Creating Your Practice of ‘We’: Step 6: Loving Bigger and Bigger

My Dear Friend,

I love you.

No, I really do. And I don’t mean that is some schmaltzy, touchy-feely kind of way. I don’t mean it in some woo-woo New-Agey smiley face of being nice.

Nice is silliness, and mostly unreal and insincere.

When I say I love you, I mean it from my heart. I hold you in my heart and soul, and send you love, compassion, kindness and generosity of spirit. I send you the love I feel for you. I do so from my heart to yours.

You are free, as I am, to love as big as you wish to love. And I mean big, giant love. Or, as my friend Eileen Meier says in her music as her name for The Infinite, for God/Goddess:  Big Giant Love.

You can love everyone you meet, and all you have to do is send them love from your heart. Anyone can send love to another, anytime you wish to. It takes nothing from you, in fact it actually multiplies your own sense of love and connection when you do this.

I love you. I send you that love, and to be perfectly honest and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s none of your business that I love you. It’s my action I’m taking, to share that love with you, to hold you in my heart as I do.

Loving bigger is part of the Personal Practice of ‘We’. It involves you letting go of your worries about others, your prejudgments of others, your fears of others, and just loving. It involves courage, and one thing that Gandhi spoke about more than anything else is that this path of love, this "Way of We" as I call it, involves courage. As he said,

   "Non-violence is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and the bravest"

In the "Way of We", we have to step into our own courage, our own bravery. We have the power over our own lives, and we are in charge of us. No one else can take away our self-respect, our ability to love, nor our sense of our own selves. We are in charge of us.

So we can immediately change our fears, worries and prejudices into courageous steps of love. All we have to do is have the courage to let go of our hesitation to love, and step into sending love to the person or persons we’re dealing with. And a simple yet powerful way to do this in this "Way of We" is to simply see the love pouring out of your heart into the heart of the other person.

To be clear, what I mean is to actually imagine love pouring from your heart into the heart of the person you are having trouble with, that you are afraid of, or that you see as someone who is different and thus needing to be wary of at this moment. Visualize that love in a beam of light, shooting from your heart into the heart of this other person. Then watch what happens. You’ll be astounded by the shift in the connection you have with this person, you really will.

Everytime I do this, it feels like a miracle to me. It’s not of course, for this is who we are. We depend on our relational connections with others, as we are such social beings. Anytime we ‘oil’ those connections with love, the other person immediately picks up on that love, and they soften. Then, we do too, and then the love gets bigger. And bigger. And still bigger.

Nothing mysterious about this. Sages of all religions, both men and women, have spoken about our ability to send love to others, to love bigger than we do, to be the change we wish to see in the world. Well, if you want peace, if you want more love, perhaps you can simply take the step to actually GIVE MORE LOVE than you normally give!

It does take courage, for sure. We have to be willing to admit that perhaps our way of feeling and thinking might not be the best way. We have to admit that we are guided perhaps by fears, worries and prejudices, and in so doing, we make the other person less than the person they are, and turn them into some monster that we have to be afraid of for our lives.

Don’t worry, we all do it. I do it, everytime I meet someone new, or walk into a new situation. It’s okay, it’s a survival mechanism, scientists have shown us. When we lived for millions of years on the African plains, we had to have loyalty to our own group in order for our group to survive, and thus in order to survive ourselves.

And, we can step beyond that millions-of-years of genetic tendency, and see the ‘Other’ as what they truly are: the same as us, not different. Blacks, whites, Asians, browns, all the same. Nationalities across the world, all the same. Men, women, gay, straight, all religious denominations, all the same.

We are all Us. There is no difference anymore that we have to be worried about. That is the shift we are making as a race, and that we each have to make individually. We are all Us. We belong, all together. And together, we will survive these trying times.

The "Way of We" waits for us now. All we have to do is take a deep breath, and join in through loving the "other" as ourselves. Send love, be the love you wish to see in the world, don’t wait for anyone else. It’s up to you, it’s up to us, it’s up to All of Us.

I love you.

Don, aka Gandhi Guy