July 9, 2006
You
can listen to parts of our July 9 service also
(MP3 format) »»»»
|
|
|
|
July 9, 2006
SPIRITUALITY IN TOMORROW’S WORLD:
IS LOVE THE ANSWER?
What's Loving Got to Do with It?
By Skye Hirst, PhD
Good Morning. What a great day to talk about Loving!
What's Loving Got to do With it?
Isn't It JUST a nice ideal? A Second Hand Emotion, like the Tina Turner Song Says…….
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
Isn't it all about survival of the fittest?
The "It," by the way, is life, yours and mine, our world, even the cosmos is the "it" I'm going to talk about.
Recently, I began really learning about what loving has to do with it all at a very personal level. Mind you, every day I'm learning and I've got a lot to learn about this subject. That's why I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to share these thoughts with you here in such a loving environment.
A few months back my 90 year old father died following two years of being in and out of hospital. We'd spent many years working through our differences and finding harmony, I thought, but at the last, just before he died, he informed me that I would not receive an inheritance that I had been promised. It hurt in a way I never expected. I felt lost, separate, isolated. I didn't even know who I was, it seemed. This loss of my father's approval was even greater than his death. I felt like I'd lost all those years of feeling his love.
This was all compounded by a minor car accident I was in while driving to his funeral from Maine to Missouri. I felt vulnerable.
Then my birthday arrived shortly, thereafter,and I was swamped by feelings of not being loved, or seen, ever, by my family, or my father and I connected to all the ways in which I'd felt unwanted. I went to the bottom of my despair. I felt exhausted, constantly in tears, a longing came up in me that felt like nothing could make it go away.
From my work as coach and counselor, I knew that if I could fully embrace the pain, the sadness, the hurt, the isolation, it would shift. Easier said-than- done when it's me having to do it. However, the feeling became so strong that I could do nothing but feel it. And when I did, something shifted and lifted. It was like I opened the wound and immediately, it began to heal.
Balance was just beginning to return when my husband, Norm, got sick and demanded lots of care every hour of the day. Day in and out these demands took on a Herculean proportion in which I felt totally swamped again and at my lowest point. I wondered what I was going to do. It felt pretty bleak.
Reaching for anything to lift me out of this place, I rather hopelessly asked Spirit to help me, to open in me a new understanding. I don't know when it happened, but the next thing I remember was I heard these words,
"When you serve your beloved with love, it is effortless."
Another shift occurred and with it a feeling of loving revealed itself in me. As I began caring from this new place inside me, I felt a oneness with both my beloved and The Beloved. It was effortless. Then at times self-pity would make it hard again, so I'd remember the loving and it became easy again. A sense of what action to take became evident, over and over. I even felt how to pray to Norm's body/mind to support his healing.
The message was simple:
"Without being in a spirit of loving, life is difficult. "
In my practice, I hear so many confusing questions about love;
"Doesn't love mean a lot of self-sacrifice?" or "If I allow myself to love, won't I get hurt?" Or "How do I find someone to love me?" or "How do I know I'm in love?"
What I got was, never mind anyone else or whether you're in love with someone else, you, in your own being, can change your life experience from being hard - to joyful. Feeling and acting loving starts inside us. That's where we connect and know love. From there all else flows. It's the foundation of all experience because that's how we are designed to be –
in lovingness.
Somewhere in time, we forgot.
As human beings in our search for effective acts, we've searched outside of ourselves. We're not encouraged to look inside, to know the expanses and possibilities that come from in here.
Instead we've learned to be judgmental, critical of one another and tell ourselves stories about how we are separate from one another, that we must defend, protect ourselves, even fight one another. Any thinking that puts our focus on what others should or shouldn't do will stop this loving feeling, just as it did in me in the case with my father. Whatever my father felt or did couldn’t stop my loving feelings unless I stopped them.
Let me change the focus here for a moment to traffic.
There is a five-way intersection in Camden. The people of Camden know the best way to go through that intersection is in a spirit of cooperation and if you will, a spirit of loving. Life works best this way for everyone. Traffic flows effortlessly. During the winter, the locals know the way to navigate this corner. However with strangers coming into town who haven't learned this simple truth, bringing attitudes that may not be so cooperative, the traffic flow doesn't work at all at that corner and often comes to a stand still.
So What's Loving got to Do with it? Everything. Life-itself works better with loving, even traffic.
Norm and I have been married for 20 years and we've worked closely all these years learning about how values work within the laws of nature and life-itself. Each year we're discovering the miraculous and magical ways nature works and heals through cooperation. But this past year, we've both begun to experience how each of us are cells, connected in a living cosmic entity working together. This cosmic entity forms us, knows us.
The way each cell in our body knows to act from it's own uniqueness to serve the greater whole, (you or me) is the same way we, being like cells, know how to act from our uniqueness to serve the greater cosmic whole.
However, centuries of focusing on the "thinginess" of life, on that which can be seen or measured, our sciences and even our religions have us believing in the duality of body and spirit and our separateness. It has fostered the belief that we are descrete things, separate from each other, made up of parts like machines. From this place of separateness, we've collectively come to believe we must control others, dominate, and win approval, get it right, be the strongest to survive. These beliefs have taken on such a force that it's hard to counter them, especially when we feel hurt, or judged, or experience any action or thought that makes us have an attitude of separateness.
All separateness does is hurt and stop our ability to live in joy and cooperation. It deadens us.
Loving is always available within us to feel because it's what's generated from being alive, from the energy vibration that forms us. It's what's making us, holding us together as cells, as human beings, and it holds us together in the families, communities, work place, countries, cultures, civilization, the cosmos.
Notice I've not been talking about love so much as I've been talking about feeling loving. I make this distinction because love is a noun and has been treated like a "thing" to get, to have, to own, to possesss like it's out there some where to go after. But loving is an active feeling, it has a felt sense that forms inside us and takes habit, if we let it. It's always available to feel, to experience at any time, just for the asking. From this feeling - loving acts follow. Sometimes a loving action will activate the feeling and that's nice too.
We've come to think it's hard to go inside to find this place of loving when everything outside us seems to be so threatening, in a world of competition, with demands for us to "get it right" by some outside standard where there is one winner and lots of losers, with threats of unimaginable destruction. With everything pulling at us from what's happening in our lives, if feels counter-intuitive to go inside in the face of threatening and unloving energies.
Is loving the answer? Can it protect us? Can it give us the direction and wisdom to know how to act during such times of change and uncertainty?
It is precisely during such times when nothing else seems to work that we finally surrender everything and loving opens in us. All that has seemed so important suddently melts away. Communication channels of inspiration become available to us. We become loving and one with our Creator at the same time. We have access to greater possibility, new ideas, action and wisdom are revealed. Creativity is released.
Feeling loving would be the best defense against terrorists. How would we act from a loving feeling towards those who are different from us? Non-violent resistance is a greater force that comes from connection with this loving feeling. When we are connected to this loving, fear disappears.
Now I can assure you I've got a lot to learn about all this. I'm challenged constantly to remember what I'm saying here. I'm certainly not always able to do what I'm saying. And I'm hoping today we can each make a commitment to help one another by first being in our own loving place, not by pointing out to others when they aren't loving; not by self-sacrificing or "shoulding" on one another, (you should be loving). I'm suggesting that first make it your business to find out what helps you connect to your own loving feelings because it feels good and it makes life work better. It changes the very health of your body, the energy you emit. Stress goes away. It puts you in touch with an internal knowing place, available at any time. It never goes away. We just lose the focus for a while. Then we get to choose it again.
There is no one way to connect to this feeling. Each of us will find our own way. Your gathering here is so very loving, it helps put us all in mind of the goodness available to us. So with your permission, let's take a moment to reflect on further remembering this loving call within.
What works for you? What opens this feeling in you? Consider this.
- Is it remembering a tender moment with your child,
- your mother or
- a new born puppy,
- or being outdoors in nature, feeling connected to the elements,
- or time out for reflection, meditation,
- exercise,
- good food,
- listening to a beautiful piece of music?
Exercise:
2) Take a moment now to recall such a happy feeling.
3) Now turn to a person next to you and first focus on their heart region,
4) Then say, say something you think that person needs to hear from you. Or simply say "Something good's going to happen to you."
This is magic. This is loving. It's the channel for communication between our unique worlds of experience. Shut off this loving feeling and we shut off our ability to connect with one another.
If you are holding back your loving from someone because they hurt you, you are the one who is feeling the hurt more by holding back the loving. It doesn't feel good. Let go of those beliefs that you are separate from them. Love that part in you that is hurt. Return it to the whole to be harmonized.
Everyone wants to feel loving. Jesus started talking about this over 2000 years ago and it seems like only today are we beginning to get his message.
The human consciousness can change in a second if it needs to and knows how. We can find ways to live together, to know each other, to have compassion, to find new cooperative solutions for our world and for our own personal lives without the need for domination and control. Life-itself knows how. It's showing us with each breath. Let's learn to listen from within.
Norm and I believe the human consciousness is growing towards a collective breakthrough as each of us feel the loving and remember. The greater whole benefits and soon a collective learning "clump" will shift us all into knowing oneness and our role within it.
Is loving the Answer for the future? Yes, because it feels good and it makes everything work. Come home to this loving inside you. It's calling and wants to answer your longing.
"Softly and Tenderly Loving is Calling, Calling for you and for me.
Why do we linger and heed not its mercy, mercy for you and for me.
Come home, come home, ye who are weary come home.
Earnestly, tenderly, loving is calling, calling for you and for me." Amen
