Seek understanding

I don’t know about you but sometimes a phrase or a word jumps out at me when I’m reading something and this morning as I read my ‘A Note from the Universe’, it happened again.  ‘Seek Understanding’.

So I went and had a shower, and I made another coffee – decaff of course – and still ‘seek understanding’ is bouncing around the walls in my head and more than that, it’s sitting low down in my solar plexus and heart area too – I know that it’s important for me to pay attention when the message has an impact on my body.

It dawned on me that I’d just read a lovely blog by @JaneCWoods about swopping shoes for the day – this too is about seeking understanding.

With a double message in under an hour, I realised that I had some work to do.  Who or what am I not understanding?

I started to examine what I’d been missing and I began to realise that understanding underpins love, respect and compassion.  This isn’t new and is certainly something I advocate already, but today it’s going deeper.

What is understanding after all.  Is it simply making sense of something, is it being willing to open your mind to a wider reality, is it being prepared to be ‘not right’?  Or is it really about being willing to let go of your beliefs long enough to create a space into which love and compassion can flow.

Often we say we understand very quickly while inside us there’s a wee niggle which says ‘You don’t really but it’s easier and quicker to say you do’ .  It often says ‘Don’t push just agree’.

To truly understand we have to be both passive and active – we might have to ask the question we don’t want to ask, we might have to check whether the understanding to be gained comes from outside ourselves or from within.  Sometimes others do hold the answer to our learnings but more often than not, that answer is only the light being shone so that we can see what we have missed.

This morning I’m looking over some events which have happened in the last couple of months where perhaps I’ve not sought better understanding.   With true understanding, one needs to detach totally from your own agenda.

We all have agendas and we all have goals and purposes and dreams to fulfill (if you don’t then it’s a good time to start making some ;))  Our paths are littered with people and situations which are there to help us, to teach us, to get in the way, to test our resolve, and to determine whether or not we are willing to understand.

What is it we are seeking to understand though?  We need to understand the truth.  The truth can hurt until we learn that it’s only feedback to help us grow.  The truth is something which when we take personally or resist means you will never gain the understanding.

Stop, look and listen – outside and inside and seek understanding of others and of yourself.  It’s a two way message and this is what is so often missing.  Thank you TUT and Jane for mine.