Build a new body of experience

If you’re going through one of those narrow places in your life where you feel alone and unprotected — that trapped, not-enough-air-to-breathe feeling where the walls of your world loom over you, steep and hard-edged, and there’s no inspiring star to guide you — please know that this is a passage in which we all find ourselves bewildered, from time to time.

When your past experiences echo this story (you, alone, slogging through the clay and grit of joyless work, teeth clenched, heart sore), then finding your way out — into the clear sky of relationship, into the intimate truth of interdependence — can taste like despair in your mouth.

Yet, when you feel most attenuated by time and circumstance, you are still cradled in a living lap of love and relationship. It breathes with you. It holds you in infinite tenderness, this lap of the Sacred Earth. This lap of sweet, sweet belonging.

Every breath you breathe is a gift, from the Earth to you, from the Sacred to you, from your soul to you.

There’s a simple way to find your way home, to snuggle back into the lap of the world.

It’s the magic of loving attention to what is. It restores you to the wide open horizon of love and belonging.

Love what’s in front of you.

Love the air that enters your nostrils and sustains your life.

Savor your breakfast. Love the bowl from which you eat. Love the table on which you rest your elbow. Love the sunlight that warms your hand and gilds your fingertips.

Love begets love.

Feel the love that flows to you from the everyday objects in your home. They are not conscious in the way that you are conscious, but they are emanations of the Sacred too. Love them, and they’ll love you back.

Everything responds to love. Everything becomes more fully and radiantly itself, in the light of love and appreciation.

Give yourself the gift of loving things as they are.

When you see the walls of your home through the eyes of love, they are shelter and belonging, sanctuary and the kiss of your Beloved.

Love the chair that holds you, the desk that lends itself so patiently to your work, the generous floor that supports your feet. Discover the miracle at the heart of their being — they are Love incarnate, Love expressing Itself in these humble, beautiful forms.

As you extend your love to the world around you, every object and life-form reveals its secret, shining self. You rediscover the truth of your place in the world — you are a star in a glowing galaxy of love and communion.

This is the gift of incarnation, this radiant web of love and connection that unites us. This is your soul’s inheritance.

You are held by grace and gravity in intimate relationship with all of creation.

Play with this. Discover it in your own body, in your own felt sense of how and where you belong.

Trust is built through experience. Choose to build a body of experience through which the light of your life can illumine your world.

Every cell in your body knows its place in wholeness. Focus your attention there — on the star that is you, on your place in the galaxy of being — and discover the miracles that are unfolding within and all around you, in this very moment.