On responsibility:
It is my responsibility to allow others to use their own powers of creation.
It is my responsibility to stay centered in my life and my connection to source.
Here's a little story from my life to make this point.
Once a year we have an event at my Karate School called the Okinawan Karate
Dojo Water Olympics.
It's a silly little fun tournament and at the end a few of us get presented personalized trophies for being the winners of the event.
We will have this "spec tical" August 22nd.
We only do this event in August, since August gets really, really hot in Florida.
All my students practice during every class for 10 or 20 minutes with a cup of water on their head and we do all the regular karate routines, punches, kicks, katas, partner exercises etc. with this cup of water balanced.
Of course the practice sessions are pretty messy. Not everyone can do this the first week.
The day of the event if anyone spills a drop they will be eliminated and when we have the actual event, there will be parents and friends watching and people taking pictures. Two or three students will make it to the end, moment by moment and not have spilt a drop and these few will then parade into my indoor workout area and do one or two katas in the sacred training hall balancing the cup of water (after maybe 30 minutes of previous focused not spilling a drop effort). What fun. We laugh at the practice and we laugh at the actual event and in addition to getting better karate techniques, we get gerrrrrrrrrate pictures!
This is our first week of practice. We do the training for this event on my concrete with a roof over head out door workout area so wet and sloppy is no big deal.
Yesterday there were a few children practicing for the event. We all had a half full cup of water and we were moving slowly. I found myself reaching out and fixing or
adjusting one of the kid's water filled cup because the cup was sitting cock-eyed on his or her head.
hummmm....
I had never done that before. It was just too tempting. I knew if I didn't do that, the cup would fall and the water would splash.
Instead of minding my own business, I adjusted the cups......hahahaha
I had to laugh at myself for wanting to control in another's experience.
No big deal but afterward I thought, it is my responsibility to just let other people's cups of water fall and then allow them to begin again.
ahhhhhhhh....I just couldn't resist reaching out and making that little adjustment in someone else's experience, so that they could avoid the shame and the humiliation of water splashing all over them....when in reality, when the water falls...we laugh and begin again the process of refilling the cup and then just getting back on line.
It was a tad windy on the out door deck,yesterday, I lost my cup too...hahaha...but I just said, "Arigato"
(thank you in Japanese) picked up my cup and poured water from the jug into my empty cup and got back on line....no big deal. (a tad shameful for me, the Sensei,...hahaha...but I got over it!)
A lesson for me in responsibility to allow others their experience and their creation.
If you got this far, thanks for listening.