A love letter to you

A love letter to you, when life is hard.

It seems a divine renovation and expansion program is now underway, centered upon your heart. And it hurts.

You are apprenticing in fierce love in the service of Life. You are learning how to keep your balance and not shut down in the face of so much intensity. Instead, you are learning to allow all these powerful feelings of awakened life to rush through you in all their color, hue, and ferocity.

This is how Life carves a spacious canyon out of the common sandstone of the heart.

St Francis of Assisi once prayed: “Make me a channel of Thy peace.” The peace you seek is not to be found in building walls, getting out of the rapids of life, or in constructing a dam. Quite the opposite. 

In the center, in your expanding heart, you are learning how to allow increased emotional and energetic flow. The more feeling or wattage that you can run, the more life to which you can say “yes!” the more you will be able to recognize a greater order in the rushing and chaotic reality that is this river of life.

Instead of riding the rapids, you are learning to hold your ground while the rapids run through you. This is what it feels like to become a channel of peace. This hollowing out would be a great violence if you didn’t meet the force of Life with a still greater power: the steadfast and all-encompassing Love which has, until now, slept unnoticed at your core.

As with electricity, grounding is what keeps the circuit from shorting out. Stretching your heart’s capacity to embrace this untamed river of lifeforce is hard on the nervous system. Working with the lower chakras, in particular the root and the sacral chakras, will help you to stabilize these rushing and wild emotions. 

Your root chakra is waking up and the experience is like sitting on fire. It is an uncomfortable process, but if you master this energy, bend it to your will, and forge it into a tool, then fear and anger will never make a tool of you. Move consciously, with deliberate, quiet, slow focus to channel this awakened root chakra energy to constructive ends.

In times of transition, observe a regular rhythm: bed times, rising times, eating times. Keep a schedule; this helps stabilize the root chakra. Toddlers need a lived rhythm to help them to maintain a (relatively) even keel. Consider yourself 3-years-old for now: that alive, that raw, that real.

Your sacral or second chakra is the realm of sexuality, sensuality, and creativity. Focus here, too. Draw, sing, dance, cook. Take bubble baths, walk barefoot on the grass, and so on. The second chakra influences the root chakra, so focusing here will help mellow the meltdowns and calm the storms of emotion blowing through. You have homework. Do it religiously and you’ll find that you can truly help yourself navigate through these wild, creative, life-giving waters.

While this situation may feel like your worst nightmare, I assure you nightmares are themselves harmless. Their purpose is to rouse us from our sleep and to awaken memory.

Nice dreams tend to float away and we just keep floating downstream with them, going along with the overall flow of our environment. Onward we float indefinitely until something unpleasant prompts us to change direction and start swimming upstream against the “current” or the “now” of popular thought and behavior.

Upstream is Source. You are swimming to sanity. Don’t let anyone pathologize the powerful transformation in which you are engaged, most of all you. Cheer your wise warrior heart onward.

A new you is being born. It is disorienting to be in the midst of a spiritual, emotional, and energetic rebirth. Remember to breathe. And to smile. 

Just because something doesn’t feel good doesn’t mean it isn’t–in actuality– a good thing. 

Welcome to the process of spiritual becoming. Like all births, it hurts. Like all births, it’s worth it.