Loving Me. Loving You.

I don’t think that there is a more challenging human experience than that of cultivating the ability to meet our own emotional needs. I also think where matters of the heart are concerned, that much of the turbulence we experience in our relationships is the unfortunate by-product of misguidedly expecting others to be a reliable source for filling our emotional voids.

The desire to love and be loved is a good and natural impulse. Love is central, after all, to living a satisfying, joyful and stimulating life. Where we go wrong, I believe, is in our efforts to, essentially, extract this from the lives of other people—to derive, to squeeze, however subtly, what we sense is deficient in our own life, from the life of another.

We need, primarily, to source this nourishment within ourselves.

Ultimately, a true and robust love must be cultivated and blossom from within.

Not to say that we shouldn’t enjoy the love others bestow on us, or that we may not lean on our friends and lovers for support, but it must not become either a rigid expectation that they serve us in this way, or an unconscious habit.

All I’m saying is that people will come and go, so sourcing our emotional sustenance there is not ever going to prove very reliable however wonderful they may be. They do, after all, have their own lives to attend to with all the inherent struggles and challenges implicit in any human life.

It isn’t their job, per se, to fill our emotional needs.

Truly being loved is a gift that we bestow on each other—a freely flowing, spontaneous offering of our hearts. Choose your friends and lovers with care.

At the end of the day, being the love you wish to experience in the world is where it’s at—embodying respect, being kind, gentle, compassionate—being whatever love means to you.

It’s a worthy practice. Devote yourself to it. Nourish and be nourished by it.

Be the love …

Pick Yourself - The paradox of service.

It all starts with us on a very fundamental level. What we do with this one wild and precious life we’ve been given (to borrow a phrase from Mary Oliver) is what impacts the world around us in deceptively simple, yet profound ways.

There is a lot of talk in spiritual and other circles about the importance of being of service—extending our energies in the direction of ‘helping’ others, but this is only a real possibility to the extent that we have done genuine work on ourselves first.

By this I mean that only to the extent that we have ripened and matured, learned something about ourselves and the world around us, and, hopefully, become a little wiser, are we able to make an uncontrived offering to the surrounding community—and I don’t believe it is necessary, or perhaps advisable, to think about this in too grandiose terms.

For the moment that being of service becomes an exercise in some form of unacknowledged self-aggrandizement (a bid for esteem based on how kind, generous and good we all strive to be, or need to believe we are) is the very moment that we may not be helping anybody, least of all ourselves.

How can we be said to be helping anyone if the subtext of our efforts is dictated by internal weaknesses related to lack of self-worth, etc.?

The idea of being of service can act against us if it exists as a distraction from all that needs attending to inside ourselves—our own tendencies toward jealousy, anger, violence or any other of the challenging and dark phenomenon that plague our lives.

We can only share with others that which has been thoroughly processed, that which we know in our bones—knowledge that is viscerally a part of ourselves, and no longer just intellectual property.

So, start at home. Transformation can only happen inside us when we choose to pay attention to our internal life—the life of the heart, mind and soul. This is our primary purpose in life.

Then, as transformation takes place, our actions in the world become a natural evolution and organic expression of that which can be none other than a real help and inspiration to all who surround us. All this without feeling like we’ve really done anything at all except be ourself—our truest, deepest most authentic Self.

Therefore, pick yourself. Start at home on the difficult personal inner work that requires and deserves your investiture and attention, and the rest takes care of itself.

Namaste.

The World isn't Just One Way: Opening the mind, freeing the heart and nourishing soul.

I think it easy sometimes to feel that the world is a static enterprise—a social and cultural grid with fixed parameters. And I hate the way I feel about life when I get stuck here. 

We get this sense, in part, from the relative uniformity of the social and cultural structures that surround us, but aren’t social and cultural phenomenon more like deeply engrained habits? Are they not in fact very plastic and malleable in nature, something the word ‘structure’ does not seem to acknowledge?

Why, you may be asking yourself at this juncture, is this important? It is important because the way our worldviews are constructed has tremendous bearing on how we conduct ourselves in life. Our worldviews shape our belief systems (either for good or for ill), they influence our ideas (perhaps setting false limitations) and they set the tone for the actions we take throughout our life.

If we believe that the world works a certain way, for example, we will often limit our choices to those which seem to coincide with that belief, about what it means and how it is shaped in our mind’s eye.

In order to cultivate a life of freedom, of joy, of contentment, we must consider that the load of goods we may have inherited about how the world works isn’t a complete one, or even a correct one.

We have to open our minds, not to mention liberate our hearts and nourish soul.

Not an easy task when the prevailing social and cultural norms are trying to box us in, but we can start by questioning our worldview, frisking the thing for misguided beliefs and limiting ideas about what the world is and how it works.

Daunting to say the least, because then one comes smack up against the fundamental mystery that life is.

I know you were hoping I had a 5-step directive to execute, but knowledge of the truly appropriate course of action for your life, lies within your own mind, heart and soul.

Choose your worldview with care.

Having said that, in closing, let me offer this—be a better listener. Learn to cultivate the skill of listening well to what resonates in the inner chambers of heart, mind and soul and it will be plainer to see what direction to set your compass in and what course of action to take.

The world isn’t just one way—we shape it and can re-shape it one small, patient, thoughtful step at a time.

Loving Others. Loving Ourselves.

Being together really is a simple thing at its core, a fact all too easy to lose sight of. 

For the moment we are efforting our way through our relationships—by which I mean creating a litany of rules and guidelines for behaviour modification—may be the same moment we have compromised our ability to accept others as they are and the love on which the relationships were originally founded. Let me explain.

One of the hallmarks of a robust love is that it is unconditional, except that all too often our love arrangements are founded on the weak foundation of bargaining. Unless we want our unions to resemble the fracas of a market place, I would suggest a less business-like approach.

How about letting those we love be perfectly themselves and not bargain them into altering who they are to suit our own image of who we’d prefer they be?

Remember, I didn’t say that being together (loving and being loved) was an easy entity to manage, only a simple one. If someone we’ve been with proves over time to have a corrosive and deleterious effect on our lives, we owe it to ourselves to make changes that don’t require either our beloved, or ourselves to be someone other than who they/we are, or where they/we are in our journey in life.

 And sometimes this means making difficult choices—cutting ballast so-to-speak.

But it also requires a journey of exploration inward to examine our ability (or compromised ability) to love and respect ourselves, and not look outside for what we can, ultimately, only find within.

I’d like to underline at this juncture that what I mean by loving ourselves involves tapping in to what makes us feel alive, living how we want to live, from a base of personal passion and authenticity.

Cultivating the skills that make this happen transforms everything in the domain of love because then love becomes an organic act of freely sharing the passion and vitality naturally springing from our own life, rather than a desperate attempt to grasp after it in the lives of others.

They say that home is where the heart is, and nowhere is this truer than the home we have in ourselves. We must honour and care for the life of the heart.

Then simply being together becomes a reality, an act of relative, effortless flow.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again—we’ve got to be the love.