Today’s offering comes from a livestream Be Love Meditation that I offered this past Friday in the Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful Facebook Group I manage. There’s some good stuff in it so I thought it was worth repeating and sharing in this space as well. I’ll also include the transcript if you prefer the written form. May you sense a bit of eternity yourself this Sunday morning ❤️ If you are the praying type I’d be so grateful if you’d offer some loving energy this afternoon over the annual meeting of the Massachusetts New Church Union that will happen today at 2:00 pm. Pray for the deliberations over whether to accept the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative as a constituent body. So many feelings and hopes that there will be space in my beloved church for this new thing.
Greetings friends, it's Sage, and I am here inviting you on this Friday to join me for 12 minutes (yes, it ended up being 16 minutes🤪) of a Be Love meditation. If you're scrolling along, if you've got a few minutes in your day, I just invite you to stop for a second and give your attention to this moment that we are in, and the possibility that in this very moment, in the midst of whatever you're involved in, whatever is spinning through your mind, your heart, whatever activity, I invite you to just take a moment to consider the presence of love that is right here, right now.
It might be helpful to close your eyes and give your attention to your body. But it also might be helpful to just continue to go about your business and listen to what I am speaking about. I've gotten the feedback that some people like to listen to my meditations while they load the dishwasher. And that's totally fine. That's totally good. That's actually perfect. Because even quieting our mind or closing our eyes or coming into a state of meditation, even that sometimes we can misinterpret and believe that we have to get to some certain quietness, inner quietude before we can sense into the presence of love.
And what I really have come to discover and believe in, and what is the heart of the spiritual tradition that I'm a part of, the Swedenborgian church, is the truth that love is always present. That love is always primary and that it's useful to remember it, to give our attention to it, to want to nurture it and to consider how that love is moving in us and calling us forward.
Love is what we're all longing for. We're all doing things in the world, perhaps with the thought that it will bring us more love. AND my suggestion to you and my suggestion with these Be Love meditations is that love is already right here, very, very, very close to us. And that actually the source of the love that we experience is, inside of us, being given to us moment by moment. Some of the restlessness of life, some of the constant pursuing can quiet down and we can become a little more contented, we can come into a deeper alignment with life and a receptivity when we stop looking for love out there, when we stop this constant search for a better moment, and just begin to be sensitive to the presence of love right here and right now.
There's deep power in the presence of love right now. There's peace in the presence of love right now. And goodness and joy and healing. Health and wellness. Even eternity.
One of the mysteries of life, of human life, is that we're only here for a time. We're born and then we die. AND we have this invitation to sense something eternal. And when we start to sense that eternal, I tell you from my own experience, it empowers us to live with a lot more freedom and a lot more joy and a lot more adventure, because we know we're not going to survive. We know that, putting all our efforts into accumulating a lot and trying to fortify our sense of safety and physical survival, that all of those efforts are really going to be for naught, because eventually our bodies are going to give out…. quicker than maybe we would imagine.
So if we shift our attention from trying to survive to trying to sense the presence of love, the presence of the eternal in every moment of our life, in my experience, it makes life fuller. It gives me a fuller experience of life. And it helps me to approach every moment of life with its myriad challenges, with more inner resources, with a knowing that in every moment, my soul is growing and learning and expanding its ability to feel and interact with its environment and to express more and more love, to feel and to receive more and more love and that that's maybe why we're here on this planet. The endeavor of expanding our hearts to receive more love that endeavor is more than just the things we obtain in this material realm, that endeavor actually has a lasting impact on our eternal experience of life. We can take that love, that expanding love with us when we leave these physical bodies and who knows what kind of adventure we'll enjoy next.
We are all so powerful. We're all so much more than our physical bodies and so much more than the roles we play in this material world. We all have a direct connection to the Source that created this whole universe. And I encourage you to nurture that connection. And I encourage you to consider that that connection is where you feel and experience and can hold an attitude of love towards this life that you are and that you've been given.
I've said this, this line many times, but it's one of my favorites. Helen Keller says that “Nature gives away its secrets to those who love it.” When we love, nature, when we love ourselves, when we love the life we're experiencing, we can understand it more clearly, we can be given more wisdom to act and to move in ways that are helpful and nurturing.
And if we don't start from that place of love, we're really lost. Turning towards ourselves, turning towards life, choosing to love life, it changes everything. It makes so much possible that can feel impossible when we're constantly feeling the need to earn love, to get love, to become worthy of love. All of those endeavors are so misaligned with the truth.
They're such common pitfalls, so don't beat yourself up if you've been in that pitfall. Believe me, I've spent decades of my life in that pitfall. But at any moment, we can stop.
We can go, hmmmm what am I seeking for next? What am I working furiously for next that might actually already be right here, right now, right on board, right inside this very life that I'm already living? And how can I look for that, nurture that, love that, feel gratitude for that? Whatever my external circumstances, can I feel gratitude for my particular bit of life that I am getting the chance to experience? And when I feel love for that, do I notice that more love is made possible, that more life energy kind of wakes up when I give my attention to that love? Can I let go and release some of these stories and ideas about how I'm not worthy of this attention or I'm not a powerful being or I'm not beloved?
It can be hard to let go of those stories when we've been living with them for a long time and when pretty much every message from our culture is reinforcing those messages. But we can do it. And I would suggest that we can start to notice the falsity of those stories, the ridiculousness of them. They may be incessant and they may be coming at us from every direction, from every media device possible and every book on our shelf and every childhood message we've been indoctrinated in.
But even though it's very loud and very noisy, I wonder if you can also notice that you're here! That you're alive on this fresh new morning. Just as alive as the next person on the planet! Just as worthy of life, just as much here on this planet, breathing and eating and participating. And that in that way, you are just as powerful, just as loved and just as worthy of love.
And that if you're going to give your love to anything, let it be that, let it be this! Don't give your love away to some other entity that promises you some future reward, give your love to yourself now, to this moment now, and see what might emerge from it.
All of the theological traditions and religions of the world and spiritual practices they're all beautiful and incredible AND they've all emerged through human beings just like you, just like me, through their experience of love inside themselves with that which created them. And so they're all gorgeous and beautiful and we can benefit from reading about them and following them and learning from them. AND ultimately, the wisdom of you, the particular love of you is not defined by those external things. It can only be experienced in yourself.
What is it like to bring love there? What is it like when you face a moment that you're in and you hold the question, what would love do right now? What is love doing?
I know from my experience that when we're loving towards ourselves, the reality is sometimes we see things and experience things that are painful. It can be hard to be present. We've been so trained to be always future orienting ourselves and working to please others that we don't have a lot of practice perhaps. just being still with ourselves, just being loving. And we may start to notice painful feelings that have been ignored in the past, sadness, anger, rage, discomfort. So I am sympathetic. If sitting in a loving stance with yourself is uncomfortable, it might be. AND I'd encourage you to do it anyway. Because part of loving this life is loving the whole of it. The sadness, the pain and the joy. Maybe you can't go there all at once and maybe you need the support of someone else, or community. That's partly why we hold our Thursday night groups so we can be together in that presence because it can be helpful to be held in community.
And the journey is yours, the journey is mine. On some level we are connected to everything AND we are uniquely ourselves. That meeting of the life that's inside of us is on some level a solitary meeting. But it's a solitary meeting that we all do. And we all meet the same Source. We all meet the same Creator. And so on some level, we can meet there together. It's mysterious. But it's also very simple.
So if you found this video, thanks for joining me. Thanks for doing your own work of meeting yourself and meeting that love within. And I look forward to meeting you there as well in the scope of eternity. Many blessings, friends.
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