For all the conversations I’ve engaged with exploring differing facets of love, and the snippets of thought I’ve put on to paper, rarely have I dedicated the time and space to delve more deeply into love through the written word. There are many contributing factors to this, some practical and others that invite more reflection. To the extent that the essence of love, in the fact of its existence, is something that exceeds any constellation of words that might attempt to capture it, perhaps I find myself hesitant to try to put words to the experience or expression of love I seek to live into. To the extent that change is the only constant, and any given orientation toward love unfolds and shifts over time, perhaps I find myself hesitant to capture the essence of a moment that is fleeting. In all these hesitations, I reflect on the teachers in my life that have offered guidance in the ways in which I understand and orient toward love. I reflect on the poets, artists, and wise persons whose works capture the ineffable and the vastness of a single moment. I reflect, too, on my own experience of love as a spiritual essence and guide, emergent most strongly through the co-cultivation of relationship with others. Honoring all of these elements, and moving into a space of compassionate inquiry within myself, I dedicate myself to practice, to exploring into the unfolding of love, what it is to love, to be loved, and to be love.
In speaking into the ways in which I orient toward love, I notice myself drawing upon ways in which others have defined this most powerful essence of life. Recently in conversation with a dear friend, I felt into my body as he expressed his own experience of love and most specifically in the moments where he was clear in his intention to not define what love is, but rather reflect on its presence in his life. I so deeply appreciated this way in which he spoke into this. It resonated profoundly and elicited this very reflection, to explore more deeply not how I might align with a given definition of love, and instead to explore the way I experience its emergence within me and beyond me.
My love for love unfolded in the recognition of its revolutionary, radical, and subversive power, which emerged through my yoga practice. I can remember the specific moment where this all coalesced, where the realization power of love for justice came most fully into my consciousness. This moment arose several years after my practice began, but my path in yoga has always been one of the heart.
I first arrived at my yoga practice because of my heart, my physical heart. It was hurting, neglected and abused. I deprived myself of nourishment to the point that my heart suffered, as my body began to pull nutrients from my muscles and organs to survive. In recovery, I began practicing yoga as a way to move my body without overburdening my heart. Unknowingly, from the very beginning I have had a heart-centered practice. Since that time, I have come to understand, more so, I have felt my way to the understanding that yoga is all about the heart. Not the physical heart necessarily, but that which the heart holds and represents – love. My practice now is one of heart, of love, of agape – the unlimited kind of love that sees no exception, a love of and for all from the smallest individual to the largest community. It is a soul connection love, one that honors every being as deeply connected and as inherently and equally valuable just as they are. It is a love of radical healing and wholeness.
In a conversation about love with one of my beloved teachers, she shared with me these words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” These words shook my body, reverberating through every cell. The expression of my spiritual practice through yoga found alignment with my engagement in personal and social transformation.
The guiding questions in the field of peace and justice are simple, for all the immense complexity they hold. How do we live peacefully? How do we move toward and enact justice? How do we heal? How do we remember our wholeness, as individuals, communities, and with the world? How do we create a world in which the truth of everyone’s belonging is realized? For each of these questions, love offers an answer. Love in action is the commitment to and realization of fierce belonging. Love is the remembrance of our wholeness, individually and collectively. Love is the essence that permeates spaces of perceived separation and fragmentation, the force of healing in its truest sense of becoming whole. As Dr. Cornel West says, “justice is what love looks like in public.” Love is the guiding intention that allows for the navigation of relationship in a compassionate and transformative way.
With love as a compass and a destination, this does not deny accountability and critical engagement in the way in which we are present and the way in which we support others to be present in the work of justice and liberation. Rather, it supports a more full and compassionate commitment to the realization of justice, as it is an act of love to support oneself and others in acting, speaking, and being in a way that upholds the dignity of all beings. This is a practice of radical presence, of awareness of ourselves situated across time and space, situated a vast and ever changing array of relationships. It is in this way that we find, generous presence is love embodied.
© 2019 All Rights Reserved
Embody Peacebuilding 