I was out with a couple of friends the other night, and we went to this local Thai restaurant. The kind where you need to choose the “hotness” level from 1-10.
I chose six.
It reminded me of the story of the Golden Buddha, from Thai history.
Maybe you’ve heard it? It’s pretty cool.
Back in the 1300’s or so, Thailand was always being invaded by the Burmese. Since the Burmese army was always stronger than the Thai’s, the Thai’s would just kind of “let them” invade, break and bunch of stuff, and then leave.
They seemed interested in taking over, they just liked breaking stuff.
Anyhow, before one of these invasions, in one of the temples they have a Golden Buddha. It’s a statue, about 2 meters high, that is made up, in large part, of gold.
Too big to hide, they decided to cover the gold with clay, figuring that the Burmese wouldn’t pay much attention to some small (comparatively) clay statue.
Only problem is during all the craziness of being invaded and having all their temples looted and trashed, they kind of forgot about the Golden Buddha.
In fact, a couple hundred years went by. All this time, even the local Thai’s figured it was just a regular, clay statue.
Until one day, this monk was cleaning it. And a piece of clay broke off.
And showed the gold that was inside.
He went to his superiors, and they carefully removed the clay, and were absolutely astonished to find the gold that was within.
And to this very day, you can visit the Golden Buddha if you ever visit Thailand. It’s a pretty tourist attraction.
This, of course, is a perfect metaphor for human development.
We start off as children, pure gold. We express ourselves without fear, without anxiety, without worry.
Then we “learn” that it may be dangerous if people discover our gold.
So we cover ourselves in clay, hoping nobody will notice us.
So much that we forget that the gold is still there, waiting to be discovered.
No matter who you are, what your experience is, or how much you value yourself, you’ve got gold inside.
Isn’t it time to strip away the clay of false fear and share your gold with the world?
This can make it much easier: