Love-Ability

       Classic romantic lore locates love “out there” in the lovability of what we love.  Love, from this perspective, is a positive judgment about someone or something – a judgment that tends to change as what’s out there alternates between more and less pleasing.  Implicit in this approach is the presumption that we can only love what we find lovable.  Our job, then, is to search the world for just the right love object – the one.

       In a recent lecture, “Love is Inside - Go Find It”, Michael Simpson asserts that love is an internal matter.  It has nothing to do with the desirability of an object and everything to do with the capacity to keep our hearts open and our energy flowing – a capacity we can all develop. 

       From this perspective, love is not a judgment.  It’s the simple act of opening our hearts as we engage with life.  Simpson claims that we can open our hearts at any moment, that we never have to shut down, that the only limits on our ability to love are self-imposed, and that there is nothing, inside us or outside us, that we cannot be present to with a soft heart.  There is nothing we cannot love.

       When caught up in the dominant paradigm of locating love “out there”, we tend to treat ourselves and others as objects.  We work hard to make ourselves lovable, so that love will come our way.  And we work hard to get our partners to become more lovable, so it will be easier for us to feel our love.  Frankly, all that hard work never produces lasting love.  The love we seek remains outside our grasp. 

       The shift to locating love internally is a movement toward taking sole responsibility for our love and our love-ability – not unlike the healthy way we take responsibility for our own happiness, self-esteem, serenity, sense of belonging and feeling of abundance.  It’s our job to keep our hearts open, no one else’s.  As social psychologists tell us, if two people are responsible for a job, it’s a lot less likely to get done than if one person is.

       Heart opening is hard work.   It takes wakeful awareness and persistent practice.  However, in contrast to the romantic approach, this hard work pays off.  We discover, inside ourselves, the vitality we’ve been seeking.  It’s always there – our love nature – our love-ability.

Focused Spaciousness

       Richard Moss, a mentor to me and many others, teaches Focused Spaciousness, an approach to meditation and centering that invites us to be keenly aware of our sensory experience – exquisitely focused – and, at the same time, to be fully present to the vast expanse of inner spaciousness. 

       Holding both simultaneously takes some practice – practice well-worth the effort, practice that draws us toward fullness of life at the center of being.

       On his website, Richard has posted two short video clips (The Art of Centering, Parts 1 & 2) demonstrating his approach.  I invite you to view them and, while you're at it, to browse his website:   www.richardmoss.com   

       Click on the link above and then on "Blog" to open the videos and other postings from Richard. 

       Enjoy!

Spiritual Nutrition

       Questions arrive – questions related to how I feed myself and my important relationships.  From a biological perspective, I know the foods we eat have a profound effect on health and vitality.

       Similarly, I wonder, how is my spirit affected by what I feed it?   The electronic and paper-based media I consume?  The thoughts I entertain and interior dramas I enact?  The places my mind habitually goes when there's a break in the action?  Does this diet nourish me?

       In my spiritual diet, is there a good balance of stimulation and quiet, connection and solitude, doing and not doing?

       How do I feed my important relationships?  Do I starve them through lack of attention and affection?  Is my relational economy booming or in recession? 

       Do I harm love – maybe even kill it – by the thoughts I harbor or the stories I tell myself about the other or about our relationship?  Is my relational diet contaminated by the toxins of criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stone-heartedness?

       How do I feed my heart so it stays soft, supple, spacious – and, therefore, vital?  How do I energize connections within me and with others?  How do I nurture fullness of life?

       Questions rumble.

       I observe.  I listen.  I know.

       I choose.

Keeping Heart Open

       In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer urges us to keep our hearts open – always.  Most of us, he notes, instinctively close our hearts to protect ourselves from experiences we don't like.

       "But closing your heart does not really protect you from anything; it just cuts you off from your source of energy…  Defining what you need in order to stay open actually ends up limiting you…  As long as you are defining what you like and what you don't like, you will open and close…  You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you.  Let go of that.  Dare to be different.  Enjoy all of life."  (pp 46 – 47)

       "If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love and enthusiasm all the time, then don't ever close…  You can learn to stay open no matter what happens in this world…  Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you are willing to close your heart over it…  Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.  Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over."   (pp 44 – 47)

       Inspired by his passionate message, I've been experimenting lately with keeping my heart open, playing with various ways to do so and feeling amazed by the difference it's making in my life.  There is so much to say about how to stay open.  Right now I want to offer a couple thoughts about what's been working for me.

       Be mindful.  Notice when you close.  Notice physical tightness and emotional contraction.  Notice the stories of fear and shame and outrage that swirl in the mind.  Pay attention to the suffering brought on by closing down.  Whenever we close, we suffer.

       Breathe.  Soften the belly.  When something painful or difficult comes our way (from outside or inside), we can breathe, soften and hold ourselves in compassionate spaciousness.  We can interrupt old tendencies to tighten, close, protect and defend.  We can bring care to our suffering self.  In the spaciousness of self-compassion, suffering melts.  When we bring love to our discomfort, we naturally open – first to ourselves, then to all of life.

       Practice.  Practice.  Practice.  Just as closing down becomes automatic and habitual, so too we can develop habits of remaining soft and open.  It takes practice, lots of it – formal meditation practice and the moment-by-moment practices of staying present and embodied in everyday life.

       Staying alive – supple and free – is a conscious choice and a choice to be conscious.

       Enjoy!

