This Week’s Quotation:

Think of it this way: your thoughts and your feelings could be friends. Your thinking could create an atmosphere of safety in which your feelings are at home. Your thoughts could arouse your feelings in inspiring ways. And your feelings could empower your thoughts with passion. Your feelings could be with you as you do what is yours to do in the world. And if you brought emotional intelligence to your own feelings, maybe you could bring it to the feelings of someone else—a spouse, a friend, an employee, a son or daughter, even the emotional body of a group of people.

Becoming a Sun
p. 62

Your Thoughts and Feelings Could Be Friends

It is a rainy day in Devon. The wind coming up from the south is driving past the window in sheets, and the surf is pounding the pebbles on the beach below.

My friend, Karen, tells me that this is why England is such a “green and pleasant land.”  It rains a lot.

As I meditate upon this week’s quotation from my book, the parallels in our internal landscape are clear and immediate. Our feelings can be like the rain—turbulent, perhaps even bringing tears. 

Sometimes there is internal thunder and lightning—anger, passion, and even wrath. Deep tides can bring crashing waves to the shorelines of our soul, wearing the rocky places into sand.

Many people turn the other way to avoid dealing with their internal weather. Until there is a low-pressure system or even a hurricane that is so intense, they have to deal with it. 

What if we devoted some portion of our thought to an ongoing awareness of what is happening in our feeling realm? We could appoint an internal weather reporter who kept track of sunny days and winter storms. With self-love, acceptance, and compassion, we could notice what was happening inside.

Perhaps today is a good day to try that. My experience is that my feelings like being noticed. They respond eagerly to being seen and acknowledged by my thoughts. And then they create a “green and pleasant land”—a vital internal landscape where the experiences that make life worthwhile can grow.

What does it mean to become a sun?

Every human being is already a sun on the inside—a being of intense love and light. The difference is that some people have the vision and courage to become a sun on the outside. This difference is our human destiny.