With Love
Spend some time during an everyday, mindless task, really noticing what you are doing. Do the task with love and tenderness. Observe your actions with all your senses, feeling into and embodying the task. Do you notice what brings you pleasure? Displeasure? Is there one sense that is easier for you to notice? One that is harder? When your attention is used up, let it go. That is okay too.
Since it’s Valentine’s Day, and I was very excited to rediscover my tree heart photo, I thought I’d write about love today. I know! I know! That topic has been covered in excess and it’s such a cliche to say “love is the answer”, so that’s not what I’m going write about. What I want to write about love as a practice.
In the last post, I wrote about this simple act I do of placing my hands on my heart every morning and asking “How are you? What do you need today?”. Some days I get clear answers, some days the answers are more vague. Asking and receiving is not hard at all and takes very little time. That’s why it’s so doable. The hard part is taking the answers out into my day. I inevitably get caught up in the energy of the day, the logistical and emotional struggles of family life and work. The truth is, no matter what my heart tells me, most of my time is spent on practical things like feeding people, getting them where they need to go, household chores, class planning, emailing and so on. It is so easy to lose touch with what the early morning check-in had to tell me.
And so “with love” was born into my life. I’m pretty sure I didn’t come up with this myself, and if I ever remember who to credit, I will. “With love” basically means taking the time to pay attention to what you are doing and do it with openness, intention, and care. And isn’t that what love really is? To give someone or something your undivided and nonjudgmental attention? To me, this is like a mindfulness practice but with warmth and pleasure in it. A heartfulness practice! It makes such a difference to me for it to be felt in my heart and my body as opposed to being something that only takes place in my mind. It’s making the bed and noticing the texture of the sheets, the indentation from your kid’s head on the pillows and feeling the comfort of this place where you are at your most vulnerable for hours everyday. It’s listening to your partner and noticing, not just their words, but the sound of their voice, the quality of their laugh. It’s doing the dishes and feeling the pleasure of satiation in your belly, the beauty of the water and the sounds of the sloshes and the clinks. It’s walking the dog and actually noticing the air on your skin, the muscles contracting and releasing in your legs, the light filtering through the trees. I notice the things I could label “bad”, as well: the stinging of the icy, windy air, the ear-piercing squawks of our parakeet, the dirt all over the floor. Part of this practice for me is to notice, but also just let things be as they are, good or bad. This has been really important because when I’ve been in the depths of a depression it’s been really hard to feel anything at all, so even noticing discomfort is strangely comforting.
I cannot claim perfection in this practice, but it’s always there, free and available in any moment of life. So when I’m in a haze of imagining how the day is going to play out while brushing my teeth, or rehashing a conversation in my head while my five year-old is talking to me about robots, I may notice that I’m lost and I say to myself “with love” and it brings me back to the present moment, at least for that moment! What I’ve ended up finding is that the days where I am most present with the activities I’m involved in, that I’m really paying attention, whether I actually like the activity or not, are the days where I feel most content, as if I’m living in alignment with my heart and my values.
Please give it a try and feel free to let me know how it goes!
