Dear First name / Friend
Love thy neighbor is an easy adage to get behind, but what about when love gets hard. You no doubt know what I mean, and in times like these, we are being deeply challenged to love. Through 15 years in intimate partnership and mothering two young children, I have humbly realized that love is a dynamic action that takes a great deal of effort. I am learning to love in a way that goes beyond the intellect. I call this robust way of understanding something, which involves balancing the right and left hemispheres of the brain, an Embodied Knowing: a sensory awareness that is more expansive and complex than language can capture.
Balancing The Hemispheres
Close your eyes and picture a sunset,
let the shades of color emerge in your minds eye.
Notice the seemingly endless glow
as it weaves into a darkening sky,
the light of day slipping away
and the mystery of night approaches.
Pause
notice your body
feel the multilayered experience.
This is an embodied knowing of a sunset.
So how do I build an embodied knowing of love to include the pain and complexity.
My path to this has been the practice of acceptance: accepting myself, others, and the present moment just as they are. To allow the soft fingertips of the sunset to touch those hard to reach places inside myself, and from there making room for the inevitable dark aspects in everything else.
I have found this challenging - especially for my well-intentioned, ambitious, controlling parts that have screamed, “But how do I accept the unacceptable?!”
The antidote: remembering our interconnection. We are all co-created in this web of life, woven together with every breath we take. When I get caught in blame, in attempts to fault-find, I discover a silk strand of the web and I begin following this to the “true culprit”. Yet if I try to blame there, I invariably discover another silk strand. As I walk along each strand the web widens to include more people and systems. As wide and as far as I can go, through space and time, there is more silk to follow. Until I realize there is no one to blame. When I notice this, I drop my righteousness and settle into loving each other, and ourselves, as imperfect creations in an imperfect world.
From this place of acceptance, I feel hopeful we can spin new silk, regenerating an ecosystem of love for future generations.
With Compassion,
Ellen
