Hello Friends,
Helen Keller once said: “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
These words have been resonating in my mind all week.
One of the most daring adventures I know is LOVE.
In their beautiful audio course To Love and Be Loved: The Difficult Yoga of Relationships, Stephen and Ondrea Levine talk about how loving another being opens us up to intense suffering. We’ve all heard it before: Attachment causes suffering. Yet, as the Dalai Lama says, ‘no attachment, no compassion.’ Love brings suffering, partly because of how vulnerable we feel when we open our hearts to another being, but primarily because everything is temporary. No matter how much we love someone, in the end we have to let them go. It’s a brave thing, to love.
I often practice heart breathing with my children, and today I practiced it with my son, who will be turning two next week (!). I have to say, this is one of the most intense and exquisite practices I have ever found, to experience moment-to-moment connection with another being. Breathing in, I welcome him into my heart; breathing out, I surround him with my love. I find this practice totally impossible to do without crying. It’s impossible to describe all the feelings it brings up, but joy-pain-joy is definitely one of them.
One of my favorite Yoga teachers, Peter Francyk, would often say that we are not “one.” Rather, we’re separate, but connected.
I believe that the sense of separation we experience presses us onward to always seek for ways of feeling connected. The feeling of connection allows us to experience tremendous joy. And, of course, tremendous pain. The joy stands out, against the backdrop of it’s temporariness, in the face of suffering, pain, and death, like a flash of lightning against dark storm clouds in the unfathomable night sky.
Would you escape from suffering, never feeling pain again, if the price was to never feel love? To never feel joy?
Would you choose a grand adventure? Or… nothing?
As Brene Brown found in her research on vulnerability, shame, and the merits of whole-heartedness, it is impossible to numb selectively. If you choose to numb, you can’t just numb out suffering; you numb out everything.
If you’re not experiencing a grand adventure, if not in this breath, in this day – if not in this day, in this week – if not in this week, in this month – if not in this month – then when? And who can change this for you?
May you be brave, and well, and may you live and love joyfully, today and always.
Namaste,
Erin