How well did I love?

It may feel as if today is just another ordinary day, in an ordinary life, on an ordinary star. We meet the morning and we’re just not sure. Don’t I have some problems I need to attend to? I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong, just somehow off a bit. Isn’t there? Isn’t there someone I need to become? Something to resolve and figure out? Change in some way? Shift? Transform? Manifest something? Awaken? Heal?

It is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come, that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, to take a walk in the rain, to listen in awe to the birds as they remind us of our longing, to share a moment of connection with the one in front of us. But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so tenuous, and that this opening into life will not be here for much longer.

Recognizing this, let us surrender the dream of postponement by doing whatever we can to help others, by taking a risk to fully show up here, never forgetting what is most important, no longer apologizing for our uniqueness, our sensitivity, and the gifts of our vulnerability.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we’d like – it is unlikely we'll be all that concerned with whether or not we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, perfected ourselves, transcended our humanness and shaky vulnerability, wrapped up our self-improvement project, played it safe, or “completed” some mythical spiritual journey. Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to behold the wonder of just one unfolding here and now moment? Was I willing to take a risk, to feel more, to care deeply about this life, to let another matter, and to honor this very experience, exactly as it has been given?

Was I willing to behold the sacred offering of the natural world – the sky, the snowflakes, the mountains, the sun, the mud, the deer, and the lunar offering of the moon as she floods our hearts with her secrets?

Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love with this life, exactly as it is? Was I willing to have my heart broken and to enter inside this breaking as a portal to the aliveness I have longed for for so long? Was I willing to provide a home, a sanctuary, and safe passage for all of me, an environment of wholeness and integration to dance, rest, and play in?

Was I willing to set aside the unending need to make this moment different?

What is it that remains unlived… for you? How have you been holding back? What are you waiting for? What is your heart asking of you? What is most important? What are you unwilling to compromise any longer? What are you no longer willing to apologize for?

In what ways are you not living your own life, but someone else’s? Or living out the fantasies of a society or culture that has forgotten about love and what matters most… for you? The bounty and the harvest of this world is upon you. It is always already here, erupting in each moment, and is not waiting.

One day we will no longer be able to look at, touch, or share a simple moment with those that we love. When we turn to them, they will be gone. One moment will be our last to witness the immensity of just one more breath, to experience awe at a color or fragrance or blooming of a flower, to enter into union with the vastness of the ocean. It will be our last chance to feel the presence of a tree, to have a moment of communion with a friend, or to weep as the light yields to the night sky.

One last moment to have a thought, to feel an emotion, to fall in love, to smell a flower, to taste something sweet, and to know heartbreak, joy, and peace – to behold the outrageous mystery of what it really means to be a sensitive, alive, tender human being.

What if today is that last day? Or tomorrow? Or later this week?

Knowing that death will come to complete the cycle of the beloved in the world of time and space, how will you respond to the breath that is moving within you right now, to the feelings washing through you, and to the opportunity to know and to be the activity of love here?

What would it be like to fully allow in the reality that today may be your last? Will you open your heart to the gift of life before it is too late?

Perhaps your “life's purpose” has nothing to do with what job you will find or what new cool thing you manifest or what awesome soul mate you might attract or what mythical awakening journey you complete. But that the purpose of your life is to fully live, finally, to touch each here and now moment with your presence and with the gift of your one, wild heart. And to do whatever you can to help others to remember this, and how precious and unique they are. Perhaps this is the most radical gift that we can all give.

Please don't forget how rare and precious it is here. And please don't forget what it is that really matters to you.

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

It's okay to be shaky

It’s okay to be shaky, to not know anymore, and to allow your heart to break. To fall to the ground and bear witness to the reality that life was never going to turn out the way you thought it would. It’s just too wild, too creative, and too devastatingly magic for all that.

Rather than spin from the death as if it were a defeat, with your breath as your guide, travel inside. There are jewels hidden there, filled with meaning, with pure feeling, and with relentless outrageousness of love as it erupts into the world of time and space.

You will never find your life’s purpose by way of a frantic, urgent, exhausting search. Your life’s purpose is to live. Fully. To participate, to take a risk, to slow down and see the signs, to commune with the colors, the songs of the birds, and to listen to the intelligence of the stars.

The forms that love take are by nature arising and dissolving in each moment, for this is the way of form. But love itself is that which never comes and goes. You never know what form love will choose to take in the future, for there is no love in the future. Love is only now. You will never be able to resolve or pin down the movement of love as it is infinitely creative and at all times unfolding into greater wholeness.

If you become too fused with a specific form you believe you need love to take, your heart will inevitably break when love obliterates that form for something new, which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form. This dissolving and reorganization is a special kind of grace that the mind cannot know. But the heart knows. The body knows.

Before you seek to “heal” your heartbreak via spiritual process, turn to your heart and ask if it truly wishes to be mended. For this breaking is sacred, sent here so that new forms may emerge.

Be grateful for the forms of love while they appear, but allow them their own journey of death and rebirth. Seek 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.

Today may not be the day where answers will come, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question.

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

Rupture and repair

It is no secret that, for many, intimate relationship is one of the great amplifiers of the unlived life. We can count on our partners to relentlessly illuminate everything that is unresolved within us. Not because they have some agenda to do so, but simply by the nature of the crucible that is formed when we allow another to truly matter to us.

We come to our relationships with an already-existing patterning that formed long ago. While this template longs to be updated, until reconfiguration it looms over us and colors our perception. It functions by way of a time machine where, when activated, it is as if we have left the “here and now,” crossed the liminal, and found ourselves back in the “there and then.”

There are aspects of ourselves that are aching to come out of the shadows and into the warmth of holding awareness. Not to harm, but as emissaries of wholeness. There is nothing like a close relationship to remind us of the orphaned feelings and vulnerable parts that have lost their way in the tangle of somatic and psychic pathways. They are exhausted from a long voyage to reach us, but have not given up.

The reminder of this truth can at times be a bit agonizing, as the other seems to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being. But this achiness is sacred. Inside the ache is a jewel. Go there.

Please be kind to your partners and the inevitable conflict that will arise as you make this journey together. Training ourselves to harness the energy of conflict – and engage it directly, skillfully, and with an open heart – is the activity of inner and outer revolution, and requires the encoding of new circuitry.

The transformative art of rupture and repair is one that is endlessly profound, revealing that relationships of vast depth and meaning are not those free of conflict, but ones where working through conflict is embraced as path, where the participants are transformed into an alive vessel of purification, love, and healing.

This is a difficult realization to come by, and one that is unfortunately not all that popular in a world that has forgotten the gold buried in the dark. But here we are. It is up to us to bring these fruits into the collective.

Photo by h.koppdelaney by way of Flickr

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