Communication from the Domain of the Heart

Communication  from the Domain of the Heart

 “Since the nature of life is action and reaction, every outer experience has a reaction within, and every inner experience has its reaction in the outer life.”

Aphorims of HIK

The lady who walked into the room in the afternoon looked familiar. In my usual dreamy style , I had forgotten when I 'd seen her last and when I looked at the notes I mistook the date and thought she was coming in for her yearly check when in actual fact she had just been to see me the previous month for inserting an IUD, a contraceptive device. When I asked her how she was and asked if she was coming for her yearly check up , she snapped at me and told me in no uncertain terms that she was the patient who waited a whole hour in the treatment room because I had forgotten about her  only a month ago and today she also waited a long time before I finally called her. She then went into a tirade about some other things and she was in a blaming mood, practically blaming everything she could think of on me. Old experienced doctors like me who have been in practice more than 20 years are well respected and I almost never get a patient who found me fair game for such an outburst so this young lady's tantrum shook me up somewhat. I knew I was responsible because with a hundred and one things on my mind, I did do some multitasking and was late calling her in. Half finished on my computer screen was a slide presentation I was preparing about communication and perhaps with the work fresh in my mind I focused on trying to  talk to her as honestly and as close to 'Haq' as I possibly could.

I began in a low and calm voice to tell how how sorry I was for all my shortcomings. I told her honestly I could see she was very angry with me and asked her how I could make it up to her. While I was saying this , I focused on my breathing and was speaking to her from the domain of the heart. There was no echoing anger in me, only a great need to mend the situation.

The change in the energy was palpable. Not only did she stop being angry, she started opening up to me, telling me her worries and concerns over her health.

In a spirit of love and intimacy , I finished the examination and her greeting as she left the room was warm and heartfelt .As she left she apologized to me for her outburst. My receptionist told me she was smiling as she left my clinic.

This anecdote that I relate introduces our class for this month, Communication from the Domain of the Heart. How often we find ourselves in situations when we react instead of respond. How often that results in difficult situations and 'dances' that are repeated time and again until we learn not to react but to respond. ? How does one learn to respond rather than to react?

"Murshid, when I come to you I come with a thousand complaints to make.

Why is it that the power of your presence disarms me?"

 Murshid: "Because I have disarmed myself."

Anecdotes of Hazrat Inayat Khan Seite 1

Some patients have a compulsive need to trigger such reactions to reinforce

their rejection pattern.

It is the energy of the other person that we feel . I once caught myself becoming very angry only to realise that it was the key to the remedy the patient needed. The patient was a baby with cereberal palsy who almost never stopped crying . He was already 6 months old when the parents brought him to see me.Soon after he and his parents walked into my room I started becoming angry. He was screaming at the top of his voice and the parents told me this was his usual manner except when he is feeding or sleeping. I took the baby from his mum and gave him to his dad , instructing him to take the baby out to the waiting room and do a zikr, Ya Salam all the time. I then did a breathing exercise with the mum , we can try it now . After the breathing exercise, I got a history from the mum. She had become extremely angry when a doctor remarked to a nurse who was trying to teach her to suckle the baby at the breast while she was warded  with the baby when they were investigating his cereberal palsy. He had remarked to the nurse that she was wasting her time because the baby was brain damaged and could not suckle. The mother became very angry but did not say anything . She did manage to breastfeed the baby after this but never stopped being angry up to the moment she was with me.A this point there was a palpable silence because the baby had miraculously stopped crying.

Here is the exercise that we did together.

Focus on your breathing. Do not try to change it but just be aware of it. Observe the in breath and the out breath . Observe how your heart-space feels.In the Quran the heart space is called the "Sadr" and there are many places where it is referred to as expanded or narrowed. How does your "sadr " feel. Is it heavy or expanded or tight or narrow?Is your breathing fast or slow, is it deep or shallow?

Following a quantum physics law, the breathing changes when we observe it. It becomes more regular and deep. We also become calmer and become aware of our emotions. We become aware of the state of our heart-space and probably the reasons why if it is not in an essential state.

The boundaries of the heart-space are the clavicles, the rib cage,the sternum , the scapula and the diaphragm below. Some people may notice that it actually expands to the throat area and the solar plexus area.

