Lifeletter #127: Learning to Receive Great Love

Great Love is not the personal love we feel as individual human beings. It’s a vast love, an unconditional love, a kind of grace. When it flows down into our human experience we feel deeply nourished, healed, transformed and forgiven. It redeems our relationship with our past, it clears away a lot of the darkness and pain that clings to us from experiences we have not yet fully integrated.

It can seem almost impossible to access this love, most of the time. And there’s a good reason for this: this love lives far beyond the boundaries and the capacities of our egoic identity. So we cannot manufacture this love with our separate self. We can’t create it. It belongs to our deepest nature, and yet all we can really do is learn to receive it.

This practice is really about your willingness to make yourself available to this great love. You begin by sitting down and relaxing, getting quiet. Then you bring your attention to the space above your head. Imagine or acknowledge or visualize a boundless realm of love and light above your head that is ready to pour down into your body.

If you feel a great deal of skepticism about this possibility, see if you can remember any moments in your life when you had a glimpse, an inkling or an insight about the existence of this love. You don’t need to be a saint, or extraordinary in any way, to open to an experience of this love. Murderers and farmers, housewives and generals, have found a way to connect with it deeply.

After acknowledging the field of love and light above you, feel the crown of your head and relax it. You might do this by breathing in and out of the crown a few times, or just by feeling it and letting it soften a bit. Then invite this love to flow down, to descend through your crown. Ask it to move down through your crown into your heart, and allow it to soften your heart a little bit.

Don’t expect to feel anything. You might or might not feel something. Sometimes people feel a gentle energy, like sun or warm water, pouring down through the crown. Sometimes it’s quite powerful. And sometimes you don’t feel anything at all. Everyone is different. Don’t put any pressure on yourself when you do this practice. Whether or not you feel anything, just trust that this love is flowing down through your crown into your body.

Invite it to move into the places in you that really need it: the places that feel broken, fragmented, alone, desperate, unforgiven and afraid. When you have a difficult moment in your day, or a whole day that is challenging, see if you can find a few minutes to do this practice. You can sit with it for twenty minutes, or you can just do it for three or four minutes, a few times a day. Find the way with this that feels right for you. Practice being receptive, explore your willingness to receive something this precious. That’s all you have to do.

This is the bright home
in which I live
This is where
I ask
my friends
to come
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love

~David Whyte

 

with love, 

Shayla