by Astara
I talk a lot about the inner world, because I believe that the evolution of humanity depends on each of us developing more self-awareness and self-agency. I ponder the emptiness. A lot. One of my heroes, Thích Nhất Hạnh — the Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of Plum Village — has a wonderful album I own called Drops of Emptiness. As I dive into the gifts of emptiness, I open to my own inter-beingness.
What is inter-be?
If you hold a piece of paper in your hand, Nhat Hanh encourages us to see with the eyes of poet and see a cloud floating in it. How is this possible? Without a cloud there is no rain. And without rain, no trees. And without trees, no paper. There is also sunshine in the paper, for without the growth of the forest to the sun, there would be no paper. In the paper are all those that harvested the wood to make paper. And the truckers who shipped the paper. And the store clerk who sold it. Even you are in the paper. And so on. He calls the relationship between all the beingness that created the paper you hold (and all the other gifts in your life) as inter-being.
Nhất Hanh offers that emptiness is really just emptying ourselves of the identification as separate and independent. What we need most now on our planet is a deeper awareness of inter-being and a new fresh look at emptiness. As we dissolve independence and transmute it to interdependence, we begin to shift the way we relate to ourselves, each other, nature and the universe.
Meditate on your energy centers. Make room for your fullness, which is to say your emptiness, which is to say your interbeing. May you see with a poet’s eyes each day. See the cloud in your paper, the sunshine in your food, and the smiles in each human waiting to blossom.
Inter-be.
Speaking of inter-being, we are especially excited about our Soul Lab Cohort online mystery school inside our Inner Space Academy. In the full course collection we teach how to wake your body’s energy centers. In our course bundle Soul Esteem, we teach you how to wake up to the state of inter-be through this better flow of energy. By connecting with our energy on-purpose, we remember the dance of fullness amidst emptiness with energy intelligence.
If you haven’t enjoyed it already, we recommend you carve a half hour out of your day and create a nest to restore yourself inside our Sound Alchemy: Drops of Emptiness, exploring the fullness of emptiness with the magic of singing bowls.
Our soul and sound offerings invite you to connect with the interbeing you are. Each of our soulful sessions create containers and openings to reconnect you to your soul and all of life. Coming home to your soul is coming home to the state of inter-being.
