Sunday, April 2, 2017

Attuned to the full-spectrum


We want love to feel safe, but love is not oriented around any particular feeling. It is just too wild for that. As a field of immense creativity, love will make use of any feeling state, including that of “unsafe,” to introduce us to the full spectrum of what it means to be an awake, alive, unprecedented human being, with a heart that is sometimes open, sometimes closed, sometimes in one piece, and sometimes shattered.

As the rich ground in which all feelings come and go, it is the nature of love to transform everything it comes in contact with, for this is its nature. This activity is not oriented in the preservation of the status quo or maintenance of the conventional, but in bringing forth new forms of itself into the world of time and space. At times, this can be disorienting.

Perhaps our deepest longing is not for consistent feelings of safety, security, and certainty, but to live from wholeness, in intimate communion with the full-spectrum nature of what it means to be an attuned, sensitive human being. To live in and as the totality of what we are, which very organically contains, infuses, and transmutes the opposites of safe and unsafe, self and other, known and unknown.

Rather than approaching this as mere philosophical inquiry, the invitation is into the intimacy of immediate, embodied experience, and to discover for ourselves what is most true. As we open into the reorganizing energies of love, we will simultaneously be attracted and terrified, as we sense the ending of one world so that another may begin. We can count on the contradictory nature of the journey of the heart, turn into the core of the contradiction, and attune to the wisdom that is found there.


The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April