Stillness 6-22: Sometimes love begins as a habit that then evolves. Other times it comes at us like a crashing thunderbolt from beyond. It doesn’t matter whence love comes or why it exists. What matters is that we welcome it. That we embrace it entirely.
The more conscious we are of Love, the more love grows. There is always something to love. Love is the essence of gratitude: if you can shift your mindset from sorrow or lack and instead focus on even just a fragment of experience that you can feel grateful for, the healing begins. And love is the essence of forgiveness: it can dissolve bitterness and transmute it into neutrality and peace.
When I’m struggling to love—whether that is someone or something like an experience or task—I try to see the bigger picture. If it’s a person, I look at the loving and light-filled potential that exists in all of us. This was something I learned to do as a parent and as a teacher. I can half-close my eyes and a lovely large glow seems to shimmer and grow around a person’s physical body, expanding out from a sparkle of hopeful, innocent striving into their eager, limitless potential. That bigness, that light, is what I always try to address.
I also learned about the expansive quality of love—that the more you love, the more love there is—through having pets in my home. In my experience, caring for a pet helps us to view every living creature with kinder eyes. Even the life inside a bug or insect becomes larger than its physicality and one feels a tenderness. But you don’t have to have a pet to feel it. Cherish the wild parrot swinging on the palm frond. Delight in the dragonfly. The more you love everything that lives, the more you love everything that lives. It’s a fundamental truth.