Leap with Love
/Let 2024 be the year we lead with love!
What is love?
Love is vulnerable, warm, compassionate, fierce, tender, caring, joyful, harmonious and courageous. Love is a state of being, choice, and action. If we can open ourselves up and even take a leap, love can lead us through anything, especially seemingly dark and fearful experiences, with innate wisdom, equanimity, and grace.
Love is not defensive but reciprocal.
Love is energy that needs to flow, move, and expand. It is not meant to be compressed, compartmentalized, or cut off. The flow is in giving and receiving love in all that we experience - the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful.
When faced with uncertainty, scarcity, cruelty, loneliness, overwhelm, and other big challenges both personally and with the collective, we can default to old survival, coping mechanisms that can be restrictive and reactive and can cause more harm than good. This instinctual attempt to protect ourselves can actually inhibit an ancient intuitive flow by reactively pushing, clinging, people-pleasing, fighting, fleeing, or freezing up.
With patience, humility, and practice, we can learn to lean into a loving awareness and leap into the magic of this mysterious life with love as our guide.
What if we lived by the notion that there is no separation from one another or our ancestors? What if we lived this life as if everything is connected? Everything! How would we meet life on life’s terms from this place of connection? The older I get the more lived experiences I have that make it evident how connected we are and not alone. But it is how we relate to life, whatever we are experiencing, that determines if we are disconnecting from or connecting to this incredible gift of being present, alive, and having a sense of belonging.
Fearful beliefs and thoughts give us the illusion of being disconnected from anything, including our whole selves. Healthy fear is helpful when it alerts us to protect and defend ourselves in times of immediate threat. But excessive fearfulness is misleading when it divides, diminishes, demonizes, catastrophizes, and separates us from one another, ourselves, and beyond.
What if we took a vulnerable risk and let love lead the way by facing everything with compassionate curiosity instead of criticizing or condemning what we are experiencing? By seeing life through a kind and caring lens of loving awareness, our perceptions can begin to shift out of a distorted view of separation and excessive threat no matter what the experience may be. Coming from this stance of awareness, we can choose how to respond to our experiences and see with spaciousness and clarity while living from an intuitive place that connects and empowers. This can allow us to feel safer and steadier and live in a graceful flow with life regardless of conditions and circumstances that we feel we can't control or want.
This isn't necessarily an easy process nor is it supposed to be. There will be times that we will come across obstacles where we will feel frozen with fear or hot to fight or flee. This doesn't mean we are doing something wrong or there is something "wrong" with us. Collectively, we all have early historical experiences that were overwhelming enough on some level that we went into reactive coping strategies to simply survive because we didn't have the resources, support, or maturity to do it differently. This is part of being human. We also inherit ancestral conditioning that is meant to be protective and is passed down through generations whether we signed up for it or not. This is part of our humanity.
The good news is we don't have to stay in these habitual, defensive and reactive patterns. We can see them as signals that we need to go deeper, open up, reach out, and love more. With awareness and practice, we can take contrary action to old defensive mechanisms when feeling anxious, stuck, or overwhelmed and learn to blindly leap into more of an unknown way of being with a courageous heart. We can learn to intuitively draw on the wisdom and resiliency that we carry within us by acknowledging our ancestors who walked through so much that allowed us to be here now. We can develop healthier strategies and boundaries that honor our true values and essence. And we are not meant to do this alone. We are social creatures and beings that are meant to connect and resiliently flow in and out of solitude and togetherness. Our unresolved past pain can prime us to get stuck in isolation or be enmeshed in relationships out of self-preservation and protection. Healing these patterns requires bravery and support, even if it is reaching out to only one person we feel can have our back and heart or reaching in and having times of quiet and introspection.
When feeling challenged, we can learn to pause, breathe, soften tension, and let our generous hearts respond naturally to life with daring compassion. We can take small steps and actions with love as our guide and as an anchor, especially in times that are unsteady, unclear, and burdened with unhealed pain.
By facing and embracing our experiences with compassionate curiosity, we can alchemize pain, grief, sorrow, and fear of the future into equanimity, fortitude, and feel the cradling care of unconditional love.
Here are a few tips to help Leap with Love:
Pause - many times throughout the day take time to stop, slow down, and check in with where your body is. Start to move the body by breathing deeply, stretching, and/or shaking out your limbs. This will help connect with our bodies which are always in the present moment, unlike our busy minds.
Presence - get present by tuning in from a place of compassionate curiosity and notice what you are feeling, thinking, and sensing. See if you can breathe into the places that feel tight and tense and begin to soften into what you are experiencing with loving awareness as your guide.
Phrases - choose an empowering phrase to help redirect and ground your attention as many times as you are challenged or feel yourself slipping back into old survival patterns. Here are some to choose from and see if you can create your own!
"May I choose to meet this moment with loving awareness"
"May I meet this moment with warmth and friendliness"
"May I trust that my daring heart can guide me in this experience"
"May I receive the loving care that I need to support me during this time of challenge"
"May I leap blindly with a loving, courageous heart into the unknown and uncertainty of this time"
For those like myself who can be complicated thinkers and have to manage both personal and collective trauma, facing and leading a life with loving awareness may seem too simplistic or even foolish. I would challenge this and say that both professional and personal experience has shown otherwise. Leading with fear tends to tighten, complicate, and even corrupt. Whereas leading with wise love can soften, simplify, and strengthen our integrity.
We know that what we pay attention to grows, so what do we want to grow in 2024? How about hope, trust, strength, joy, and togetherness? Letting love lead is how we can shift our personal and collective experience and live in harmony, balance, safety, wholeness, connection, and passionately with a fulfilling purpose.
Let’s leap with love into this new leap year and in every area of our lives.