. I hope that when you feel like coming to
I think there is a good intent
behind it but I believe that it really doesn’t get down to the fundamental
issue. Perhaps the words, non-violent,
hide the real issue. Instead of saying
one is practicing non-violent communication wouldn’t it be better to say one
was practicing love? When someone says,
they are learning non-violent communication isn’t the subtext ‘I communicate
violently?’
My question is how can you practice
who you are? How can you learn and
practice love? It is either known to you
or it is not. You either have it or you
don’t. If you see that you are love each
and every word and deed is soaked in love.
You may have noticed that I experience virtually no resistance in human
encounter; my life slides along as if on greased wheels. In fact many opportunities that are not
available to guarded people come to me for one reason: there is love behind my
words. I don’t try to be
loving. I just know that love is
my nature and that it is always there to be experienced by others.
If you don’t examine this
fundamental issue, if you just take yourself as a non-loving being to begin
with, as if you were born this way or conditioned this way by unloving parents,
then whatever you practice will not bear fruit…because no practice can change
your fundamental self. You will try to
practice love because you think you are not love. When you sent that first gift to Sally you
felt bad. It was an unexceptional gift
and you did not value it so you felt that you could let it go. The reason you felt bad was because the
statement you were making was not loving. It was a polite attempt to be
loving, but the real feeling of love was absent. Later you realized it and you were not happy
with yourself. How could you be, it was
not ‘you’ who sent it. So you sent
another gift, something exceptional, and you sent it with love. It is interesting to note that Sally did not
react when she received the first gift.
She didn’t think anything good or anything bad. She just set it on the counter and that was
it. But when the second one came she lit
up like a light bulb. She loved it. She
danced around and she said that she had been thinking about just such thing for
several days and here it was…she was amazed at how the universe manifested her
thought. And immediately she said she
was going to get you something nice too.
This is because the communication was loving. And significantly, she gave it pride of place
on her altar. Why was the communication
loving? Not because you neutralized your
first karma with the second, but because the real you sent it.
When you set out to change your ego,
you are always in a bind because the changes you make, being based on an
incorrect self understanding, merely serve to reinforce that self (mis) understanding.
So you never get out of it. You
always feel that you are not good enough, loving enough, etc. You are esteeming the wrong self.
Love to you,
Ram