Expanding Light, Expanding Love

Sometimes I find it impossible to quiet my mind. Today has been one of those days. As I've tried to work through the things I needed to do, my mind has felt chaotic. Even meditation didn't help much. Even yoga didn't help much.

Today's post was scheduled to be about reading fiction, but instead I'm stuck on how difficult it can be to quiet one's mind even with all the tools that usually work. Sometimes we have to let ourselves feel the chaos in our minds in order to quiet it and move on.

My meditation this morning focused on expanding one's light out into the world. As I meditated, my thoughts settled on my decision several years ago to make a concerted effort to live from a foundation of love. As I meditated, I imagined the light emanating from me as that foundation of love.

The more I make a concerted effort to live from a place of love, the stronger I feel. Living from a place of love isn't about allowing people to walk all over me or about denying the negativity I sometimes face and even feel. Just like gratitude can often shine a light on what's not working in our lives, love can point us toward what needs our attention in life, in society, in the world.

When I first started making a concerted effort to live from a place of love, I thought that meant I failed every time I felt angry or hurt or betrayed or even a moment of dislike. What I came to understand is that when I live from a place of love, all those so-called negative emotions take on a different role in my life. Those emotions help me see where I need to make changes. Living from a place of love doesn't fix everything in life, but it helps one face the challenges in life with a more proactive stance.

The more I thought about the connection between projecting love into the world, the more I remembered that love must be active to be effective. 

Love isn't about what we get back when we put love into the world. Love gives us the opportunity to connect and understand and grow.

Love is where we begin to break down the barriers that keep us apart. Love is where we find the strength to seek the change that unites us and lifts us all up together. Love is where we see our humanity and the value of the world in which we live. Love is where we see our similarities as starting points and our differences as assets allowing us to work together to find solutions that work.

I started to focus on living from a foundation of love because it had to be better than living in the constant underlying fear that had overtaken my life at one point. When I embrace the love within, fear becomes a tool to alert me rather than a state of being making it easier to discern between genuine fear and manufactured fear.

I choose once again to live from a foundation of love and to emanate that love into the world every chance I get. And, when I feel the light of that love emanating back to me, I will accept it joyfully.

T. L. Cooper is an author and poet whose work aims to empower and inspire through an exploration of the human condition. Her poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared online, in books, and in magazines. Her published books include a collection of short stories, Soaring Betrayal, her Silhouette Poetry Series, and a novel, All She Ever Wanted. She grew up on a farm in Tollesboro, Kentucky. She currently lives in Albany, Oregon with her husband and three cats.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Failure Isn't an Option, But...

The flip side of fear of success is fear of failure. Both end up in paralysis, have some of the same triggers, and share some of the same roots. It can be hard to discern which is which. I've struggled with both, and at times still do. Fear of failure for me was a need to be perfect. I equated perfection with love. I could only be loved if I was perfect. I could only be perfect if I was successful at everything. Failure wasn't an option. An "A" was never good enough in school. Everything I did could be better.  Early in my life I developed a fear of failure that at times has stifled my creativity, my progress, and even lead to complete inaction. In some ways my fear of failure contributed to my later fear of success. I started life confident that I could and would do whatever I wanted, but as I began to encounter those little digs that meant I could never be perfect and the harder I tried to be perfect, the more my imperfections haunted me. When I was assaul...
Read more

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Image
I recently read A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost . It's a beautiful book and one I'd been salivating over for a while, ever since I saw it in Costco several months ago. It is filled with poems that speak to my heart, my imagination, my core. I was thumbing through one day while reading - yeah, I was looking ahead - and came across Nothing Gold Can Stay , and the first thought that popped in my head was "Stay gold, Ponyboy." I stopped in my tracks as a shiver went up my spine and a smile slid across my face. I remembered in that moment the first time I read The Outsiders   by S. E. Hinton . The first time I read Nothing Gold Can Stay in the book, The Outsiders , the first time I heard the poem aloud in the movie , the first time I read the letter at the end of the book, the first time I heard the letter at the end of the movie... Robert Frost and The Outsiders are forever linked in my memory because of this poem. S. E. Hinton used Nothing Gold Can Stay to...
Read more

Benefits to Buying Books

Image
Last week I wrote about supporting authors without buying their books, so this week I want to talk about a few benefits of buying books. To be honest, there's this little voice in my head going "People need reasons to buy books... They're books. That's reason enough." Of course that's the writer and reader in me. The minimalist and anti-consumerist in me totally gets why many people don't want to buy books. Buying books is a commitment. It's adding another "thing" to your shelves, your home, your life. Let me be clear. I understand that people work hard for their money, and buying a book can feel like a luxury. I totally get it. I've been there. The rent, the mortgage, fuel, food should all be higher priorities than buying books. I remember days when I saved change for a month to buy a book. I'm not, in any way, proposing that people sacrifice necessities to buy books. There are advantages to buying a book. You own the book. ...
Read more