Lao Tzu said that he had just three things to teach.

Simplicity

Patience

Compassion

In an age where we RUN from the depth of feeling and the teachings of the heart, our fear can reframe simplicity as stupidity, patience as laziness, and compassion as sentimentality. And therefore making them not worth while to pick up.

Simplicity refers to direct living; it’s firsthand experience. The return to touching life directly. This restores our wholeheartedness. Patience also restores this.

The urgencies we feel ever present are mostly false. Unless we can’t breathe or we’re bleeding, there’s no real urgency.

And compassion, it literally means to be with, to keep honest company.

When we are not directly living, when we are not patient, we want to problem solve the pain of others and not keep them company with it.

If we DON’T open our heart, than our existence will crush us.

Not because there’s something evil about existence, but because the way water fills a hole, if we don’t meet the world with who we are then everything around us will fill us in.

The cost of not staying open hearted, whole hearted, is that we lose access to our aliveness. And we’ll end up walking lock step in a society of consumerism, of getting, of fear, and of worry. And we will not have lived our life.

We have a life to live.

The heart has the answers.