“Only from the heart can you touch the sky.” Rumi
What I believe Rumi is saying here is that you can only live up to your potential when you live from the heart. To me, living from the heart means to endeavour to make love of others and oneself the centre of all that we do.
A person who does not feel and understands the pain of others does not understand love. Without love it is not possible to gain higher knowledge nor to use this knowledge correctly.
The meaning of compassion is to feel together. If people feel together, and are responsible for each other, then there is compassion.
Compassion is the first lesson of human life we need to learn when we no longer have the need to concern only with ourselves. Without an active concern for compassion nobody can move forward spiritually in their life.
I would like to encourage parents at home, and teachers in schools, to motivate children to cultivate compassion. I believe it is also important to teach children to practise breath-awareness.
Breath-awareness leads to self-awareness. Self-awareness is the highest form of intelligence and it would be wonderful if children can become aware of what it is that they are thinking, believing and feeling when experiencing occasions of difficulty.
Both children and we adults have to develop a sense of awareness of what goes on within us. To be sensitive is to be aware of that which we encounter, and to have sympathy with what we experience, internally or occurring outside of us: with objects, friends, people, places.
So, for instance a sensitive person is one who is awake to his own states of being. What matters to them is to be aware of the present, to be constantly watchful of what is going on at a mental level and to pay attention to it with a calm attitude.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity… A golden moment of change can be experienced whenever we encounter difficulty.
