Accepting yourself as you are in this moment,
Standing up or in a chair,
Lying down or even driving in your car,
Wherever you are.
Acceptance begins by just seeing,
Just allowing,
Just witnessing yourself as you are in this moment.
Bring your awareness to your breath.
Bring your awareness to that vital life force,
That animating presence from the crown of your head all the way to the soles of your feet.
And lastly,
Bring your attention to your heart center,
To that space wherever in your body where you hold a receptivity,
An anchoring in love.
And just take in these words from psychotherapist and author Gerald May.
There is a desire within each of us in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart.
We were born with it.
It is never completely satisfied and it never dies.
We are often unaware of it,
But it is always awake.
It is the human desire for love.
Every person in this earth yearns to love,
To be loved,
To know love.
Our true identity,
Our reason for being,
Is to be found in this desire.
Love is the why of life.
Why we are functioning at all,
I am convinced,
Is the fundamental energy of the human spirit,
The fuel on which we run,
The wellspring of our vitality.
And grace,
Which is the flowing creative activity of love itself,
Is what makes all goodness possible.
Love should come first.
It should be the beginning of,
And the reason for everything.
So just taking those words into our heart space,
See if they resonate with you.
Is that final statement,
Love should come first,
It should be the beginning of,
And the reason for everything,
True for your heart?
Is it true in your practice?
And if it isn't,
It's just as easy as coming back to love.
For if love is the most important part of your life,
All you ever need to do,
In a challenging day or in an uncertain circumstance,
Is to get back to love.
A mantra I like to practice for myself,
And I invite you to practice too,
Goes like this.
I experience fear,
But I practice love.
I experience anger,
But I practice love.
I experience jealousy,
But I practice love.
I experience anxiety,
But I practice love.
Know that in this world full of experience,
Love will not always be our experience.
But with clarity about who we are and why we're here,
It can always be our expression.
It can always be our practice.
Join me in taking a moment to remember a time,
A most recent time,
When you experienced something other than love,
And instead of responding with love,
Reacted from a place of anger,
Or fear,
Or just not your best self.
What would you have done differently in this situation if you had acted from love?
Recently I was with my daughter preparing her breakfast and she was asking for so many different things that it led to a level of frustration and I was holding a spoon in my hand and I dropped it on a plate.
Immediately she cried out,
A hurt heart.
You hurt my feelings,
She said.
I gave her a hug and told her my anger wasn't directed at her and apologized for dropping the spoon.
It was a good reminder for me that no matter what I'm experiencing,
A practice from love will always be the best healing for my heart and the best way of interacting with my daughter.
In that time,
No matter how small or how large,
Where you reacted in a difficult situation from a place other than love,
What would have happened if you would have acted from love instead?
Perhaps for me,
I wouldn't have heard those cries from my daughter and I would have felt a little bit better about myself.
Perhaps I simply could have acknowledged my anger in that moment or just asked my daughter to be patient with me while I got her breakfast ready.
Now remember a time when someone responded to you with something other than love?
What happened?
What if they were to act from love instead?
What could this person have done to make you feel loved at that time and how might that have changed the situation?
Certainly,
What it's done is done in the past,
But right here in the present,
There's always an alive love to send back to difficult experiences and experiences that you have not experienced before.
I would have thought that I would have been able to have a life that was different from my daughter.
I would have thought that I would have been able to have a life that was different from my daughter.
There's always an alive love to send back to difficult experiences but to claim right here and right now a kind of forgiveness that isn't about forgetting the past but it's about moving on in our lives with a greater love.
It's about coming back to love.
Come back to love from fear.
Come back to love from anger.
Come back to love from grief.
Come back to love from anxiety.
Love is always something we can come back to and to live from in our lives again.
