Inner Practice: Things You Should Not Give (Part 2)

This is the second part of the blog post on things you should not give away. And for this part, although it applies to all, I especially would like to dedicate this to my readers of a more senior age.

Read Things You Should Not Give (Part 1) here.

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You must never give away your remaining years of life energy.

Let’s be direct here. Because I believe you deserve directness at this stage of your life, young or old.

There is a teaching called Impermanence.

In short, nothing lasts forever.  

Knowing about impermanence is not to fill us with fear, but to awaken in us a deep appreciation for what we have.

This life is precious.

A precious human birth.

To be born as a human being – with a mind capable of reflection, capable of wisdom, capable of awakening – is described as rarer than a blind turtle who rises once every hundred years to the surface of the ocean, finding its head through a single floating wooden yoke. That is how rare this life is.

And yet many of you – good, generous, loving people – are spending these precious remaining years in ways that are not truly yours to spend.

You feel guilty saying no. You feel selfish setting a limit. Someone says, “But you are the only one who can help me”, and something in you surrenders before you have even had time to think.

As a matter of fact, many people had this on their mind: “I wish I had kept something for myself”. Not out of greed, not out of selfishness, but out of the deep knowing that there was something they came to this earth to be, to feel, to discover – and they were so busy giving it away that they never got there.

Your energy, especially at sixty, seventy, at eighty is sacred.

It is limited.

And it is yours.

This does not mean you stop caring for others. Of course not. Love remains. Presence remains. But there is a difference between choosing to give your energy and having it extracted from you by guilt, by obligation, by the needs of people who could, if they had to, find their own way.

Practice: every morning, before the phone rings, before the requests begin, take 5 minutes. Sit quietly. And ask yourself. “What am I pouring my energy into today? Is this mine to give? Will this leave me more whole, or less?”

Not every question will have an easy answer. But the asking itself is a form of wisdom. The asking is you honoring the life that still pulses in you.

The candle has been burning for quite a while, if not for a long time. Protect what flame remains – not so it shines only for you, but so it does not go out before its time.

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Basics of TCM, TCM(Traditional Chin Med), Inner Practice, Being HumanXiang Jun LimDr (TCM) Xiang Junacupuncture, healing, tcm, inner practice, wisdom, generosity, inner peace