Love = Exquisite Activism

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Love. Cosmic, huge, rippling, ecstatic, joyous love. It’s the very foundation of our being. The essential building block of our true nature and of our temporary manifested form. Our cells and atoms dance in its coruscating light, the light of Love wedded to Awareness. So what better way to transform the inner world or the outer appearances than to use this very love? Like water, it bathes everything indiscriminately. Like the sun(s), it shines on everything without prejudice or preference.

We can do so many things that we don’t even dream we’re capable of, until suddenly it occurs to us to try them. When shopping in a certain big-box discount store, I like to use an attention trick: Instead of letting maneuvering in crowded aisles or among harried shoppers bother me, I inwardly say “I love you” to each person in turn that I pass in the store. This immediately shifts my mood and generates feelings of unconditional love, appreciation of things I hadn’t noticed about those folks before, grace and humility and gratitude simply to be having this human experience. A big smile dawns on my face and sometimes a few tears well up from the gratitude and beauty. People sometimes stop to ask what my secret is. How can I look so happy while shopping in a place people often find irritating and energetically draining? If they seem sincere in asking, I tell them about my trick.

On this most recent trip, I decide that instead of silently beaming love to people one at a time, I will bathe the whole field of my perceptions, and everyone apparently in it, with love all at once. I expand my sense of presence effortlessly through the whole store, the parking lot, and a good section of the town. I enlarge my field of tactile presence to sweep through the earth below, into the skies above, through all the seeming matter and space, appearances and beings. I encompass it all and fill that expanse with a silently repeated, “I love, I love, I love,” without specifying an object for the love. This is much faster to do than to describe–an energetic stretching out and then filling the whole space with buoyant appreciation.

Immediately a huge, dizzy, happy, naturally “high on love” feeling fills me in response. It’s an amazing wave of happiness and joy washing through! So astonishing how easy and immediate this is. I keep doing it while picking up the items on my shopping list and repeat it later in other parts of town. Each time it’s so easy and rewarding. That love is always here, just waiting to stretch out as far as mind and heart can reach. Those around me also become more harmonious, smile more, slow down and bask in the spacious moment.

We are built to love, totally and without restriction. What if more of us bathe our surroundings with unconditional love and appreciation, frequently and joyously, as we shop or work or exercise or travel or just breathe? We don’t have to switch it off, pretend that we are less than this, or save it for meditation sessions or family time. Love is the eternal elixir, the ultimate solvent. If we use more of our moments like this, what miracles may appear? Let’s find out.

Namaste

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