True Love

“Within the body you are wearing, now inside the bones and beating in the heart,
lives the one you have been searching for but you must stop running away and shake hands, the meeting doesn’t happen without your presence . . .” ~ Robert Hall

Devote a Day to Love

I am often surprised when I hear that someone is opposed to celebrating Valentine’s Day, birthdays or whatever celebration popular culture deems ‘this is the day for…’. I understand the push back at commercialism, the ache for simplicity and authenticity. And yet, days with built-in reminders to honour the loves in our lives are still beautiful opportunities. Use those days to be creative, to make your love visible in not only what you give but in your very way of being.

One of the most beautiful books on loving I know is one by Thich Nhat Hanh called, “True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart”. It is a small book packed full of accessible wisdom that you can take immediately into your life. The first time I read this book, I consumed it in entirety while having a bath. I have since re-read it many times over the years when deep connection has felt illusive. It is a book that serves as a gentle reminder that love begins with the self and that simple practices are sometimes the truest.

Simple, Loving Meditation Practices

Here is one such practice from the book above that might help bridge a formal meditation practice (if you have one) or to begin a practice of Everyday Mindfulness:

When looking at your beloved, for example, you could breathe in – and say in your mind to yourself, ‘I see you,’ and then as you breathe out – you might say again in your mind to yourself. ‘and I am glad for it.’

You could do this when you look at the sunrise, the snow falling, the wind’s movement through the trees, your child sleeping.

Here is another practice from a different book also written by Thich Nhat Hanh called, “Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children”. It is a practice we did as a family when my daughter was quite small and the memory of it still fills me with so much love. Commit to this with anyone you wish to cultivate a deeper connection with. It is a Three-Breath Hugging Meditation:

Begin standing opposite to someone you love and make eye contact and smile. Slowly embrace and on the first inhalation become aware of your breath and say in your mind, ‘I am so grateful I am alive’. Then breathe out. Take your second inhalation and direct your attention to the breath of the person in your arms and say in your mind, “I am so grateful that you are alive’. Then breathe out. Take your third inhalation and say in your mind, ‘I am so grateful to hold you in my arms.’

What Would Valentine’s Day (or any day!) be Without Chocolate? Without Poetry?

Here is a tried and true recipe to make (it says in the recipe that extra chocolate is optional which prompts the question: Is extra chocolate ever ‘optional’?).

I have also selected a couple of poems that you might give to your love this Valentine’s Day:

What She Could Not Tell Him ~ Denise Levertov

I wanted to know all the bones of your spine, all the pores of your skin, tendrils of body hair. To let all of my skin, my hands, ankles, shoulders, breasts, even my shadow, be forever imprinted with whatever of you is forever unknown to me. To cradle your sleep.

Women Who Sleep Outdoors ~ John B. Lee

It seems in the primordial menses of natural night that women who sleep outdoors attend to lunar rhythms as their moon-drawn darkness weeps away from the womb like crimson cloth woven to flow in the slow tidings of heaven’s loom and from the fallopial ache to where meanwhile the vulva swells like the bivalves of a breathing sea life comes away as a half-completed seed under the black sky’s brilliant fecundity of stars as those radiant maps set out the seasons of desire in design.

And how might I place this human heart this velvet clock this soul-sad calendar born beating at the clavicle like a gentle knocking of waves for I am a fathering creature and cannot comprehend circumference or why by that stone’s reflected light those liquid gravities have no equal anima in me. And yet I am completed by the sleeper’s satellite. However long I live I’ll draw one luminous circle from within and love one woman forever.

And finally, one last quote and so much LOVE from me to you, beautiful one, who is reading this…

“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi