One of my Conscious Weddings E-Course members sent me a beautiful article about real love. It was written by a Buddhist nun named Ayya Khema, author of “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere”, and is full of nuggets and gems about the true nature of the heart and what we believe about loving. As she wrote: “If we were aware that we all contain love within us, and that we can foster and develop it, we would certainly give that far more attention than we do. In all developed societies there are institutions to foster the expansion of the mind, from the age of three until death. But we don’t have any institutions to develop the heart, so we have to do it ourselves…. “If we see quite clearly that love is a quality that we all have, then we can start developing that ability. Any skill that we have, we have developed through practice. If we’ve… Click here to continue reading… . . . → Read More: Love is a Skill
Hollywood has done a number on all of us. From the time we’re old enough to ingest information, we’re inundated with images and messages about love, romance, and marriage that are shrouded in a shimmery cloud of fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy; the problems arise when fantasy and reality become blurred and we unconsciously absorb the unrealistic messages of, “You can have it all” and “Your Perfect Partner is waiting for you around the next corner” and “When you meet The One, you’ll ‘just know’”. We watch film after film and read novel after romantic novel that reinforce these damaging messages and then we wonder why our culture is so dysfunctional when it comes to love.
Much of Hollywood films are predicated on the theme that the story ends when the relationship begins. This means that for ninety minutes we’re hooked on characters who are chasing after each other, … Click here to continue reading…
My little one turns four tomorrow. Where some cultures mark the passage of time by etching lines on a tree trunk or branch, I mark it here, on this blog. Am I marking time or trying to capture it? Am I holding on or bearing witness to the way the hours keep dancing forward? It’s impossible to ignore the passage of time when you’re raising little ones; there are some days when they literally look older and taller in the evening than when they woke up that morning. Some days I hold on tightly and mourn each ending. But tonight, as I snuggled my boy to sleep, I didn’t resist. I thought, “There will come a day when I won’t snuggle him anymore,” and it was okay because the next thought was, “I’ll have more time to snuggle my husband and my cat!” Love shifts and moves but it … Click here to continue reading…
One of my favorite authors, Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, says that good love is like a bowl of oatmeal. A bowl of oatmeal? How unromantic, you may say. How prosaic, you think. Love should be an ice cream sundae with cherries and sprinkles on top. Love should be a decadent Italian dessert. Oatmeal? How depressing.
In our romance-addicted culture, this concept rubs many people the wrong way and often elicits questions like: Where’s the passion, the drama, the excitement? Isn’t love supposed to make me feel alive? Isn’t it supposed to fulfill my every need, even needs that I didn’t know I had?
What Johnson means is that love is not the cure-all that we set people up to believe it is. When love is true and real, it feels warm and sweet in your soul the way oatmeal feel warms and … Click here to continue reading…
The dreams always recur this time of year: I’m with my grandparents or I’m grieving the loss of them, and I wake up with the weight of unshed and unarticulated grief sinking my bones. Without the spaciousness that used to characterize my mornings before I had children, I can’t drop into the dream. I’m up, I’m snuggling my little one, I’m washing the cat bowl and filling it with fresh food as I notice the snow or sun on our yard, I’m reading books to my kids, making breakfast. The sounds and movements of the day begin and the dream is lost in the ether of that other realm.
But it’s not lost at all. It lives beneath the surface, swimming in the current of psyche that has no words, the world of grief and heartache, loss and longing. It’s a slow, quiet world, but it does not disappear simply … Click here to continue reading…
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