A friend of mine recently said,“the opposite of fear is faith and unconditional love is underneath all of it.”
I’ve always wondered, if love was underneath all of it why we all fear and suffer so much. Why don’t we just have faith and live in love? It’s an inquiry worth exploration. I’m writing today in complete faith that love is underneath everything AND this does not mean that we are shielded from pain and suffering.
We live a human existence.
From the moment we were born we were separated from our Source – Pure Love. We can experience glimpses of wholeness in remembering who we really are and we can experience other things like pain, suffering, fear, etc. The Yoga Sutras state that,
“All experiences are either painful or painless but they all include pain.”
The contrast and world of duality is a swinging pendulum. Nature, Prakrati, around us changes from day to day and minute to minute. Until we are fully liberated from this human experience and move into Samadhi, we will no doubt experience pain.
The truth is that pain and suffering is unavoidable.
In fact, most enlightened beings suffered a great deal which led them to seek out the end of their suffering. Through their challenges they reconciled their karmas, examined their pain and its causes and made a choice to liberate from it. In history, we have witnessed some humans reach liberation through practice, non-attachment (vairagya), faith, meditation, surrendering to God (Ishvara Pranidhana) and the giving of unconditional love.
I believe the key to mastering our human experience as spiritual beings is to see what causes our pain and then to understand how we react to it, live with it and get comfortable with the fluctuations that arise from moment to moment.
I believe that we can make the choice to override our suffering and pain by practicing devotion to loving all that arises with faith that there is a Divine plan and Love underneath it all.
As challenging as things get (and I’d have to say this might have been one of my most challenging years to date and also one of the most spectacular on all levels),we need to practice non-attachment (vairagya) because the pendulum will swing from full expansion to complete contraction.
In the Law of Attraction work, we talk about contrast and the emotional guidance system.
Without contrast there is no way to set off our rockets of desire. Our desires as humans are born out of seeing what we don’t want and moving toward what we do.
That’s the basis of expansion.
We are leading edge creators molding our experience based on this emotional guidance system. If something doesn’t feel good we palpably feel that and we move away from it. If something feels really good we move toward it.
This is magnetism. Our heart is one large magnet.
Sounds easy, but then you have some other things that come into play.
The mind and the ego.
These entities, as I like to call them, have their own agendas. Their agenda like all of ours is to survive. They continually keep us challenged and experiencing our Samskaras (latent impressions) and kleshas (obstacles). They also provide us with the contrast needed to expand.
Due to these entities, humans experience conditional love.
We place parameters around what we allow ourselves to feel in efforts to protect ourselves or someone else from suffering. Yet in this human experience there is no way to protect ourselves from suffering or contraction, especially if we are living from fear and not from our truth.
Our truth is our connection to Source Energy.
Many of us find ourselves bound in our relationships and we compromise our belief systems and voices based on fear of being alone, fear of not being the loved, fear of what someone else might think or fear of hurting someone else.
With all of these agendas it seems only natural that there will be some degree of suffering. Our job, I believe, is to be a witness and in a state of listening. Our objective is to gain comfort with discomfort and suffering. We are tasked to find tools to help alleviate these energies as they arise. Ultimately, we are moving toward gaining freedom over all of the fluctuations of the mind, citta vrittis and moving toward Source.
As humans, can we love without conditions? Can we actually experience unconditional love?
I believe love is experienced as conditional in most relationships AND we keep elevating our understanding of love. I believe that through special intimate relationships we can get closer to unconditional love. A conscious relationship is a beautifully reflective and reactive laboratory to further understand the mind, the ego and their reactions.
When our love is unconditional we experience expectations and outcomes as mundane.
We have little reaction towards them. We fully experience this IS-ness of what IS at the moment. We feel into our emotional systems and we make choices from our current condition and awareness of what is arising in the NOW versus our illusions of the past. We find presence. Fear has a hard time surviving in the present moment.
How can we reach these states of presence and move toward unconditional love?
The cessation of the fluctuations of the mind comes with self-study (Svadhaya) discipline (tapas), and meditation. When we mediate or release ourselves from so many thoughts we find the bliss and Samadhi we desire. We can tap into unconditional love in our hearts.
Our hearts and our spirit thrive in this place of limited and pure thought.
Some of my favorite phrases to live by come from the Law of Attraction that states, “the basis of our life is freedom, the purpose of our lives is joy and the result of our lives is expansion.” One thing that I have discovered through my years of yoga, shamanic energy work and meditation is that when we can tap more fully into the spaces of unconditional love we do feel so much more freedom. We do live much more joyfully and we expand and grow beyond measure.
How can we experience our lives more fully to create this freedom, joy, expansion and unconditional love?
As spiritual beings in this human experience we self reflect. We take time for ourselves. We listen to what is arising instead of ignoring. We don’t bind but we liberate. We speak our truth despite the outcome. We make choices that feel good guided by the emotional guidance system we were given. We move energy that gets stuck so we can generate pure clean energy. We graduate to making choices with discernment based on what is best for ourselves at that moment. We continue to create opportunities that provide us growth and expansion toward living in our highest truth. We watch where we are attached to expectations or when we place conditions on others. We offer to do something for someone else because we want to not because we expect it returned. We tune in to our fears. We get still. We meditate. We learn to witness our human existence from our soul, Purusha. We tap into pure consciousness.
This year, I’ve experienced some of the hardest challenges and the most suffering of my life and some of the most joy and expansion I could have hoped for.
All of this has provided me with the opportunity to have faith and fully surrender to God. And with this, I’m creating a challenge for myself to also observe how I make my decisions moving forward. I pledge to listen to my emotional guidance system as best I can and to practice discernment with this question in mind,
“Nicole, are you making this decision based on fear or in love?”
I’m sure this month will be a very powerful one and I’m excited to see the results!
It’s also my plan this month to tune into Leela, or Divine Play, tuning into the natural flow of the Universe.
I plan to swim in the ocean, dance with the sun and the moon, unite in community, help friends, open my heart more, guide people out of fear, inspire hearts, laugh, cry, sing from the bottom of my heart, discover hidden treasures everywhere, tantalize my taste buds, express my truth, breathe fully, meditate and experience life with childlike wonderment and discovery. I plan to live more from the present moment!
Everything is available. The possibilities are endless.
And with this I leave you with some of my favorite new quotes from ME…
“Every road leads to everywhere!”
“If there is one thing that I do know, its that I don’t know shit!”
Blessings on this infinite journey unfolding,
Nicole