The forms of love

The specific forms that love take in our lives arise and pass in time, for this is the way of form. Time is the great dissolver. But love itself is that which never comes and goes.

We never know what form love will choose to take in the future, for there is no love in the future. Love is only now. But it can take a cleansing of perception to see through the veil, behind the scenes where love is always at work… giving birth to one of its forms, one of its children, while recycling and dissolving another.

If we become too fused with a specific form we believe we need love to take—a particular person or way of finding purpose and meaning—our heart will inevitably break when love obliterates that form for something new, which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form, evidence not of error and mistake, but of wholeness and profound compassion.

This dissolution and reorganization is a special kind of grace that the conventional mind struggles to know. But the heart knows. The body knows.

May we be grateful for the forms of love while they appear, standing in awe at the ways the beloved takes expression within this chaotic, messy, and glorious sanctuary of time and space. While simultaneously allowing the forms to make their own journey, to depart this place and move into another world.

Seek ultimate refuge not in love’s forms, but in the field of love itself, that which never comes and goes. For this is what you are.

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True 

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster

The mystery of one and two

Usually when we talk about the “others” in our lives, we are referring to persons external to us who we are in relationship with—friends, lovers, children, neighbors, family members, and colleagues. But there is another “other” found not external to us, but inside, weaved of the lost pieces of our hearts, broken dreams, partly digested feelings, and the content of our unlived lives.

Just like external others, these ones also long to be known, heard, and cared for, to receive a moment of our uninterrupted attention. They are not limited to only a few forms but appear in infinite ways, as shape-shifters who are of endlessly creativity in their ability to make their way into our experience to remind us of something we may have forgotten.

In this way, relational work is not only with an “external” other but simultaneously with the disowned and displaced figures of the psyche and body. Many of us long to be in a healthy, nourishing, mutually-loving relationship with another, a fellow traveler that we can walk through this world with and share in the beauty and pain of this bittersweet human experience. It is such a natural longing and one that we can honor and bring attention to, clarifying our motivations and intentions, realizing how little any of us truly know about the mysteries of self and other.

It is to the degree we are able to empathically attune to the arising internal other, in all of its forms, that we will be able to hold and be held by another. If we are unable to attend to inner darkness, chaos, and contradiction, we will never be able to practice intimacy with these qualities as they inevitably and organically emerge in our most intimate relationships. At least not to the degree that will fulfill our heart’s longing.

While we may never understand the mystery of these two or come to any fantasized resolution or answer as to whether they are the "same" or "different," we can allow them to touch and accompany us as we break open into the sacredness of the question together.

Photo by Steve Buissinne

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True 

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster

An emissary of new life

When in a moment of activation—for example when someone doesn’t respond in the way we’d like, criticizes or ignores us, or doesn’t mirror back to us the way we long to be seen—instead of engaging in self-destructive behavior, automatically characterizing their response as clear evidence of our unworthiness, and falling down the rabbit hole of shame, blame, and self-attack, we are invited to slow down.

Recognizing that we are caught, we naturally cut the momentum of self-abandonment as we realize that some old pain has been activated and we have a choice to make. We can follow the thoughts and feelings down the familiar groove of denial, dissociation, or acting out, or we can choose a new way, bringing curiosity, presence, and compassion to the charged thoughts and bodily-based feelings.

By engaging these latter pathways, it is then possible to perceive the activation not as an enemy coming from the outside to harm, but as an emissary of new life, ally of meaning and depth, and ambassador of neuroplasticity.

And in this reorganization come to see that at times we pretend there is something more than love that matters. We play hide and seek with the beloved in his or her infinite forms, because that dance and that play is what spins out the stars and galaxies and oceans and trees. But in the end we know.

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True 

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster

Fellow travelers of interior wealth, richness, and meaning

While the desire for transformation is natural, noble, and honorable, if we are not careful it can serve as a powerful reminder and expression of the painful realities of materialism and self-abandonment. One of the shadow sides of seeking and the (seemingly) endless project of self-improvement is that we never slow down enough to digest what we have already been given, which is often much more than we consciously realize. Which, in some sense, is everything.

Not the “everything” the mind thinks it needs to be happy and fulfilled, found by way of a journey of internal and external consumerism. Not the “everything” that conforms to our fantasies of power, control, “mastery,” and safe from the possibility that our heart can break and our world can reorganize anew in any moment. But the “everything” that is already here as part of our true nature, the raw materials for a life of purpose and meaning, revealed by way of slowness and humility, not unconscious acquisition.

In Tibetan tradition, there is an image of the hungry ghost, a figure of the imaginal realms with a large distended belly and tiny mouth. No matter how much food (experience) is consumed, there is a deep ache and longing for more. Regardless of how much is taken in there remains an insatiable hunger. Because this one is not able to make use of or enjoy what is given, a primordial hole is left behind which can never seem to be filled.

The invitation as this one appears is to slow way down and to send breath, awareness, and warmth directly into the hole, infusing it with curiosity and presence, and tend to what is already here, not what is missing and may come by way of further procurement.

To listen to the heartbeat within, the heartbeat of the earth, the heartbeat of the stars. To attune to the drum of the holy reverberating within a nervous system and body that is open, ripe, and sacred.

The willingness to fully digest our own vulnerability, tenderness, confusion, suffering, and joy is an act of love and fierce, revolutionary kindness. There are soul-nutrients buried in the food of our embodied experience that yearn to be integrated, metabolized, and assimilated in the flame of the heart. But this digestion requires the enzymes of presence, embodiment, and compassion, and a curiosity about what is here now.

May we all slow down and become mindful of the ways we seek to fill the empty hole in the center, whether it be with food when we’re not hungry or experience when we are already full. And in this way we can walk lightly together in this world, on this precious planet, not as hungry ghosts desperate to be fed, but as fellow travelers of interior wealth, richness, and meaning.

Photo of Krista Marleena by Tea J. Photography

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True 

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster