WORDS CHANGE US: THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN by Carlos Castaneda

Tonight’s WORDS THAT CHANGED ME comes from a modern spiritual classic, “The Teachings of Don Juan” by Carlos Castaneda.

Here it is:

“Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.”

I’ve liked this quote since I first read it in the late 1990s.

Back then, I drove semi-regularly from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Las Barrancas del Cobre in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madre.

I didn’t know what drove me to travel to far-off, sometimes dangerous places like Mexico’s Sierra Madre, Greenland, The Amazon, Indonesia, or Palestine. I didn’t know what I was seeking. I’m sure, on some level, I was trying to prove something to myself.

Was I brave?

I’m sure I was also trying to escape, run, from a lot of things: America, with its emphasis on buying and achieving?

Maybe myself.

But now I understand some of it.

I now see that I was searching for, among other things, a path with more HEART.

By MORE HEART, I mean more open and connected and responsive to REALITY. More human.

Back then, I believed that IT was OUT THERE.

I was wrong.

It’s IN HERE.

HEART is something we cultivate, grow, and tend to.

And share.

Now, whenever I start down a new path, I ask myself Don Juan’s brilliant question:

“Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.”

What words changed you?