I often ask myself: What am I willing to do? What am I willing to take responsibility for? These seem straightforward enough questions in some ways, but as I grow older, I am more and more aware that I cannot know what life will bring and I am more and more wary of what I commit myself to. In Chinese medical thinking, the Will is the aspect of our mind that allows us both to take action and to endure. The Will, however, cannot operate alone for if it does, it will exhaust itself in a very short time. Instead, the Will derives energy and direction from the Heart, as the Heart allows us to see what directions we might choose.
How can we see what direction to go? How can we decide what to take responsibility for? Questions like this open us, create space if we let them, and are one of my favorite ways to go about exploring life. “Questions we hold in our hearts are like hands on clay” words of wisdom from Frank MacEowen, speak directly to this point. A question, when we live with it without answering it, allows us to feel gaps and crevices in our own being as we move through time and space without knowing what is next. Yet, the question of what we are willing to do when we do not know remains. Faith then comes into play. I love the definition of faith given to me by Ken McLeod, “faith is the willingness to be with the mystery of being.” This again speaks directly to the topic. Can we have faith in our willingness or in some cases, our unwillingness? Even in unwillingness we can have faith if we trust our own hearts. Trust, and this is my own personal definition, is the willingness to open to whatever our experience is in a given moment, even if that experience includes unwillingness.
The Chinese character for the Will, Zhi 志, contains the word for heart 心 and the word for scholar 士, a seemingly strange partnership at first. Yet to know oneself, to truly “know thyself” in the meaning set forth by the Greek aphorism attributed to Socrates, is true scholarship. Here combined with the heart, it suggests that in order to engage one’s will, one must be a scholar of one’s own experience with a keen and open heart. I am thinking about this topic lately as I have begun to teach the second Part of The Nectar of Plants: Essential Oils and Chinese Medicine. Part II is all about the relationship between the Heart and the Kidneys, who we are in dialogue with the world, what might we be willing to take responsibility for and how we might choose to express it. So, I am thinking a lot about this topic.
“Love is being willing to take responsibility for what you choose” a note on this topic from another of my amazing teachers, Jeffrey Yuen. This quote, for me, encapsulates the very relationship we are after. Opening the heart, which some might say is love, and shedding light on where you are willing to take responsibility, making choices that reflect your own knowing. This, then, is the conversation about where we can take action, what we can endure and when we must simply rest open in faith and willingness to discover what life is offering. Here is to doing just that…
