Encouraging is the act of motivating a heart to flourish and supporting a heart to continue flourishing.
Who or what do
you encourage?
How do you encourage?
Who encourages you? How?
These are big, serious, Holy Nights’ questions. They require the time for a noble visioning and a warm listening. We each must see the star and hear the choir in our own heart and in the hearts
beyond our own.
Encouraging is not a push or a pat on the back.
It is a listening, a courageous willingness to hold all the sorrow, the set backs, the regrets, the dreams, the doubts, the resistance, the shocking uglies and the darkest shadows living in another’s heart and not lose heart or cast them out of your heart.
Encouraging is powerful holding of a vision in your heart of the glorious vision that lives in the heart of yourself, another, humanity, nature, spirit, or the future. This holding of a glorious vision will motivate and support your listening…put and keep heart in your listening to what flourishes and what languishes.
A
languishing heart is a heart that has lost its own heart. Encouraging is the kindness that guides a heart back into its own heart. Encouraging is what keeps a heart in its heart.
All acts of kindness expand the forces of heart and soul, body and spirit. The act of encouraging is probably the most expanding of the heart whether you are the encourager or the encouraged. Is
this your experience?
It is like the heart is a womb that expands with the growing capacity to encourage and is constantly giving birth to the courage to listen to both doubt and enthusiasm with equanimity and the courage to see a glorious vision manifesting through the complexity of circumstances with equanimity…to see goodness without being impressed, to hear terror without being terrified.
I am using the word “glorious” not to be dramatic, but to encourage us to see the glory in what lives in all hearts. In the Christmas Story, there are shepherds and kings. Would you say what lives in the hearts of either is more glorious or more worthy of encouragement than the other? Kindness does not play favorites. There is glory and despair in every gesture. When we encourage the divine
to be expressed in the practical and encourage suffering to reveal joy, everyone and everything flourishes.
I just had the vision of a Holy Nights retreat where a group of souls could gather to research both the personal and the cosmic acts of encouraging. Do you need the kind of encouragement that would appear in this kind of gathering?
The great mystic seer, Rudolf Steiner, spoke of the weariness of the spiritual world in relationship to the growing spiritual capacities of human consciousness. Can you and I develop our capacities to encourage the spiritual beings who for ages have encouraged our development? Does this question awake and spark a heartfelt courage in you? It is one level of self that can imagine encouraging another human being. It is another to imagine
encouraging an angel or an archangel. If you were to encourage the Christ to return, to manifest the Second Coming, what acts of kindness would you manifest? What depth of despair would you be willing to experience in your listening? I want to encourage you to ask these questions and not be overwhelmed by them.
Encouragement gives you the courage to step into the unknown, the
unimaginable, and the impossible. The spiritual world will encourage you to do this. It is the way spiritual beings now say we our encouraging you so that you can encourage us.
What an act of kindness!
