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The Stone Cutter
There was once a man who spent years shaping stones at the foot of a mountain. Day after day, he carved in silence —no applause, no recognition. Onlookers pitied him.
“All that work for nothing,” they whispered. “The mountain doesn’t change.”
But the man wasn’t trying to change the mountain.
He was changing himself.
With each strike of his hammer, he refined more than stone—he refined his focus, breath, and presence. His movements became more precise, his posture more effortless. Over time, his muscles grew lean, his breath deepened, and his mind grew still.
One afternoon, a traveler approached and watched in awe.
“How do you make it look so easy?” the traveler asked.
The man smiled. “I stopped trying to make it look like anything.”
He struck the stone once more, and it split along a perfect line—as if the mountain had always been waiting for that one, clean blow.
Mastery, the man had learned, isn’t about conquering. It’s about aligning—with breath, with rhythm, with the deeper intelligence flowing through all things.
He didn’t need to move the mountain.
He had become part of it.
