CCP Blog - Episode 2

Earning And Learning With Jade

If there is one stone that is greatly respected in the stone kingdom, especially in the East, it would be the jade. The jade is usually associated with nobility and wealth, and it is said that we must earn our place to learn about it. In this episode, Sarah Thomas takes us deep into what makes this stone so special. Rooted in respect, spiritual evolution, cultivation, and order, Sarah helps us earn and learn with jade. Join her in this great conversation as you learn not only about this stone but also find your own process of transformation. Know the knowledge and wisdom jade passes on to you. Let it be your foundation to keep evolving.

This episode is about jade. It is a great episode for you if you have wanted to know about jade, you have wanted to know some great times to get out of your jade or apply jade, why would you buy jade or why is jade so special. Especially in the East, jade is seen as so special. It is so highly valued and greatly respected. Jade has earned the respect of all of the other stones in the stone kingdom. It has earned the respect of humanity. It is said that we have to earn our place to learn jade. We have to study for long enough. We have to earn our place to come up to that place where we get the transmission from jade.

This episode is all about respect, learning, cultivation, spiritual evolution and order. Do you know those times when you built something yourself and it wasn't given to you? How good that feels that you created that yourself, that's the most beautiful side of earning. That is the beauty of earning. Jade has a lot to say about that. Let's dive into that in this episode.

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As a metal person, if I had a constitutional factor, that means what would my sun sign be in astrology or what would my Enneagram number be, a constitutional factor is what would my elements be in Chinese medicine. There are five elements. I am a metal person. That's why I'm wearing white for this episode because white is connected to metal.

I'm excited to bring that energy into our conversation about jade. You'll see how the metal piece comes up and wraps through. You'll get a sense of what that means, the place that I want to start as we get jade a little bit deeper under your bell. The stone is the most respected in China. It's still written about in headlines in newspapers.

Jade talisman saved someone from a burning building or jade brought this business so much good luck. Jade is almost like a dragon to them. It's a presence. It's like a consciousness that their whole culture interacts with and that's been going on for a long time. Jade is seen as the most spiritually evolved stone among stones.

Jade is seen as the most spiritually evolved stone among stones.

Where I'd like to start by reminding you and refreshing you of all this about jade and when to use jade is to think about that feeling that you have when you have built something yourself. Have you ever built own your house? Do you know how different that is to live in a house that you built yourself compared to buying one? It feels different.

Have you ever earned your own money? Have you ever gotten to a place where you said, "Everything that I earned in my life, I climbed up that ladder and I earned that?" It feels different than if you inherited money. Have you ever been like, "I took this ten-year training or apprenticeship. I went to medical school for ten years. I did this giant training in some kind of sport or athlete," something that you had to bring your intention to and you created it yourself.

That intention, creating it and building it with your presence, awareness and attention is earning something. We're going to talk about what it means to earn something. It's such a beautiful thing. How good do you feel when you created and earned something? Do you know what it feels like? It feels like you're sitting on something. To me, it's like I'm sitting on this foundation. I can look at some things in my life and be like, "I earned and created that." I feel like it's something that no one could ever take away from me.

It's because in that process of earning something, what you're doing is cultivating virtues. As you go through that process, it's an alchemical process and you get alchemically worked. I'm thinking of this one wonderful patient that I had that went through the process of building her own house. Several people whom I've been with went through the process of building their own houses. I've seen a lot about what that's like to witness somebody go through that process.

In that process of earning something, you're cultivating virtues.

She ended up getting sick in the middle of the process. She had to slowly keep going. She had these plans to have this done so much earlier. She was such a hard worker. There were times that she would lay in this unfinished house too sick to move. The courage, the will and the patience that that woman cultivated over that time is something that no one will ever be able to take away from her.

When she got to the end of that process and she was finally starting to heal through a giant ordeal and was sitting in her finished house lighting fires in the fireplace that she built, I know that she had a sense that she was sitting on something that no one could ever take away from her. You often find this process of earning something is connected to the cultivation of some virtue.

You cultivate something and that's the piece that no one could ever take away from you. We feel good when we do this. The interesting thing about this is this is also how we gain respect. We gain respect from other people when we cultivate these virtues. We go through these processes and earn something. It's these processes of cultivation that earn us respect from other people.

