Mark Silver: Founder of The Heart of Business

This week I got the pleasure of interviewing Mark Silver. It was one of my favorite interviews so far.

Mark Silver is a recognized master teacher in his Sufi lineage, and has earned his Masters of Divinity. He is also the founder and leads the team at Heart of Business, and since 2001 they've helped thousands of small business owners develop their small business in this dysfunctional economy, while striving to live the truth that every act of business can be an act of love. He lives in central New York with his wife and twin sons.

https://www.heartofbusiness.com/

EPISODE QUOTABLES:

The core Sufi practice is called remembrance. It's remembering the divine, remembering the presence of the divine and One. The way that we understand divinity, and divine and Allah as the word, is the name, is that this is not a beard in the sky, it is the oneness, it's universal source that we all come from and we all return to, on that we are not separated from. Our yearning, our striving, is to remember the divine in every moment, in everything, to see the oneness and the multiplicity and to see the multiplicity and the oneness. ~Mark Silver

Sufism is it is a is a devotional practice, it's a devotional path and it has to do with not of detachment but of attachment, like we're attempting to attach ourselves to the One, to the love through love.

The Remembrance as a practice, is the repeating of the calling of the name.  It's not a mechanical practice, it's a relationship, like we're wanting to be in relationship with the One and there is some of the language of the deity, language that comes in because it represents an intimacy that is available you.

Love is a deeply attaching force and quality and that's what we're attempting to do, is to feel the love is to witness the love it's present in everything in every moment.

I'm trying to call through my heart to the divine and be aware of that presence as much as possible.

The way that we understand and witness the divine according to Sufism is of course is by the 99 divine qualities. ~Mark Silver

It's just a way of understanding how the divine moves everything, that everything is an expression of the movement of divine presence and that we're never alone and we're never separate. ~Mark Silver

So many of our actions are unfulfilling, because the actions are an attempt to manufacture divine qualities and human beings are completely unable to manufacture divine qualities we don't have that power but what we can do is we can sense that neediness inside ourselves a thirst for safety a thirst for love a thirst for appreciation for connection for wisdom for guidance for forgiveness and then we can ask for it and we can fill with it and then when we're filled with it we can be an expression of it.

In Sufism the one of the metaphors we use the metaphor of the ocean a lot and water and thirst and so  what I've come to understand is that these emotions like fear and anger and a grief these are just symptoms of thirst it's like when we're thirsty our throat gets dry when we get hungry our stomach rumbles when our heart is thirsty we feel fear or anger or grief and it's just the sign of thirst and we can either you know go for junk food that doesn't really nourish us or we can slow down and get what really nourishes us and for me an understanding of the thirst of the heart's thirst helps me not react on the fear so directly. ~Mark Silver