"Tending soul requires patient and sensitive listening to inner needs and wants: resting when we need to rest, rather than when convention or habit dictates; respecting our desires for solitude even though others may consider it antisocial; weeping when there are tears to weep. With each compassionate and understanding response to our needs, with each authentic expression of who we are, our capacity to recognize and respect our nature increases. And inasmuch as and only to the extent to which we can acknowledge, allow and serve our own souls, we can acknowledge, allow and serve the souls of others.
Like a musical instrument, the soul and its physical form can express the symphonies of Self -- the songs of God -- only as sensitively as its own degree of delicacy and refinement permits. For just as a Stradivarius allows levels of a Bach violin sonata to be heard which cannot be heard on a beginner's violin, so a finely wrought soul allows more of God's voice to be amplified than one unrefined by spiritual and psychological work."
This is the secret. You must step back, separate yourself from your everyday thoughts and habitual gestures: look at them. It is patient work, like the work of the watchmaker who observes the spirals and gears under the lens, cleans and calibrates. The secret is to retreat deep into oneself until one encounters an almost imperceptible vibration, which then becomes more and more evident, a silent, separate, calm vibration. Those who anchor themselves in this possess serenity all day long.
