Living in love

What might it mean for you, in this moment, to live in love?

I had intended to join the “Peace is Every Step” walking meditation in London today, alongside some of you here. But it is also the anniversary of my father’s death, so I needed to find a personal expression of this heartfelt prayer rather than a collective one. I’m sharing a few experiences from my practice this morning in case you find resonance and solidarity in these words. 

In my meditation, grief quite naturally came forward first. My heart is aching from both the long journey with my father and the unfathomable depth of suffering currently alive in the world. It takes such courage to hold loving space for grief without jumping into numbing, fixing or distracting. I watched how quickly my mind moved into overwhelm (“the scale of these problems are just too big”) and self-judgement (“what I’m doing is never enough”).

For me, though I practise anchoring the mind with loving presence in a meditation practice, whatever arises in the body is not a distraction, even if it differs from my initial intention. It is the place love is being called to attend, first. By coming into the body, releasing the stories and feeling what is here, with love, I am witness to love’s presence and expansion. 

So in my meditation I turned towards overwhelm with curiosity and care. Releasing its stories, I discovered fear waiting behind them. I gave fear permission, breathed into its tension in my diaphragm, told it that it belongs here too. That it’s safe here. And slowly I began to feel love’s embrace holding it.

Love’s embrace came with the reminder that transformation is always hard, but it is our participation in this alchemical fire which determines what grows: whether love or fear. I felt how healing it is to meet fear with love, rather than the suffering and destruction of walking through life acting from fear. I recognised how I had more capacity to receive life’s complexity and confusion without closing my heart.

At some point, self-judgement came forward again. The crippling sense of not being enough, not doing enough. So I turned my attention there, releasing its stories and meeting its tension in my body with love. The tightness in my breathing and the familiar diminished sense of self began to feel like they were held with forgiveness. I found myself able to forgive my smallness and my fallibility. A little more able to relax into the naturalness of my imperfect humanness.

I began to feel judgement itself held in forgiveness. And once again I felt how healing it is to meet judgement with love, rather than the tightness and meanness of walking through life acting from judgement. I felt more capacity to act in alignment with love, more openness to wonder what my own authentic expression really is.

From these practices a beautiful reminder began to emerge: that alongside our individual journeys of transformation, there is a collective transformation which we’re witnessing right now. Together, we are One Being moving through the birth canal of transformation. Each one of us is a cell of that Being, doing what is ours to do. This is the journey of a collective shedding of old skin, a collective version of the Biblical walk through the valley of death to reach the temple of light. 

We are very much still in that valley of death, but everything each one of us does in service of love as a cell in the body of humanity, influences the whole. Whether marching on the streets or taking care of a child or a neighbour. Whether patiently creating new laws in parliament or patiently following the delight of a 5 year old baking biscuits in the kitchen.

Gabor Mate has said a few times that all we can do is our best, knowing it will never be enough. And yet each individual not-enoughness leads to a collective sea-change. If we can begin with the willingness to receive the enormity of the tragedies at hand and the changes ahead - without knowing the answer but without turning away - we grow into finding and expressing our small but necessary part in turning the heart and mind of this collective Being towards something new. 

I am so happy to know that some of you - other sister and brother cells in our shared body - walked in prayers for peace today. And whether others of you found your own expression of peace or were lost all day in a storm of reactivity, I hope you are able to find a moment, right now, to meet yourself just as you are. Meeting yourself even in grief, fear or judgement with love’s courage, belonging and forgiveness.

I am happy to think of all of us, in our own small and large ways, as living, walking, sitting and moving prayers for peace, right now, together in this body of love.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground ~ Rumi