Unconditional Love Hello again,
It's John here.
Thank you for connecting in this guided practice.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Said Darkness cannot drive out darkness.
Only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate.
Only love can do that.
In a troubled world,
It's tempting to want to express our hatred for the hatred that we see and disagree with.
We have this notion that by proclaiming our hatred for all the bad things in the world,
It sets us apart from it.
Yet,
The more we hate,
The more we accumulate.
Fortunately,
The same holds true for love.
The more we love,
The more love we have and the more love that we give back to the world.
There's another quote from Tara Brach where she states,
And a close cousin of that thought is sets us free.
If we clench and hold back our love,
Waiting for just the right conditions or proof that loving is worthwhile,
We build a wall between us and the freedom that unconditional love opens us to.
It doesn't mean that we condone the bad things of the world,
But what it does is inject a missing ingredient or element.
If we have a flat tire,
No amount of annoyance,
Disappointment,
Or hatred changes the flat tire.
Only when we add air,
That missing element,
Can we move forward.
With meditation,
We learn to let go of resistance and we create an environment of peace and well-being that draws us back to the chair or cushion.
It's a garden of goodness that grows by nurturing the soil.
Love is the same.
It is there for us to return to always.
It is a soft garden to relax back into rather than somewhere that we must try harder to find.
Loving is in our nature.
It is a landscape of sunrises and sunsets.
A forest of peace and possibility.
It is our most natural nature.
It is our most human way of being.
Let's breathe together.
Close your eyes if that feels good for you.
We can settle in by taking a few nice,
Slow,
Full breaths.
Breathing in,
We draw in the love of the world.
Breathing out,
We breathe our love out to the world.
Just a few breaths of intentional breathing and then a relaxing back and trusting that the body breathes without any effort or doing.
When our intention gets sidetracked from being love,
Just like with our wandering mind in meditation,
We can return to love with love.
As simple as a slight smile in the corners of the mouth,
In the eyes,
And in the heart,
Allows the body to return to that place with loving kindness.
We are what we practice and the awareness of this allows us to be skillful in how we practice.
We cannot fill from an empty cup and so filling our own cup with love is where we start and where we can return to when our cup needs filling.
We do this by practicing Metta or loving kindness with ourselves.
I invite you to repeat these Metta phrases out loud or silently in your mind.
These can be adapted in your own practice in whatever way feels right for you.
May I be happy.
May I be at peace.
May I love and be love.
From that home base we can repeat those phrases for a widening circle.
That can be our close loved ones,
Widening out to our larger communities,
And eventually to all beings.
Again,
By adapting the phrases to something that feels right for you allows you to build authenticity with it.
Metta practice for some feels inauthentic at first and the invitation is to trust it.
The sense that it may be inauthentic is a good sign that it's needed.
Anything new that we learn takes some time and practice before it starts to feel authentic.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be at peace.
May all beings love and be love.
Gratitude is often a gateway to love.
Let's be grateful for the time that we've taken to practice love today.
Thank you for your practice.
May you love and be love.
