Love
Earlier today in yoga class, as we were moving into shavasana pose at the end of practice, I felt the urge to sit and meditate rather than lying down. Sitting there, I closed my eyes to rest my thoughts and started dropping into a gratitude practice, giving gratitude for so many things in my life. At some point in the gratitude practice, I dropped into this deep reverence for Mother Earth and for her fierce love – reflecting on my past several years of ceremony. One in particular that came to mind was an Ayahuasca ceremony from back in 2015 when Mother first started talking with me about this world ‘Love’…remembering:
On that 4th night of consecutive drinking in the remote woods of Canada, the medicine decided it would be a teaching night for me. I had originally asked Mother Ayahuasca to teach me how to love, that I wanted to see and feel her love. She told me I wasn’t ready to learn how to love yet because I first needed to learn how to receive love. Then, she began showing me how all the wounds of our world are because we have collectively lost or forgotten how to truly receive love. And I began to feel in my body that night how overwhelming love is. Seeing how, when we are unable to receive love because it feels unfamiliar and scary – we push it away and reject it, or worse yet we begin to fear it, as I had. I began to understand a world whereby it is easier to give into fear than it is to give into love. That the hardest thing in the world for us humans to do is to receive love and instead we push it away and then act out in violence at our anger, which is really our wounding and deep cry for love. This was my lesson that night.
Back on my mat, I was in deep reverence and gratitude for the past years of ceremony and rituals which have followed that fateful night. My teaching at first were very slow, oftentimes painful as Mother stripped my ego bare again and again.
But in reflection, she was tilling the soil of my soul to enable me to deepen my capacity for love.
Over the past year or so, that slow burn has accelerated, opening me up to my vast feminine animal desires and how much I love that part of me I never knew about. The past few months have been a rapid acceleration of Mother rebirthing me again and again. At first as a plant, then animal, and last as a human…in love.
I felt the rage of separation from my mother – angry, scared, and alone in this fast-paced, disconnected world. She reminded me that this is my animal desire for love and in its absence I may rage for it, pray for it, dance for it, cry oceans of tears for it…for that is what it means to embrace the divine feminine within all of us – to feel the enormity of love and do not let fear take its place.
Every choice you make is either an expression of love or an expression of fear, there is no other choice.
- A course in Miralces
She showed me where she has always been within me, inside of me, inside of my heart center. I just needed to learn how to hear her calling, feel her power, know her love.
Then, in that silent space between my in-breath and my out-breath, I heard another voice…
What about father?
I whispered those words to myself again…what about Father? and I wondered, fretted even, did I forget him? He knew I needed Mother’s medicine to teach me my capacity for love, but did I lose him in this sacred communion?
But now I hear him, he is telling me he has been with me the whole time. Whether I was out on the land fasting for a vision, stewing deep in plant medicine, climbing the peaks of sacred mountains, trance dancing with the bushmen, or just siting alone sinking deeper into despair and depression – that no matter where I was or what I was doing, he was always there holding me safe. He has always loved me – even when I hated him.
Here on my mat, he whispers to me that he was waiting all this time for me to find my sacred voice, to work though my emotions, and to learn my capacity for love that I have denied for so long – because he knew that as I learned to deepen my capacity for love…that I deepened my capacity to feel his love.
"Die Before You Die
Ironic, but one of the most intimate acts
of our body is
death.
So beautiful appeared my death – knowing who then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died.
“Die before you die,” said the Prophet
Muhammad.
Have wings that feared ever
touched the Sun?
I was born when all I once
feared – I could
love.”
Rabia al Basri
Note to the reader: When I speak of Mother, I mean it as the divine, sacred feminine in all life forms – sometimes specifically and always generally. And when I speak Father, I mean it is the sacred masculine that is in all life forms. I do not believe in a “God” as is spoken in any religious terms; I believe God as love.
