Will you hold another who has been touched
by the darkness within? Will you love them enough to allow them to fall apart
in your arms? To unravel, to become unglued, and to feel unbearably lost as the
wisdom of their process unfolds? Will you be the space in which they can
finally meet the feelings and emotions that have been kept at bay for a
lifetime?
To love another in this way you must touch everything that is unresolved within you –
all of your own unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, and deserted
aloneness. You are willing to no longer stay safe on the sidelines. You are
willing to get messy. Even gooey and drippy.
Will you set aside your need for the other
to change, to be different, to be “cured,” to be transformed, and to be healed?
Will you resist the temptation to talk them out of their embodied experience,
to tell them everything will be okay, and to dishonor the creativity hidden
inside the unwanted? Will you allow your heart to break with them, and endure
the urge inside you to put it all back together again? Will you fall into the
unknown with them, holding them close, and provide a home for their brokenness?
To care about others, yourself, and the
world in this way you must stay radically embodied. You are no longer
interested in transcending suffering, confusion, and neurosis, for you see
these as thundering expressions of the path itself. Please don’t turn away. As
your attention moves out into the conceptual world, return to the wild
intelligence of your body, for it is there that love is working behind the
scenes, giving birth to its sweet activity in this dimension.
It is in this factory of love, which is
operating as the temple of your own body, where the sacred world is revealing
its essential secrets of healing: there is no “other,” there has never been an
“other,” and there could never be an “other.” There is only the reflection of
your own being.
Love is taking the pieces of your heart and
is using them to re-assemble the world in front of you, each as an invitation
sent to reveal to you the preciousness of what is really happening here.
Matt Licata
Sounds True
Editor-at-large
