…it is the source.

I was having lunch with a business coach the other day and we were talking about why we do what we do. After years of processing and meditating on the subject of my “why” my answer comes automatically, “My mission in life is to bring people back to Love.” I know that everyone views Love differently so this simple yet profound statement garners a lot of questions and that day was no exception. He asked me a question somewhere in that conversation that has given me pause for further reflection, “do you think love is a byproduct of the things we do for another?” What a great question!!

Human beings do what we do for a lot of different reasons:

• because we feel like we should,
• because we want to,
• because it’ll be fun,
• because we feel like we either owe or want to be owed,
• because we’re afraid of consequences if we don’t do something, etc.

But all of those reasons boil down to 2 guiding principles. We either
1) want to experience pleasure or
2) want to prevent pain

When people interact with one another and their pleasure/pain points are similar it is easy to feel affection for them, want to help them, forgive them their trespasses and so on. It’s easy to call that love because it really is something that is developed over time and is most definitely fostered by what we do for one another. So, yes, Mr. Business Coach, I do think love (with a lowercase ‘l’ as the intellectualized version of the word) is a byproduct of what we do for one another.

And…

While I understand and appreciate the kind of love that comes when two or more people come together by the same guiding principles it really has nothing to do with the kind of Love I mean when I say things like “I want people to Love themselves again.”

love = doing
Love = being

I’ve started calling the body our “meat suit” because that’s how I’ve come to visualize the purpose of our physical selves…as something we don in order to go out onto the planet and do some learning and digging about who we really are. Our meat suit is not who we are, it is not our Light, it is merely a container for the Truth of our being: that spark that makes me, me…you, you…and us, us. That spark is the thing we cannot help but be. Once we shed our ego and our fears – which are the function of survival and only relevant to our bodies – there is nothing left but the brightness that lies within. Call it God, call it Spirit, call it Collective Consciousness it doesn’t matter because it is all of those and none of those. It is our Source….Love. The path to that source (Love) comes in the practice of forgiveness, grace and compassion. How else would we get a chance to practice forgiveness, grace and compassion if we didn’t have the limitations of ego and fear (ours and others’)? We couldn’t!

There is no greater compost for our Love flower than the crap we have to go through to get along with each others’ competing agendas.

Once we realize that we cannot help but BE Love then we tap into the underpinnings and embrace those opportunities to get it right…not to experience pleasure or prevent pain (although it definitely does that) but to deeply and profoundly live our Truth.

Whether we realize it or not, everything we do is Love. Fear and hate are manifestations of the ego that believes we are separate from one another. Fear and hate are the trappings of our meat suit that give us practice at forgiveness of others and forgiveness of ourselves so that we can come to understand more completely than ever before that Love is who we are.

Love is not what we do; Love is what we are.

What does love mean to you? Do you see a difference between love and Love? How has love impacted your life? How has your life impacted Love?