Your soul is your life. Everything else is a fiction -- a mind game in authenticity. Without nourishing your own soul, you can't nourish the world; you can't give what you don't have. As your soul grows, however, it emanates invisibly and involuntarily the light which it has received.
How terribly the rice suffers under the pestle!
But it emerges polished, as white as cotton.
The same process tempers the human spirit:
Hard trials shape us into polished diamonds.