February 1, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
Love exists in a state of flow. Love does not sit idly waiting for someone to notice and pick it up; love moves. When mystics say things like “in order to love oneself, love others”, they refer to love in flow. If we want to feel love, we can share it and invite the flow of love through our lives; as love flows through us to others (or God), we inherently feel replenished and healed by the love we share. For some, however, before we can share or receive love we must first create space by clearing our blockages of fear and sadness. Once we create the space, love naturally flows in and invites us to share. In this natural state of flow love grows, expanding to fit the space we create and inviting us to grow the space available.
The idea that love exists in a state of flow came to me a few months ago, during my meditations. It started due to some trivial frustration with your mom (I don’t recall why I was frustrated; when you are married you will find that you carry various minor grievances regularly). On this particular occasion, as I sat down to meditate, I actually noticed the frustration, which felt as if I were carrying some negative electrical charge. Rather than do what I normally do and justify my frustration, I got curious and decided to explore. As I settled into my meditation, I welcomed the charge and thanked it for protecting me. It took me awhile to genuinely feel a willingness to welcome and embrace the charge; I sat patiently until I felt the willingness. From that place I asked the charge if there was anything it wanted me to know. I felt a source of negative energy in my gut. I directed my awareness to where I felt the discomfort in my body, and again welcomed it. I observed that the energy felt closed, as if sitting inside a balled fist. I asked the charge if it were willing to let go and open up (with the caveat that we could put the fist back if needed). The fist opened and receded, exposing a bulb-shaped receptor. The receptor sat suspended in my gut from a long wire. From that part of my body, I suddenly felt very raw, open, and exposed. The fist served as a source of protection from vulnerability, from pain. With the fist gone, the receptor felt acutely (almost unbearably) sensitive. I asked the receptor what it wanted: to be loved. I assured the receptor that it was loved, by God and by me. It responded “I also want to be loved by others”. I assured the receptor it was okay to want to be loved by others.
After some time sitting raw, exposed, and uncomfortable, I started to feel love flow from some mysterious internal source out of the receptor. I sensed the receptor was receiving God’s love, and channeling it out into the world. My fist had protected the receptor from pain, but had also stopped the flow of love. I eventually settled into the realization that I was meant to sit with this receptor open and exposed, allowing love to flow. On a practical level this meant allowing myself to get vulnerable, sit in the unfamiliar discomfort of feeling exposed to pain, and eventually find strength in the vulnerability. As a result, I’ve been intentionally practicing exposing myself and getting vulnerable publicly, slowly building comfort in the discomfort, strength in the vulnerability. It’s painful but healing work.
More recently I realized that we humans, when we experience love, have a deep and innate desire to capture and hold onto that love. And so we try to build boxes meant to capture the love we experience, in the expectation that we can return to the box and access the love we want when we want it.
The problem: as mentioned above, love exists in a state of flow. The box may very well trap some finite quantity of love inside, but in blocking flow it prevents the replenishment of love. In our return to the box, we begin to draw upon a finite rather than infinite source of love. We don’t notice at first, because there is ample love remaining in the box on the first few visits, and so we feel safer in the presence of the box, knowing *we* have done something tangible to secure our access to love. Over time however, without the capacity for replenishment, the well of love in the box begins to run dry. We experience a crisis: we’ve grown dependent on the box for love, and have forgotten how to live in a state of flow. We delude ourselves into believing love is finite, and panic at the thought our sources might run dry. We’re cut off from the endless ocean of love available to us due to our inability (born of unfamiliarity) to live in flow.
Examples of boxes we create: holding onto relationships that no longer serve us, addiction in any form (chasing the ‘high’ we felt the first time), or stunting the growth of our children out of fear they will grow up and leave us. Basically, any time we clutch onto something that once brought us joy, we create a box that impedes the flow of love in our lives.
To some degree, our institutions are really just boxes we built in an effort to capture and preserve something good. Our media, education system, forms of government, corporate structures, and religions are all boxes designed to capture and protect various ideals. For generations (or centuries, or even millennia) we’ve relied upon these structures for security and protection, increasingly at the cost of allowing ourselves to exist in a state of vulnerability and flow. And so, over time, we have sourced our security and love from these finite sources, not realizing these sources were finite and not realizing the ultimate source of goodness is love, love exists in a state of flow, and the path to replenishing the love in our lives is surrender. In surrender we clear the blockages of fear and sadness, creating the space for love to flow; fortunately the flow returns once the space is cleared, love is infinite, and in flow love expands.
Our species is being invited to rediscover flow. As the boxes (e.g. institutions) we built run dry, we collectively feel the need to replenish the love in our lives. As of now we look, increasingly frantically, to those institutions on which we’ve come to rely. We have yet to understand those institutions were cut off from replenishment the moment they were created, that the very thing that made them feel safe (the reliability of the box) was the same thing which would lead to their ultimate doom (the separation from replenishment via flow), and that we need to return to our natural state of flow in order to feel love and wholeness again. This will be a jarring shift. Such is our invitation.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 