Loving When It’s Hard

When we practice the Spectrum of Love exercise, it cracks open a door within us that allows us to feel a flow of the essence of love into places where love is not easy for us. Included in the process is often some version of discovering a love that forgives ourselves for not being able to love someone. This week, let’s focus on that love – the love that forgives ourselves for our perceived shortcomings.

We begin, as always, with stepping up and in to that core of presence that is our Sovereignty: Say hello to the land beneath your feet and the love of Gaia that holds you up and the body that can stand and move upon it – all love and honor to the valiant body!  

Say hello with gratitude to the deep feelings of your emotional body that enriches your life experience, loving the fact that you can feel.

Say hello to the rich and imaginative mind that directs and sustains your identity in the world.

Say hello to your Self Light, magical and radiant, and a pipeline for the light of your soul to be present in the world.

Notice the felt sense of the wholeness of your incarnational self – stand in your Sovereignty for a moment and appreciate the depth and breadth of your inner source.

Know that the source of your life is love; every atom of life, every particle is a gift of love. Feel this love flowing through your layers of Sovereignty, your physical body, your emotional body, your mental body, your transcendent body. Love fills you, and in filling you, blesses you. This is the source from which you practice the steps of the Spectrum of Love practice. 

Now choose something or someone you have difficulty loving. Feeling the love flowing through your senses, sit with this focus and let yourself notice what you are not loving. Notice what part of you is not able to love. Turn toward this part of yourself and open your arms to it. Let yourself see it clearly and acknowledge it. Don’t try to force it to change. Sometimes just seeing it allows it to soften and change shape.

Let the love in your core flow into this part that can’t love, and accept and own it, and forgive it for being part of your experience. Let your love embrace and fill this part of yourself.

In forgiving this part of yourself, you may find you are more able to turn and start the Spectrum practice with the first step of perception – seeing the subject of your “dis-love” with new eyes, moving toward accepting that the subject exists and has a right to exist and be different from yourself.  

Forgiving yourself for feeling unloving allows you relax into flow of acceptance of the other “unloved” for being different. This is the crack the light of love begins to flow through – seeing another as a soul incarnate doing life their own way. They may be very different from you, but their soul is doing its best with what it has.

After ‘perception’ comes honoring their existence, then acknowledging they have a right to exist, then forgiving them, caring about them (feeling compassion). The next step might be affection.  

We expand our love one step at a time, each step widening “the crack that lets the light in;" the wider the crack, the more love flows through and the more open and connected you are with yourself and your world.  

A little love is better than no love and leads the way to bigger and bigger rivers of love blessing our world, like the power of water carving channels of flow over the land.