Deep Listening

       I just picked up The Exquisite Risk:  Daring to Live an Authentic Life, by one of my favorite authors, Mark Nepo.  He talks about the connection between listening deeply and the authenticity of spirit that is so essential for our well being.  "We must meet the outer world with our inner world, or existence will crush us…  If we don't assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole."  (p. 11)

       "When we can listen deeply, we are strengthened to feel that everything around us lives within us and that everything within us lives as part of the world.  When we experience both the circumference and center of the circle of life at once, we are then in the larger Self, the Universal Self, as Carl Jung describes it."   (p. 4)

       "But how do we listen?  It is so simple and so hard.  So obvious to begin and so elusive to maintain.  In this lies the vitality of deep listening.  To keep beginning.  Over and over.  To keep emptying and opening.  And simply to keep listening.  For to listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean.  In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear."  (p. 5) 

       "In truth, listening deeply and inwardly allows us to keep meeting the outer world with our inner being, and this mysteriously keeps us and the world vital.  Often, the nature of the dance cycles us from being self-centered to being other-centered to being balanced as an integral part in an integrated whole.  And when we're blessed to experience those balanced, integrated moments, it becomes clear that everything is relational.  Everything inside us and between us is circulatory – and ongoing exchange of what matters."  (p. 12)

       "In my life, I have known truth and beauty and peace to be ever-present companions that I often sit beside, bemoaning their absence."  (p. 15)

     Enjoy your listening Self.

Joining the Listener

        Last night, I bought a book, The Untethered Soul.  I'm considering it as a text for this fall's Connecting group.

       In his first chapter, Michael Singer discusses the incessant chatter of inner voices.  These voices take many viewpoints and assume many "personalities".  Which one, we wonder, is my true voice?  Which is the real me?

       Singer's answer is none of the above.  We are none of those talkers.  We are the one who listens. 

       In meditation this morning, I played with his idea.  My mind was filled with chatter – heavy drama happening.  I turned to the one who listens and asked:  "Are you enjoying all this?  Are you entertained by the drama going on inside me?"  I remembered how I was as a 7-year-old hunched over the radio on Sunday afternoons, raptly absorbed in episodes of "The Shadow".  I wondered if the listener were engaged in a similar way with my drama.

       The listener remained quiet – very quiet, gently quiet.  Yet, somehow, there was an answer – a felt sense.  No words.

       My translation of this felt sense was "duh-uh" – a bit like the expression teens use with parents who seem clueless in the face of the obvious, except there was no attitude in this "duh-uh".  I got the message.

       Shortly after, during an extended period of grace, I joined the listener.  We sat together, connected as one, in a delicious quiet.

       I'm amazed.  The listener is so patient, so unafraid.  What a wondrous companion – pure presence, loving and detached, with no judgment, no power in the traditional sense and no inclination to control or change anything.

       I think of God.

A Reminder

No matter where

you go

Or who

you know

Or what

you do

Or think

or feel

YOU CANNOT

NOT BELONG

Unexpected Awe

       I spent much of last week in the wilderness on the Canadian border, as part of a great group of guys who have been traveling boundary waters each summer for nearly 30 years.

       Mid-trip, I took a day of solo retreat on a high bluff overlooking a majestic expanse of big water and picturesque islands. 

       At one overlook, I sat for an hour watching a spider, who clung to pine needles and waved with the breeze as he advanced from various directions, trying in vain to poach a dead mosquito from what appeared to be another spider's web.  All this action took place maybe three feet in front of my face.  Still sitting in that delightful spot, I closed my eyes and tried to meditate – with no more success than the spider trying to navigate the wind and nab a dead mosquito.

       Letting go of formal practice, I sat for another two hours reading the second volume in a science fiction fantasy series.  A recurring theme in the book is that if you try too hard to grasp something, you won't discover its true nature.

       Butt-sore by now and tired of focusing on a book when surrounded by such beauty, I dug out my ipod (something I rarely use) and, over the next couple or three hours, found a number of nearby places to stand and lean and sway and gaze, while I listened to the music of Leonard Cohen.  For me, this was a very sweet, multi-sensory immersion in beauty.

       At one point, as I looked across the water toward a rocky cliff face I'd probably glanced at dozens of times, I was suddenly jolted by its beauty and the awe-filled sense that I was seeing it for the first time.  Greedily, I tried to grab the experience and hang on to the awe I felt.  I searched for words to describe it, so I could keep it with me.  And, of course, it vanished.  And, of course, even though I felt as if it had left me, I knew I was the one who'd left it.

       I re-remembered an old lesson – how grasping never leads to having – and resolved to do better next time.

       Next time arrived about a half-hour later, as I noticed puffs of clouds on the low horizon and was flooded once more with awe.  Again, it was like the first sight of an amazing beauty never before seen.  Again, I was graced.  And again, automatically, I grasped, vainly trying to control what can only be freely and spaciously received.  Awe gone, I tightened in defeat and then smiled, as humor and humble appreciation of my human condition replaced embarrassment over experience lost.

       I see how uncomfortable ego is with the grace of unexpected awe, which arrives and departs by its own rhythms, heedless of ego's efforts to predict it, call it, hold it or control it.

       "Soften," I say to myself.  "Soften to grace.  Practice softening every day, practice receiving, practice staying present in the body – soft belly, soft heart, soft eyes.  Soften, James.  Make ready.  Make room for unexpected awe."

       Maybe next time awe arrives, I'll have more space for it.

Oddly  One

If we follow

Our uniqueness,

We’re all

A bit weird.

Odd ducks

In God’s pond.

Oddly One.

Make Room for Messy

Messy life

Messy love

Messy me

Messy you

Forgive messy

Honor messy

Make room.

Make room

For love

Make room

For life

All messy

Awe worthy

Make room.