A Call to LOVE: Something to Hold US

"And if my words don't come together
Listen to the melody
'Cause my love is in there hiding."
~Donny Hathoway

I am mourning the loss of my mom as I write this - pulled inside out, exhausted, confused, angry, fearful, and also deeply grateful to be here in this life – to hear the call to LOVE another day.

As is my way, all that I feel and think and understand is processed through these words and through meditation - it's how I discover new relationships, clarify needs and misunderstandings, digest and frame new ways of being with emotion; it's 'how' I action myself so as to rise into the arms and strength of LOVE's resilience - to be OK about not being OK.

What this faithful movement continuously returns is that I can be with this heartbreak – this idea of ‘not fair, no more, not now’ – and still have access to the power of LOVE. It is, in fact, the very experience of being ‘heartbroken, exhausted, confused that revealed this to me, the way fear reveals the belief that I am at the mercy of that identity.

LOVE.

It’s so misunderstood, and in an on-demand world, it shows up as a product in our ‘shopping cart’ – an identity packaged and expedited to our home that makes it easy for us to hold. But this ‘easy’ is only temporary; like the conditions of the objects we buy, it fades. And, with the challenges that remain in our world, we need something to ‘hold us’ just as much as something ‘to hold’.

The ‘thing’ about LOVE is that we call to it as if we don’t have it – or we work for it as if we need to prove that we deserve it, or we arrive believing that we earned it and demand it - and, in the course of doing so, we circumvent the awareness of who we really are - we deny our own LOVE.

In this way, as Rumi points, our task is not to seek the reasons for love, "but to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it," - to ‘know thyself.'

THYSELF.

This is the lesson that my mother tried to teach me when I was young and suffering, "Learn to Love yourself," she would say. But, I didn't know how- I didn't know what that meant back then; I had a conditioned belief of what love was, and though I now understand that there is much of LOVE that can be learned, it was for me to teach myself, not for another to bestow.

Knowledge arrives with experience, especially when we discover what LOVE is not.

To understand and process what we are experiencing and feeling demands a safe space, so we can willingly weave ourselves into a fabric of life that we have designed – so we can confidently and compassionately come together on the inside for the mutual benefit of the outside.

As a life-long student and teacher of Life and Love (Mindfulness & Meditation), there is no greater calling than sharing the dimensions, realms, and energetic relationships that arrive to hold us and which teach us how to hold - those that lead us into the Heart, and those that remind us of the freedom Love upholds.

Indeed, our most vital work is in the realization of who we really really are as we stumble and forget, and then in actioning ourselves from that LOVE.