There comes a point of no return on a path, a turning-point after which you can’t unsee what you’ve seen or un-feel what’s been felt. A moment in time when you can no longer tolerate, or pretend to tolerate, systems that once worked for you but now no longer do.
I’ve consistently witnessed the “no-going-back” arise when someone makes a genuine bid for love in their life. It becomes the primary motivation, the North Star, the very reason to keep showing up despite doubt, distraction, and discomfort. Not the love of agenda; wanting, grasping, or possessing. Not eros or romance, though honest embodiment can deepen those too. But rather, a love synonymous with truth, inclusive of life’s complexities: valleys, shadows, and all.
This kind of love doesn’t have us close our eyes to reality, it invites us to make eye contact with whatever is happening, and to soften and open to it, even when we don’t like it.
Here, love is no longer doled out conditionally, based on inherited notions that it must be earned or deserved. It becomes a way of seeing and allowing whatever arises be run through the first act of good loving: to grant it the right to exist. When reality shows up as restlessness, despair, confusion, or terror, denying its existence or wishing it away (a) doesn’t work and (b) is an affront to this depth of love.
This type of love can feel like a soft relief one day and an impossible challenge the next; because love like this threatens the parts of us that crave order, control, and a perfectly laid plan.
It’s a love with less agenda, without a hidden wish for things to be other than they are. A sober, unflinching love. An honest meeting with all the parts of life we usually exile or vigilantly hide. The work is no longer to wage war against our paradoxes, but to learn to embrace the fact that many things can be true at once.
In today’s practice, the invitation, as always is simple, though not easy: let go of the pursuit of an ideal state. Rest in a quiet, active practice of allowing. Step away from the subtle forms of control and striving that even the most sincere practice can slip into. Make a little more room for your current reality to be just as it is.
It has taken me years to see that my addictive loops, my despair, the mess of my emotions, don’t ask for my approval, or even my liking. They ask only to be allowed. To not be denied their right to exist. Loving them, not sentimentally, but in presence, has been the only way I’ve learned to stop feeling “done to” by them and instead begin to forge a real relationship with them.
This love makes no promises of improvement. It offers only the honesty and humility to meet the places within us that stir up striving, managing, or fixing.
As the practice deepens, the body becomes the teacher. In the second half of today’s audio, the invitation is to listen. To create space for the body to show how it wears the mind; how it has carried the weight of all that has moved through you, unchecked.
No cause is free of effect. An unobserved mind, left untended, spins in its loops and imagined dramas as if it exists outside the laws of consequence. But the body is infallible in its honesty. Just as it digests everything we eat, it also digests the patterns of our personality; its fantasies, fears, and dress rehearsals of futures that may never come.
The relationship between mind and body is intimate, inseparable, woven into every breath and gesture. The audio practice will help you understand this dynamic and then ask you to turn to curiosity and root in respect. This awareness-based love, over time, will shift what has long been tangled, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
* I’ve mentioned how I’m committed to keeping these audios long-form, not because I assume you need to consume more content, but I believe in preserving attention span and focus from extinction. Additionally, these letters will never be written by AI. I find immense value and sentience in its contributions, but I also want to preserve some spaces where people still talk to people. Where flawed grammar and imperfect ideas are still welcome (I will never understand a semi-colon but will use them regularly). Places that invite nuance, debate, and the imperfect attempt to stay in conversation …with each other, and with our essential nature.
As always, your comments and questions are welcome.
With love,
A
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