FOCUS ON YOURSELF ❤️

By Lian Brook-Tyler

As Waking The Wild students will know, some of my most repeated words are “Focus on yourself.” (Which really means “Focus on your own soul.”)

As an example, in Wild Feminine, I invite the women into a week-long ‘Complaint Cleanse’, which simply put, is about noticing when they’re complaining about others, often their partners, and then enquiring into what’s creating their need for someone else to be a certain way. (There’s a lot more to this work than I’ve shared here, not least the absolute love needed when we’re shining a light on the wounds that create these kinds of needs).

Bringing our awareness to self, rather than others - especially when we’re in the act of speaking or thinking badly of others - is perhaps the most challenging of all the work we can do because focusing on what we see is wrong with other people is so habitual, so culturally acceptable - even encouraged, and can feel so much easier than being responsible for our own soul’s evolution.

As I dive into the teachings of Meher Baba, I find it fascinating that whilst he talks of all the ways humans can cause themselves trouble, he reserves the most caution for those engaging in what he calls back-biting.

He said “The three most important things to be eliminated before attaining God-realization are greed, lust and ninda; the last, meaning "back-biting," is the worst and most disastrous.

One can overcome greed, or even lust, though both of these are very hard to get over; but the worst and most difficult of all to eliminate is the habit of ninda: speaking ill and trying to find faults or flaws in others; because this particular act or vice incurs the burden of sins or what is technically termed as sanskaras of others.” From TREASURES, ed. Jane B. Haynes, 1980 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust.

I don’t share this to make wrong anyone who, for whatever reason, is finding fault with others… it is to illuminate one of the most seductive and seemingly innocuous ways we can be enticed away from the path of soul.

If that path isn’t something you are interested in then you are free to dismiss everything I’ve shared here.

But if you are devoted to union with your soul, focus there.

All my love,

Lian ♥️

Art: Bekah Russom 🙏

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