THE 3 JEWELS OF THIS PRACTICE

I have come to embrace what I call the three jewels of this practice. Most philosophies and spiritual practices have sets of guidelines and principles. Call them whatever you want to call them, a sort of best practices for life according to whatever we deem to be important. The three jewels of this practice are not so much rules as they are pursuits. I emphasize them in this practice because they are all unique aspirations that rely on each other. They all require diligence and maintenance. They all have an art to them, and they remind us why our personal evolution often feels like we are juggling parts of our selves. We get one thing in order in our life and something else seems to slip away or suffer for our attention to another. Life can seem like we are endlessly trying to put all the pieces of some mysterious puzzle together.

We do have important practices to pursue, such as watching what we say, how we think, and the actions we choose to take. These are practices we will find in almost every spiritual discipline. The three jewels of this practice are more like fuel for these practices, a foundation that can inspire us to create and follow such disciplines. In terms of these three jewels, we will find we can’t truly keep one around without the other two. Love without strength and wisdom is a feeble and fragile thing, destined to quickly fall through our fingers. Strength without love has no purpose. We can only be strong to be strong for so long before we hunger for something to be strong for. And wisdom, perhaps our most precious jewel, cannot prevail without strength, nor find purpose without a fuel, a goal, which is to create a livable home for love.

An order to our jewels?

It is rare, if ever, that we can pursue all of these jewels at the same time with equal attention, although the wiser we become the more we will find one nourishing the other. When we really seek to evolve in our relationship to any of these jewels, we must often submerge our selves into them, trusting one jewel will nourish and lead us to the others in our proper place and time.

In the practice of understanding life, contemplating disposition is often meaningful. It is our disposition that often drives how we head into these jewels of life. If we are the warrior type, we often head into strength. It is our comfort zone to face and fight battles, to focus on our fortitude, and to avoid putting too much emphasis on the deep, soft and mushy aspects of life, lest we weaken our nature by over-thinking or over-feeling.

If we are the romantic, passionate, fiery soul, we will often walk straight into the notion of love, not that we understand it. We jump into the fire, as it is our comfort zone to dance with passion and, through trials and tribulations, we trust we will learn our lessons, find the strength and the wisdom we need so that we are not just burning the house down, one blind expression of love after another.

If we should be the deep thinker, we often begin by pursuing wisdom. It is our comfort zone to observe and analyze. We may relentlessly try to unwind the mechanics of life through deep observation and study, but then what? What do we do with that? So, we hope that our journey will lead us on to a path that summons our strength, and seeks the ability to nourish that journey with wise love, a path that can bring us more deeply into the physical nature of life, into manifesting our wisdom, not just living in our heads.

Patience and our jewels

Whether we embrace the notion of reincarnation or not, we cannot argue our genetic memory, which is one of endless challenges and climbing out of suffering. There is no lack of pain and suffering in any of us, as we go further back into the roots of our existence. We are all crawling out of the great human shadow, hoping to be able to stand up and walk with some sense of joy and purpose in what we know, from many lifetimes, to be a challenging road. This is a long and tireless journey. To get our 3 jewels in order, nourishing each other, this is no small feat. It is an extraordinary pursuit and challenge, a never ending challenge, and one we will falter in, even miserably fail at, from time to time. When we pursue that which is of the most value in our lives, we need buckets of patience and humility. We cannot underplay the tremendous challenge that we have in our lives, and yet we cannot stop in the pursuit of the only true rewards we have for being alive.

Giving up on our jewels

To say we should never give up is a foolish notion. Giving up is part of the process of life, our phases of evolution. Giving up does not have to be a permanent thing, and this we all instinctively know. Sometimes we “give up” simply to wait for a more appropriate time for something. It is a well known fact that when we are intensely learning something, if we should tirelessly practice, we grow, but only get so far. We begin to struggle in our next phase of growth. When we step back, give up for a bit, what we have practiced seeps into our subconscious. Did we really give up? No, we take a break and trust in our capacity to re-energize, to let life summon our next steps and lessons. This allows us to get re-inspired. It also allows our soul to decide where it wants to go with what we have learned, whether through joy or hardship. What are we inspired to do with what life has given us to work with? What energizes us moving forward? Learning to live life wisely is perhaps our greatest challenge. In this, of course, we will feel like giving up at times. It is part of our inherent wisdom to know when giving up is the best thing to do and when it is not the time to do so. In wisdom, giving up is never an escape. It always leads back to some form of commitment, some responsibility, some vision or purpose.

Putting too much weight upon a jewel

When we are in our best place, love nourishes our strength and wisdom, and vice versa. When we are not, it is as if we are juggling 3 separate things and they never seem to find each other, they never fit together. In this, we may set them all down, at least the ones that life allows us to. Many struggle with setting love aside. Love is our most rewarding energy and emotion. It is the glue and fire behind our best existence and it is the doorway to what allows us to be unselfish. Many don’t like setting love on the side or putting it down, but love needs a rest like all things. This is the challenge of the hopeless romantic, one who thinks love should always prevail, always hold the answer and should never falter or diminish, lest someone has done something seriously wrong. This is a counterpoint to the hopeless warrior who thinks that all things can be won through relentless battle. Who screams at life when life reveals that strength is only one part of the puzzle and there are times when all the strength in the world is useless to overcome a given challenge. Even wisdom has its romantic version in the deep thinker, one in which we hope wisdom alone can solve all our problems. That is until we meet something that can only be solved through strength, action, or perhaps some thoughtless, reckless and foolish abandon.