The essential state of our heart space

I met an amazing woman this weekend. I was on a beautiful island in Thailand called Koh Samui. Both of us were attending a workshop. This tall Dutch woman walked with a crutch and had to be sent to the lecture room with a buggy.At 54, she was a cripple almost since birth. She lived in hospitals and institutions because she was almost paralized and had constant fits . The doctors finally diagnosed her has having a form of systemic lupus and told her when she was about 20 that she had only a few more years to live. The drugs they gave her almost paralyzed her and she was wheelchair bound. She looked for alternatives and met with an acupuncturist. He said to her, please remove your clothes so that I can examine you. Hearing this she burst out crying for none of the doctors had ever asked her permission to examine her or to subject her to any kind of scrutiny .Another alternative practitioner to whom she was referred to by the acupuncturist worked with her for six years and helped her to stand and walk again. Remarkably, she later met a person who financed her education and training and she then worked as a social worker. She had lived in the US and India and was now living in Thailand. She now called herself by a name her spiritual teacher gave her, Taro. Taro taught me something about the human spirit that I could not have understood had I not met her. I cannot begin to relate what I learned from her because the language of our communication is the language of the heart. This woman had learned to pray for whatever she needed and it would simply come into her life. Although dependent with her disability, she was more independent than many other more mobile people. She was however totally surrendered to guidance from the One.

Communication from the heart is about understanding the still voice from within that guides us and brings to us what we need in our lives. It shows to us our life purpose and guides us to the means to fulfill it.

" Open our hearts that we may hear Thy Voice calling to us from within" Prayer of Hazrat Inayat Khan

In the busi-ness of the day, in all that we do and all that we are occupied with it is the communication and guidance that can turn the time management into a flow of surrendering to the moment . When we learn to communicate with the Divine and are guided from within, our time management changes from coping to directing to thriving

exercise:

Have a look at the chart below and gauge where you are right now.

Use the breathing exercise from the last lesson and place the question in your heart space.

How is my communication with the Divine?

Is my life thriving?

"Whoso believeth in Allah and the Last Day is exhorted to act thus. And whosoever keepeth his duty to Allah, Allah will appoint a way out for him, (QS. 65:2And will provide for him from (a quarter) whence he hath no expectation. And whosoever putteth his trust in Allah, He will suffice him. Lo! Allah bringeth His command to pass. Allah hath set a measure for all things. (QS. 65:3)"

Learning how to live in the moment and let go of the past is part of our being able to address our own needs and the needs of those we communicate with . 

Living in the moment will be another lesson . 

Living ourselves to death

Yes I know this is a computer game, one of the things that serves as distractions from the real journey 

What a notion. We are living ourselves to death . Whether we like it or not, whether it sends chills down our spine or not , death is at the end of the journey we are travelling on. For those of us who have a belief, a faith that death is the beginning of another journey and this life is a preparation for this other journey our fear becomes a focused one. We fear that we will not be able to prepare enough for this coming journey .

Islam defines my faith but I probably cannot be categorised.  Am I a fundementalist Muslim, a liberal Muslim, a universalist  or an ignorant Muslim? Perhaps in any one moment, I am one of those definitions. Sometimes I act like an ignorant Muslim when I forget to raise my children knowing the fundamental rules of being Muslim like respect for one's parents, knowing their rights and the rights of their guardians. At other times, it seems to my very strict fundamentalist Muslim colleagues that I mingle with, I seem rather liberal because I do not dress like they do. In my worship practices and the hijab I wear, I am fundamentalist  and sometimes it seems to those who view Islam through a narrow spectrum of what is right and see it as them versus us, I seem to be universalist as when I respect and acknowledge people of other religions. For my own self, what defines my faith is the depth of my belief that I have to live the life that God intended for me and for which God gave me the potential to do and I have to do it within the bounds of a set of rules and regulations that I choose to adopt and adhere to. Sometimes I get distracted by the glitter of life and forget for a while and at that point there is no congruence and alignment with my beliefs. I then need to realign myself and I am now realigning as I write this.

