Love Is

Love is not something you acquire. It’s something you become.

I invite you warmly, whole-heartedly, to consider this, lean into this:

Love Is.

You can surrender your small self, you can merge with it, become one with it.

We human beings are addicted to acquiring love, to looking for love outside of us, (”in all the wrong places”), to finding that special someone to love who will love us back, when the truth is,

Love Already Is.

You don’t have to go looking for love when you are it already.

You are it; it lives within you as YOU when you let go, when you surrender. 

“Ah,” you say, “let go of what?  Surrender what?”

When you let go of your prejudices, your judgments, your infinite opinions, your comparisons, your “not as good as,” “better thans” -- your superiority and inferiority. Surrender, let go of, recognize, notice, all that internal chatter. That internal chatter —one of my Chilean teachers called it “chicherero” — the sound of the rubbing together of cricket wings. That “chich,” (for short) is the survival mind speaking, whispering incessantly in your ear to snag you and bag you and take you away from life. You have to first notice those internal, dualistic voices, observe them, witness them, recognize them, NOT resist them. Another teacher of mine said. “What you resist persists.”

“Welcome them, include them all,” Rumi says, in his poem, “This being human is a guest house.”

When they are accepted and included, you can let go, and they can let you go.

You can fall.

When you let go, when you stop holding on so tightly to your fear, you fall… into love.

Consider that the opposite of fear is not courage.  It is love.

Love is.  It permeates the universe.

It is unconditional.  To say, “I love everyone and everything except x,” is not love.

All we have to do is raise our sails, as Ramakrishna says, and we can experience it. “The winds of God’s grace are always blowing; it is for us to raise our sails.”

The problem is, we don’t raise our sails.  We try to steer our little boats, rudderless, compassless, through wishing and wanting and hoping for something outside of us to take care of us, rather than raising our sails and discovering and experiencing the love that is already, always around us. That Grace, if we attend to it, will lead us to our own rightful destination.

The first time I received this “knowingness,” this experience of a deep and profound sense of belonging, I was 27 years old, and taking a course in Silva Mind Control, in Piedmont California. The year was 1972. The month: November.

I was sitting on a chair inside of a dark wood mahogany living room with several others. Photos of a strange-looking Indian man in orange robes were all around, and I was curious, but I ignored them. I was there to learn about Mind Control.  My first husband and I had just gotten a divorce. I discovered I didn’t know who I was. The time had come for me to discover myself beyond my old identity, my old thinking about myself, and the roles I had been playing — teacher, wife, college graduate, good student…and that there were patterns of thinking I had been given by my upbringing, my parents, my culture.  It was time to break free!

I was deep in the question, “Who am I?”

The course I had taken was all right enough. 

However, something startling, something extraordinary, something perhaps miraculous occurred for me in that chair.

Suddenly, waves and waves of warm electric energy poured from above, into the crown of my head, and from there, permeated my whole body, sending me wave after wave of heat, of bliss, of Life. 

I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t understand it. I just let it happen.  It was, after all, all I could do. It was not stopable by thinking. Ignoring it didn’t work, either. I just had to experience it. Let it roll through me.

That totally new, totally unfamiliar experience of heat and energy literally shook me to my depths. I was not frightened, as inherent within whatever I was receiving was a deep sense of love, and of belonging, and of healing.

And I was at peace.

As I was leaving this beautiful home, where the course took place, to step back onto the world of a time, and the wide, tree-lined street, approximately 20 minutes from where I lived at the time, in Montclair, the hills of Oakland, I shared the experience I had been having with the teacher of the course.

“Ah,” she said. “You’ve met Baba. Now, you have to go to India.”

She was speaking of Baba Muktananda, a renowned Guru in the Siddha Yoga tradition, a “Sadhguru” in India, a Guru of Gurus.

And go to India I did, several years later, but not before I had met Baba here, in the United States, in a small, yellow home in Aspen, Colorado. Though later he had hundreds and thousands of devotees and was widely known, all over the world, at the time, there were only one or two or three of us, present to him in person, to have the blessed experience of “darshan,” whether all we were doing was sitting with him, meditating with him, chanting with him, or talking with him, receiving his messages to us.

Baba Muktananda (whose name means “the bliss of freedom”) was brought to the United States by Werner Erhard, a man dedicated to creating transformational shifts in the lives of people.  These two Teachers, one, a Guru who gives blessings through shakti, (divine energy), and the other Western philosophical, ontological, were to be two primary Teachers for me for many years. Though I have since journeyed with and through many other teachers and wisdom guides through these years, through books, live and virtual courses, and many other paths, both ancient and present, poets, spiritual teachers, philosophers, and coaches, the foundation I received from these two men, and my other teacher at the time, Oscar Ichazo, gave me a strong spiritual AND practical opening for living life wakefully and being a contribution to the lives of others. 

In my first darshan with him, I was filled with angst. “Which path should I follow?”I asked him, thinking that I needed to select one of three paths in my life, one of which was his. I was in deep conflict. He laughed and laughed and laughed and stroked my face with his peacock feathers (enough to tickle and get me off of any attachment to anything!) Then, he said, “Do whatever makes you happy.”

I knew, then, that I had done enough inner work that I could trust myself to listen to my intuition and follow it, and life would work out. This was a momentous communication to me.

Later that same week, Baba gave me my name, Amba. The Hindu story of “Amba” is about a goddess who slays demons by way of having the energy of many paths, many gods, within her.

I saw that it was okay — well, not only okay but that it was MY way to journey, my way, to dive into many paths to find my Center, my Core, my Authentic Self, my Dharma, the Presence that I am.

What always struck me was Baba’s greeting of us each time he met us, whether there were two people in that room, as in the early days, or hundreds upon hundreds later.

He used to this begin with us, each time:

“I welcome and honor you all as different forms of my own true Self.  When I perceived my true inner Self, I found that I was extremely loveable, and that I was worthy of the greatest of honor; and now that I see you, I find that you, too, are extremely lovable and worthy of the great honor, and therefore I call you my dear ones, and I welcome all of you with great love.”

I invite us all to listen to one another through that heart, those eyes.

Even those you might call (and see) some as “enemies” or “competitors” you could shift your thinking about both those words – from enemies to teachers – (as the Dalai Lama says) and “competitors” to “collaborators.”  Like a kaleidoscope, just a slight shift in the lens gives you a whole new world to dance in.

When you listen deeply, to the heart of hearts, when you get beneath the surface of things, when you get underneath another’s words, and connect with their experience, their intention to be known, be heard, be “gotten,” you can also hear the spirit of love in them, even though they are not manifesting that way. They could be angry. They could be upset. They could have just been triggered by something.  However, if you give their manifestation space and listen below the appearance of things, listen for the divinity within, your appreciation of them – of who they are—below their manifestation can yield a connection that is sought after and rare.

There, you can find that they, too, are extremely loveable and you can welcome them with all your heart. You can give to them the gift of listening.

As Catherine de Hueck Doherty Poustinia says,

“With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing, because listening to your brother or your sister until they have said the last words in their hearts is healing and consoling.  Someone has said that it is possible to ‘listen a person’s soul into existence.’ I like that.”

And, last of all, but maybe first, (take your time with this one): know, too, that YOU are loved. You, yourself, with all your quirks, and all your stumbling blocks, all your joys and all your griefs, with all your perfections and your imperfections. Just as you are, and as you are not. I know this is hard to get, and sometimes it takes a lifetime if then, to see that. . You — who you are — is a container for all of it.

You could even say, “I am love.”

Here is Marianne Williamson, in her book, A Return to Love.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

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