The Circuitous Route to Love
A Reminder
In my heart of hearts, I’d like to get people interested in meditation, if anything to introduce them to their own capabilities and encourage self-healing, but I’m OK telling you that how I’ve become my own self-healer isn’t the right way. It is a way. And it might not be your way.
To become our own self-healer, I’d like to encourage the many avenues and ways we might get there.
What is self-healing and why do I always seem drawn to this particular term? I use the term self-healing like many teachers might, to share with you the intricacies of the self, not only as a catalyst for pain and suffering but as an instrument for change.
We are self-destructive in the ways we hurt ourselves and others, just as we are propelled to repair the damage and do better for ourselves and the world around us. But one individual’s fight to heal ultimately will hurt. Someone. This is the way things work on a planet with competing forces.
My desire to help could push you into a place of regret, animosity, or insecurity. Maybe I look pulled together and capable. Maybe you feel shame that you are struggling. My desire to help can then hurt and push you away.
On the flip side, you can see someone struggling, and in your desire to help, only succeed in making yourself look better. To you. Healing becomes caught in this undertow of need. I need you to heal to help heal an ailing planet just as you may need me to stop chattering.
When we take away all the needs and unpack meditation, the desire to do right, to heal, to improve, to ground, to become a catalyst for change, once tangled in love, or this idea of love, or the illusion of love, shifts.
We’re trying to love and meditate and do good. Right? We’re trying to improve ourselves to help others improve, but remember, my idea of improvement isn’t universal. If I believed in war then I would fight my way toward world peace, but I don’t so I won’t push war on you.
But in the same breath, someone who believes that world peace can only be achieved through the fight will sink my theory. Two opposing forces trying to bring about world peace and not one of them is right. They are both right/wrong. Dueling.
We’re sinking, all of us, in the quicksand of right.
Is there a right way to love? To achieve? To honor? To fight? We think there is. And we’re hell-bent on proving others wrong.
In my meditations, I hear this language that comes from the stars. It is not a language I recognize, but I do hear it. It’s complicated, but I know I’m listening to something outside of myself and it is not coded as either right or wrong. It is not coded in polarity or politics or heaven and hell. It is simply this unilateral understanding that language divides. Simply put, there is no such thing as this OR that. We’ve decided this for ourselves.
But on a planet such as this one, I am shown, there will always be a this AND a that. And it is on us to accept this.
