Dear Friends,

With the coming of the New Year come also the new responsibilities and obligations. However, we often get intimidated by inner and outer fears and become less able to accomplish our intentions.

A hundred years ago, in the tumultuous time of the First World War, Rudolf Steiner gave this meditation (in my translation) to a person that was being entrusted by High Beings in the Spiritual World with a particular task. This person needed strengthening because he was allowing himself to be sidelined and thus prevented from carrying out that task. Not standing firm he was essentially allowing adversary forces to succeed in purposes contrary to his own.

Doesn’t that often happen to us too? Do we not often know exactly what is expected of us spiritually/anthroposophically and yet we succumb to material needs and fears? Do we not often get overwhelmed by the world around us? Do we not often choose physical comforts over what we know to be our spiritual mission? Do we not overvalue perceived risks? Do we not need help?

This meditation will help us to neutralize misleading impressions that disable us, that make us timid. This meditation is meant to give us strength:

What do you deceiving thoughts, and images that lead me astray

Have to do with the High (purpose) that I must (do);

The Spirits want it of me after all.

Thus I remove the enmity to my own Soul,

By forcing myself to strong thinking,

Out of my timid heart,

That strongly serves me if I only will it.

As in any meditation of R. Steiner’s the cadence and the peculiar sequence of the sentences is crucial. The weaving back and forth is just as much unusual in German as it appears here in English – but we need to observe it. First the question is raised what the thoughts and images of the physical world have to do with the spiritual mission that the person knows it has to do. Then the certainty needs to be reasserted that one is aware that the good spiritual beings have entrusted one with a high mission- for each person its unique one. Then the realization comes that by forceful strong thinking (the right thinking) one can remove the hindrances that make the heart timid and thus transform it into a Courageous Heart.

Happy New Year,

From all of us at the Institute