Even more importantly, they earn us our respect of ourselves. It's how we gain respect. It's so interesting that the things that matter in life and that make our life worth living, you can't buy them. No matter how much money you have, you can't buy health. You can't buy a sense of fitness or freedom in your body. You can't buy happiness. You can't buy wanting to wake up in the morning and feel good. You can't buy love, relationships, trust and respect.

It is ever fascinating to me that those things you have to cultivate. There's something beautiful and interesting about respect that I want to say as we lead up to bringing jade into the conversation. Respect and learning are directly correlative. Respect and learning are so correlated that you cannot learn from someone unless you respect them. One can't even exist without the other.

You have to respect someone to a certain degree to learn from them. You cannot learn from someone if you don't respect them. Isn't that amazing? To have a real teacher means that you have someone that you respect. Especially if you're learning something that's not just an A plus B equals C but if you're learning something that changes who you are, if you're learning something that is about spiritual evolution, you have to respect the person that you're learning from. You cannot learn from someone if you don't respect them. That's so interesting because it pulls cultivation together very closely on the side of the teacher and the side of the student.

Knowledge and wisdom were seen in ancient Daoist thought and Confucianist thought. Knowledge and wisdom were greatly respected. If somebody had true knowledge and wisdom, everybody saw that like, "This is something they cultivated and earned. They sat and meditated for year after year." Martial arts was very like this. If somebody got to a place where they had knowledge, wisdom and skill in martial arts, you knew that that person was on the mat so much.

People respected that. Knowledge and wisdom were something that was greatly respected because it wasn't something that will just hit you. It was something that you had to earn and cultivate. When a teacher would pass down their knowledge to a student and say, "I've been doing this for 20, 30 years or I've been apprenticing for 10 years and I'm going to give you what I've learned," that was seen as the greatest treasure and the most precious gift.

You had a sense of inheriting a whole foundation. Remember how I said that when we earn something ourselves, build something ourselves and cultivate something on our own, it feels like we're sitting on something that no one could ever take away from us. That's what it feels like to me. It's like I'm sitting on this pile of goodness like it's a foundation.

In the moments when you would receive teachings from a teacher, knowledge or wisdom, you had the sense that you were inheriting this whole foundation. This is what you studied this whole time and you're just going to tell me or gift me this. You would stand on their shoulders and then the person that you taught would stand on your shoulders. Everything kept evolving in that way.

You didn't have to keep starting from zero over and over again. It was like the whole collective humanity was evolving through teaching, learning, knowledge and wisdom. That key piece in there was respect. There was an order to how this was done. Let's say there was an 80-year-old teacher that was about to pass on and they had all of this wisdom that they hadn't shared yet because it wasn't time. Now, it was time to share everything.

There was an order to where they would pass that down. It wasn't just, "Give it out to that twenty-year-old over there that's goofing off." There was probably someone who was 77 years old that cultivated their whole life and you pass it down in order. That order was also a way of respecting. We talk about cleanliness as godliness. People say that.

They're talking about order. It's not just cleanliness. Order is close to God. Order is close to oneness because there's a way that everything that gets passed down. This order is a way of saying, "I respect so much what is above me. We're going to put this out and pass this on as a reflection of the divine." The divine itself is like a snowflake with perfect order.

You can see that this passing down of all of this order, respect, lineages and knowledge is a reflection of the divine in its own metal way. This is all under the element of metal. Not the earth, fire or air but when you look at a metal crystal, there's perfection in that. There's order in the way that those faces come up and then it shines. It's like reflecting the order of the divine, like that perfect snowflake. Those crystalline structures, there's order to that. It's like sacred geometry. There's order.

This is all a very metally conversation. I find that people who are true teachers get this. They get that there's an order. They respect what they're learning. They don't even have to be told for a second to respect it. They realize that when they pass it down to their students, it's going to be something so precious that they're passing it down.

Cultivation. Earning something. This is all connected to jade. Why jade? Jade is a stone that was once agate. Agate spiritually evolved to become jasper. Jasper spiritually evolved to become chalcedony. Chalcedony spiritually evolved to become jade. That is the Daoist thought about this grouping of stones. Agate became jasper, jasper became chalcedony and chalcedony became jade.

Jade is a stone that's gone through literally millions of seasons of cultivation and of spiritually refining itself. Going through these consciousness shifts that were so great that they became another stone. When it finally becomes jade, it has consciously evolved. It has consciously gone through that whole journey. It has earned that seat. Now, it is the most consciously evolved stone of all.

