Relaxing into love
🎶 and a NEW workshop on September 22nd in collaboration with the masterful Bali sound healer Shervin Boloorian 🎶
In this world of argument, so caught in the compulsions of demanding, defending and distracting, I find it helpful to remember two things.
That I can choose where to place my attention.
And that the way in which I attend, is also a choice.
Choosing where to place our attention doesn’t only apply to the outer world: to whom and what we listen to or read; to whether or not we curb the mind’s addictive search for stimuli. That’s important of course, but it’s also important to choose where to place our attention in our inner landscape. Do we get lost in our compulsive and often repetitive thoughts, for example? Are we equally aware of bodily sensations and emotions? And how does this impact our capacity to respond wisely?
The modern world is so dissociated from the body and emotions that we might not even realise there’s a distinction between attention and thinking. They might feel like one thing: where thinking goes, attention follows, looping through familiar (and often neurotic) pathways. And even when we are aware of the body and emotions, our relationship to them is often coloured by filters of judging, comparing and fixing.
This all leaves us reactive. Our attention follows habitual pathways of blame, shame, fussing and fixing, and our actions follow immediately behind. Which means we do what we’ve always done before, despite the suffering which has always ensued.
When something hurts, we attempt to hold on, defend, attack or distract, in the hope it will ease the pain we feel in body, mind or heart, but blind to the fact that these behaviours have only ever perpetuated suffering in the past.
Choosing where and how to place our attention is a stepping stone towards living in love, because when we meet what is here with love, we actually experience love, right here and now. The grief, fear or physical pain which may have overwhelmed or directed us moments ago will still be here, of course. But we no longer feel we’re fighting or drowning, so we no longer need to numb, distract or destroy.
When love is present, even as we struggle some part of us knows that it is home; some part of us feels that it is whole. And some part of us knows that this home and wholeness is shared by you too.
To experience love alongside pain means we widen our field of attention. This not only soothes and heals ourselves: it also allows us to respond to the complexity and contradiction of this world with less reactivity. We have access to more of ourselves: to intuition, imagination, the subtle signals of the body and the wisdom of the heart alongside our intellect. Which means we can respond with greater flexibility, kindness and energy. We are able to meet life with wisdom, compassion and delight: gifts more potent than cleverness alone.
I’ve been wondering about all this whilst walking through the house my Italian grandparents used to live in before they died. The house is being sold: someone else wants it to become their story now. But my own stories are woven into the fabric of my life.
I see myself, age 10, sitting high in the apricot tree, the indescribable happiness of eating soft ripe fruit directly from a tree warmed by the sun… age 17, walking through the garden with my grandmother, the sense of belonging to something sacred as she taught me about plants and flowers, her hands as soft and wrinkled as mine have now become… age 22, bringing my boyfriend to meet the family, tethered to my past whilst teetering on the edge of a future of my own… age 28, introducing my plump 3 month old baby, the swelling joy of his toothless smiles lighting up their faces… And then came so many summers with all the little ones together, cousins putting on plays, making treasure hunts, learning to swim. Bringing their own friends as they grew older, then bringing their partners. Cycles of life.
These memories bring tears, indignation even, when I believe something is being lost or taken from me. But when I release these stories of loss or abandonment, and embrace the grief itself with love, the memories are liberated into the pure joy that they are.
Of course, some part of me wants to be in that house forever. But it was love which filled it with so much colour. And it’s the wheel of change which makes love so colourful. How beautiful that the house will continue into countless more colourful stories.
This is a sobering reminder for me: that when I choose to invest in contracted stories, my heart closes in resentment and coldness. And when I choose to widen my attention to feel what hurts with love, my heart opens in appreciation and gratitude. The conditions remain the same, but my experience of them changes, and so does my response.
Widening our attention with curiosity and kindness shifts our perspective. We’re able to see things as they really are, from a place no longer caught up in the tension and drama of reactivity.
Whilst at my grandparents house I read Samantha Harvey’s beautiful novel “Orbital”, about astronauts orbiting the Earth in the international space station. ‘A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.’
Now, when I look up at the sky, I think of the 5 men and 2 women who, in this moment, are gazing back down at us from space. Witnessing the majesty of 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets while I move through the seeming solidity of this one arc of day into night. For them, a new day begins every 90 minutes. For them, new continents and seasons emerge and dissolve in the time it takes me to stumble through breakfast. They can’t see us, but they see the impacts of what we do playing out on the largest canvas there is.
It helps me remember that everything changes.
That nothing is separate.
And that what we do matters.
I wonder if we, too, could gaze down on this blue green pearl of feathered clouds and shimmering light as it turns through a blackness - so dense with a vibrant aliveness that no words can describe it - would we shake our heads and weep in horrified, compassionate disbelief at the way we tear each other apart at its surface? Or would we simply turn to each other speechless at the preciousness of our home and the life we all share, moving forward with tenderness, respect, responsibility and humility, in silent agreement that none of us are separate on this finely balanced ball of life spinning through space?
Everything changes, nothing is separate and what we do matters. But we don’t need to journey into space to remember this. Each time we choose to widen our attention and receive with love, we strengthen our capacity to let go into love, and respond from love as well.
This takes practice, of course. But just like those astronauts whose years and years of training allowed them to receive unimaginable beauty from a place just beyond the ever-turning curve of the Earth, with practice we, too, are able to receive this moment from a place vast with wonder and awe. Without travelling anywhere, we release, widen, and relax into love, right here.
Relaxing into love actually allows us to give ourselves back more fully. We offer our unique song to the one sound, our creative spark to the one brilliant light. We are able to listen to each other’s fears without needing to attack, defend or define. To share our gifts without needing to compete or compare.
Relaxing into love, we might even, one day, look around in gentle wonder and heartfelt kindness at the different ways we experience this one blue green pearl spinning through space… falling through space… caught only by the grace of the sun.
September 22nd
I am honoured and delighted to co-host a workshop with the world renowned virtuosic sound healer Shervin Boloorian as he orbits through London from Bali this year. It will be in Primrose Hill from 2.30-5.30pm on Sunday September 22nd (full details here).
Together, Shervin and I will weave a magic tapestry of yoga, wisdom teachings and meditation, with live sacred music, heart opening mantra and relaxing sound medicine to ease the mind, open the body and expand the heart.
We will practise seated, reclining and standing postures intertwined with live sacred music, toning and chanting, followed by meditation and a long sound bath in savasana, where you will receive the vibrational energy of Shervin’s didgeridoo, Zen flute, shaman drum, strings, meditation chimes, gong, guitar, crystal bowls, percussion, and authentic medicine chants.
We will invoke and embody the elements of earth, water, fire, air and space, to become more grounded, relaxed, awake, open and spacious. And we will honour the autumn equinox - a time when the cosmic scales shift from masculine to feminine - by relaxing into love.
Book your space here - and see you there!
.