I’ve had the privilege of experiencing and hearing about so many new insights, healings, growth, shifts, and understandings over the past few months that I’m not even sure what might be of use to share with you for your own journeys. Perhaps (loving shoulder shrug) a capacity for the richness of all that life has to offer. The “good” and the more challenging? The relationships, the illusion of time, memory, sensation…being.
Immediately after writing that entry point to this newsletter I think underneath it all is love.
Love is all there is.
Even my/your initial response to hearing that statement is a door to understanding more of your own ways of giving and receiving love. The beliefs and blocks and/or openness around it. What holds you back? What do you need from love? In love?
Are there qualifications? Resentments? Requirements? Can they be thrown out?
What if love (of yourself and for others) truly had no conditions? What about the radical love that comes from the capacity of the heart to be present? What about actively living from the heart?
I realized just the other day that I spent the first 35 years of life trying to avoid feeling and now my feelings guide me in everything I do. 100%. To me, this is love: honoring those feelings and letting them be heard. This is deep listening and it helps me to also listen from the heart in ways that I could not do in the past. And that is okay. The shadows of ourselves just want love too.
And yes, sometimes love of yourself requires separation from others, protection, and can even feel at times that being unloving towards others is what needed and yet… and within actions of tending to and taking care of yourself there is an openness to the life force energy of love that is available.
I write about love in different ways in my Loving Kindness for Everyday Life book. What I have learned from offering that meditation and visualization in the past is that, often, many of us are practiced in giving love but many (including me) are not so trusting in receiving it.
That receiving it often means risk. Risk of rejection, sure. But, more often as I’m coming to learn for myself, the risk of acceptance. And in that acceptance some odd letting go of control; letting go of holding others away.
As trauma and war and many of what feel like the antithesis to being loving continue to unfold around the world, I want to believe that as our human capacity to love radically grows there is yet a possibly new world. It may be thousands of years away and, if we don’t start now with ourselves and one another… Without ignoring all of what happens in this world, one way through is to grow more of what is already here too: love.
I did not expect to write any of this when I sat down to share with you that I have a Reiki 1 Training on November 4th because the early bird rate ends on Friday 10/13 (haha). But/and I have been writing newsletters and posts for at least eight years now and I have learned to trust in whatever comes through when I feel called to write them. I hope it resonates for you in some way.
Majestic Wisdom Publishing 