So coming back to us and by us I mean those who have a firm conviction there is life after death and who have a Supreme Being to answer to. What shall we do this day to fulfill our life purpose? To live the life intended for us? What needs to happen for us to be able to say to the Supreme Being that we have done that  for which we have been given the gifts talents and skills.  What needs to happen for us to have thoroughly prepared ourselves for the life to come? For the truth of the matter is every single minute we waste is a minute we will never recover ever again and it is a single minute that we have neglected to do that which we were intended to do in the limited time the Supreme Being gave to us. So please let us not fritter our lives away and cry when it is just too late to do that which the Supreme Being intended for us to do.

I expect you to....

When I was 8 years old, I asked for a desk and a chair for my birthday. One little desk with one little chair so that I could sit and draw or paint or read all by myself . Instead my dad bought a round desk with 4 chairs. I was really upset and wanted to throw the desk and chair out from the play room my parents had assigned to me.  Their thought was that I would be happy to have a table where my friends could come and play with me and we could have fun together, they thought I would be very happy to have a table where I could socialise and they did not know what I already had in my mind and what I was expecting to get. From my perspective now, I am sure my parents were perplexed and not a little disappointed with my reaction but from a coach's point of view, I now see what went wrong. It was about a difference between my expectations and my parents thoughts of what my expectations were.

I see this happening in our dealings with people quite a lot and wonder how many problems could have been avoided if we could have a discussion between the two parties interacting with each other and get a better picture of what the other expects.

Examples from my  past experiences:

A speaker was engaged for a conference and it was understood he would be given free food and lodging. The contracting was not well done however, and, he arrived several days earlier and decided to fly back several days later. He expected his whole visit to be paid for by the organizer but the organizers only wanted to pay for three days including the day of his presentation. This difference in expectation and the resulting misunderstanding could have been avoided if the terms of his engagement were stipulated clearly beforehand.


For Muslims, I would like to point out that contracting is clearly stated in several verses of the Quran.( Verses at the end of this article)

An agreement between two parties should at first be clearly stated, so that both parties are clear on what would be provided and in which quantity and on what date under what terms . This applies even to freebies and to any other dealings between two parties. It could be between patient and doctor, between customer and vendor , between a professional and his client, between a teacher and the pupils, between a husband and a wife and the list is endless. A discussion followed by a thorough understanding of what the other party expects is a contract, whether it be verbal or written. A written contract is far superior to a verbal one when it comes to disputes which arise after the contracting.

A vague promise by one party say Mr A,  would lead the other party, Mr B to imagine the undertaking to be more than what Mr A was willing to give and this applies to all of the parties I mentioned above and any that you could think of .

This also holds true for service providers who get payment for their services. Supposing I were to engage an entertainer for an event. Surely there will be terms of the payment . Perhaps a payment and some other benefits. What if there was an agreement to the terms and just before the event, the entertainer made some new requests? Surely I would feel that the entertainer had reneged on the original agreement and it would upset me. Indeed, in this case, the entertainer should right from the beginning state his/her terms and make sure that he/she does not demand more that what was agreed upon even if it meant he/she was being compensated less that what he/she felt he/she deserved!

An example I often quote between two people who marry each other is the expectation of the wife that she is getting a prince charming who will bring her flowers and gifts while the husband is imagining there is now someone who will cook and clean for him in the daytime while becoming a femme fatale at night ! Fireworks indeed when the prince charming turns out to be a snoring couch potato and the cook cleaner and femme fatale turns out to be a the girl who can only take care of her own little body or one who does the cooking and cleaning and gets so tired out that she goes to bed with her sweaty work clothes! So, you guys and girls who are planning to get married, do manage your expectations of each other , talk it out and spell out the dos and don'ts and make it as realistic and practical as possible . 

Below I quote several verses from the Quran that speak about contracts and honoring its terms:

1. O you who believe! Fully discharge (the obligations arising through) contracts
(Surah Ma’idah 5:1).

2. …and those who truly care for their trusts (left by others in their care) and their
covenants. (Surah Mu’minun 23:8).

1. Fully discharge the volume (to be provided to the client) when you measure in
volume, and weigh (the commodities sold by weight) by an accurate scale. That is
goodness and better (as a material and practical) interpretation (of the contract of sale
you have concluded).
(Surah Isra 17:34)

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