Blood from Stone

 

On a recent Zoom call at work, a colleague’s three year old son came into view giving his mother a sweet and generous hug and kiss.  His love for his mother and his happiness to be near her poured out of him.  We all have this remarkable capacity to allow love to flow through us towards others.  Many of the wisdom traditions call this God, God as love.  It doesn’t matter what you call it. Learning how to unconditionally love more is why we have been given these lives.  But unlike when we were three, as we grew into adults, a necessary hard shell formed around our hearts separating us from others and blocking this divine flow of love.  While we needed this armor of the egoic self to individuate, become separate selves, after midlife, it just gets in the way of our loving. 

To get the tap flowing, we need to consent to allowing this love to flow.  Spiritual practices which have been passed down to us for thousands of years help us to prepare the body/mind/consciousness for this consenting, this allowing love to flow. Without these practices which calm the body/mind, strengthen the nerves, soften the heart, we will continue to dam this flow of love out of fear, shame, and our woundedness.  Instead of spreading light and healing into the world, we instead create more darkness, injury, and separation.

That we have this capacity to love is remarkable.  After all, we come from stardust, cold, inert, lifeless.  After billions of years, water, air, then life itself emerges, and then life that knows itself, and through this knowing the capacity for love to flow through the rocks that we are made from. But not without our consent which must be given each time new.  This is the unconditional love of tenderness, that does not judge, separate, punish.  Without practice, courage, and faith, it might be easier to wring blood from rock than this kind of love.  And yet, this is the great invitation, the great purpose of life.  To allow through us, through matter, more light and love into the world.