Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you. – Rumi

It is much easier to do than be. We get up on the run, showers to take, families to feed, lists, errands, work, out of milk again, one more trip to the grocery store, might as well pick up more toothpaste, meetings run long, dinner is late, finally to bed, only to wake up the next morning and repeat. We may begin to wonder where we are in all of that doing. Quietly waiting for a sliver of our own attention, sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Like I said, it’s easier to do than be.

This is how the days go, putting out the small fires, meanwhile the inner fire slowly dies. Who we are gets put on hold. Vaguely we may remember we love to paint, or use to read more, took solitary walks deep into the forest or nearby park. Being is the doorway to discovering our inner fire and the more introspective we are the clearer it becomes. But the quiet things are easy to forget, they seem luxurious, when really they are just as necessary as anything else if we are going to tend the fire of the soul.

We know we’re getting closer when something really stirs us up, a project, a person, an idea. When there is tremendous heat and excitement around something we know the soul is speaking. We come even closer when we follow up on it. It can be as simple as writing down the thoughts that bubble up from inside. Maybe it’s planning a garden for spring, singing in the shower, dancing under the full moon, or listening to our intuition more often. Every small spontaneous action feeds our inner fire.

Somewhere between cultivating greater awareness of our everyday actions and deep, languid thinking comes the drop off point, lost in thought, lost in nature, lost in the spaciousness of the moment. How much time slips by in this kind of thinking doesn’t matter, being doesn’t keep time. No game plan, no solutions, no what’s next, only now, only this moment.

This kind of being is the secret path to tending our fire, the inner light within that is joyful, grounded, and centered in the now, just as it is. Here we sit side by side with our soul. There is no way to plan being, all we can do is give ourselves some room to let being be. Tending our own fire means we honor what’s found inside, even when we don’t quite know exactly what that is.

The more attention we give the secret places of ourselves the bigger the inner fire grows. Being gets a chance to live and breathe in our daily rounds. Suddenly we are pumping gas or petting the dog settled into the moment at hand without qualifying or manipulating it. That’s what more being, less doing means. The more familiar we become with this kind of being and the more consciously engaged we are, the more we take the deepest essence of who we are into everything else we do.

So how do you tend the fire within? Pour yourself a cup of hot tea and head out to the garden or a cozy chair and see what comes next.

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