Love Can Be a Hard Word for Us...

I feel called to speak about love.

We hear it all the time: Love heals. Love is the answer. Be love. And yet, so often, we walk around feeling pretty far away from love.

We spend our days judging people, places, and things as good or bad. We put conditions on our love:

I will love you if you do the thing I want you to do. If you behave the way I want you to.

But unconditional love means love without conditions.

I have been listening to Jonathan Ashford a lot lately. Jonathan had a near-death experience, and like so many people who have gone to the other side and returned, he recounts an experience of remarkable, overwhelming love—love beyond anything he had ever experienced, almost so expansive that it was difficult to contain.

There isn't judgment on the other side. There is just love.

Even during the life review, he describes it as being held in so much love and compassion.

His message is simple:

Be LOVE.

But what does that mean?

First and foremost: self-love.

How can we think we can truly love another if we haven't first learned to love ourselves?

Loving ourselves means caring for our needs. Encouraging ourselves. Recognizing that critical voice as something other than our pure self, and bringing love and compassion to that voice.

It means bringing love and care to the parts of us that want to rake us over the coals for not being perfect.

Self-love, to me, is making loving choices in how I speak to myself, what I put into my body, and what I put into my mind.

Body. Mind. Spirit.

We are a spark of God. We are a piece of the light of the Creator, and we are here to share that light.

I love when Jonathan is asked about our purpose, and he says, essentially, Take your next breath.

You already fulfilled your mission when you came into this life and were born.

Now breathe.

And be love.

First and foremost, we fill our cup with love. And then we get to protect that love.

We don't allow someone to come along and knock that love out of our hands.

We love—and we protect it.

Sometimes that means setting boundaries.

We can say to someone:

I love you, and I love myself enough to say no to you.

Boundaries can be loving—for me and for you.

Being loving doesn't have to be some grand gesture.

It can be waving to someone.

Smiling at someone.

Asking the checker at the grocery store how their day is going—and actually listening with genuine, authentic interest.

Our love needs to be authentic and come from the heart.

We are like a fish in water that doesn't know it is in water.

We are LOVE, surrounded by love, all the time.

I love Rumi's teaching that we are not here to seek love, but to remove the barriers that keep us from recognizing the love we already are.

This is our work.

To remove the conditioning.

To remove the barriers.

To question the limiting beliefs that keep us from being loving and kind.

I have also found that I have had to grow my vessel to be able to hold more love—to become more attuned to it.

It is a frequency, and I have had to expand my capacity to receive it. And I am still expanding.

Sometimes my heart feels like it is bursting with so much love and gratitude that it is almost hard to hold.

We come here to remember.

To remember who we are.

A spark of God.

A speck of the Divine.

LOVE itself.

This is what we all are.

And so many of us forget.

We can become caught in survival patterns and strategies that get in the way of remembering who we really are.

Yet underneath it all, we all want the same things.

We want love.

We want to be seen.

We want to matter.

And sometimes, sadly, we use strategies to get those needs met that end up hurting ourselves or others.

Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, taught that when someone does something hurtful, they are often trying to meet a need.

We can understand the need without agreeing with the strategy.

There is a very distinct difference.

I can understand you.

I can have compassion for you.

I can love you.

And I can still say no to what you are doing.

So when the mind wants to find some great purpose for being here in this temporary incarnation, perhaps we can remind the mind that it can take a rest.

Drop into your heart.

Take a breath.

And remember:

We have already fulfilled our mission simply by being here.

Breathe.

And be the love.

I want to invite you to trust fully that everything—and I mean everything—is happening for us, not to us.

We are here to remember that we are love, and to share that love.

Even some of the ugliest things we encounter, the very things we are most tempted to judge, can show us the contrast of what love is not.

So the question becomes:

Are you going to judge, or are you going to remember?

Remember to be the love.

Many blessings.

And from one spark of God to the next—

I love you.