What's interesting about this is the name for jade. One of the names for jade has an image of a horse's brain or a horse's bone marrow because brain and bone marrow point to the same thing in Daoist medicine. They point to the horse's true essence. They point to the horse's true self. It's like saying the true soul of the horse. Why the horse? Why would jade be the brain or the marrow of a horse?

When the horse came to China and they realized that they could ride this horse extremely long distances and be gone for several days, they made it further than they had ever made it before. The horse took them to these great distances. This changed their reality and consciousness so much that they became another consciousness to go out into the world like that, see all of these different things, see all of these different groups of people in villages and learn all of these different things.

The greater perspective you have, the higher your level of consciousness is. Those are also two things that are connected. When the horse came along, the entire culture was elevated to a new consciousness because they were able to see the world. They were able to finally go such great distances, see other places, learn new recipes, find new stones, find new herbs, meet new healers, learn how things were done and get new spices. They had a shift in consciousness.

The greater perspective you have, the higher your level of consciousness is.

This would be for us if something came here that was a dragon or something that took us to other celestial realms and we got to meet all of these star people and star worlds. What are they doing on this planet? What are they doing in this galaxy? Our consciousness level would significantly rise. When we'd go to such a greater perspective, our consciousness level would shoot up.

That's what the horse was like for them at that time. The brain or the marrow of the horse represented the true essence of the horse. The true essence of the horse was this possibility of a raise in consciousness, this possibility of almost becoming a different society and human being. It's like becoming a new specie. It's the evolution of consciousness.

That was one of the names for jade. The marrow or brain of a horse because it is the promise of an awakening and spiritual cultivation that lands you in a whole new state of consciousness. Jade earned that consciousness. Jade consciously evolved for millions and billions of seasons. It changed who it was. It transmuted.

It was once agate and then it was once jasper and then it transmuted again to chalcedony and it transmuted to jade. It has been on this long journey of cultivation. It is seen as the most highly cultivated stone through a journey that earned that place. Jade is a stone that has earned the respect of other stones, the respect of other beings in nature and the respect of humanity.

Humanity thinks jade is amazing. It's highly valued. When we are learning, we often say that we have to earn jade. We have to get to a place in our spiritual cultivation where we get it, where our resonance gets high enough to get it, understand jade and get that transmission so we have to earn jade. It's the most beautiful way that I could talk about cultivation because cultivation is so warped in Western society. It's just like working hard, working yourself to death and working yourself to the bone but the beauty that I'm talking about is the beauty of earning something.

Going through an initiatory process and then becoming who you are is something that no one could ever take away from you. It's the beauty side of earning and respect. How do we gain respect for ourselves when we go through those processes and we gain the respect of others? We can teach. People can learn from us. We can evolve the entire society. This is the beautiful side of earning.

This episode is the yin to the yang of an episode on grace and lapis lazuli that you can look up. They're great to listen to each other side by side. When you have somebody who is about to embark on a spiritual cultivation journey, they are starting school to go to big learning, they're going into a ceremony or a ritual or they're going into something that's going to spiritually evolve them, you would give them jade.

You would treat them with jade. You would put jade around them. You'd put jade into their rituals to help them go through that. In the middle of a process of cultivation, give them jade to keep them going. At the end of a great process of cultivation and earning, you would give them jade to congratulate them or say, "You did it. You made it."

Sometimes students will give their teachers a piece of jade as a thank you. I would use jade if I knew somebody was spiritually evolving and that they were getting transformed down to their essence to the point where they were becoming a new person and were transmuting at the level of the soul. It's a way to say, "Keep going. You're earning this. You're doing something that counts, something that matters and something that's changing you. I respect that. I see you. I acknowledge that." These are sometimes to work with jade.

The last thing I'll say is when we talk about jade evolving on the Earth and the way that it changed, the process that it went through to become who it is and the reflection that we see in this stone, the way that we see ourselves in it, when we talk about this, it's not just metaphors. It's not just us coming up with some funny story. It is a transmission that's happening.

It's something that the Earth itself is teaching us and showing us through our relationship with the stone that she has given us. Thank you for that transmission, jade. I can feel the support. I've got that foundation underneath you for all the things that you're building and cultivating. You can do it. It's your purpose to spiritually evolve and cultivate. It can be a beautiful process to earn something. That is a little bit about jade and cultivation. I'll see you in the next episode.