There Is Only Love

“Our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them.” 

-Rumi

As I have been contemplating my journey toward Love, it is interesting to look back at my life and see how things connect and how I got to certain places.  Maybe that is what turning 52 will do to a person.  

One of these contemplations led me to thinking about a pivotal teaching that I received from Linda Smith, who was our neighbor for many years as I grew up in Sunbury, Ohio.  However, when it happened in 1999, I had been away from Sunbury for seven years.   

I thought back to how I got to be sitting next to Linda that evening when she shared her truth with me - at just the moment that I was ready to hear it.  Since it might not be possible to start all the way back at "the beginning”, I will share the ones just preceding that lead up to that meeting.  

I notice that many of the “linking stories” that got me there involved an invitation that I accepted.

In 1998, I started working at THK Manufacturing in Hebron, Ohio. There is a series of stories that connect to explain how I ended up working there that go back to at least 7th grade, and likely many before that.  The immediately preceding one is that I was invited to meet with Kuniko Weber, the person who was influential in bringing Honda to Ohio.  After I met with her, I received a phone call from THK: “Would you like to come in for an interview?”  I said yes.  I was then offered a job as a part time Japanese interpreter while I was finishing school.  After graduation I was offered a job as a production scheduler.  I said yes.  I hadn’t formally applied for either job.

I was living in Gahanna (a suburb of Columbus) when I started at THK, but after a short time, it was necessary that I move out of my apartment.  A coworker at THK invited me to move into his place in Westerville, Ohio, and I said yes. My new roommate became a friend who taught me many things.  This apartment was the closest I had lived to my hometown since leaving home.  

One evening, my Mom and Linda Smith showed up at my door.  They said they were in the area and invited me to dinner. I said yes.

During dinner, Linda told me about The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield and some other “new age-y” and spiritual things I had never heard of before.  Much of it went over my head, but I remember feeling a shift as she talked.  Toward the end, she told me, “There is only one emotion,” and invited me to guess what it is.  I said “love”.  She lit up with love and said, “YES!”  She explained to me that all of the other emotions we describe are some version of love or a version of a lack of love.    

We have love (who we really are) or have some defense against it.  Those defenses were invitations to feel or be safer - and we said yes, as we should have at that time.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false.” 

A Course In Miracles, T-16.IV.6:1-2

Have you built barriers against love, for your own safety and survival, that you no longer need?  Are there barriers that were true then, but are false now?

I have been working with what Linda taught me for 27 years.  27 years of trying to carve away what is not true around it and of letting go of the defenses I have built that keep me from it. So that I can learn to feel at home on this planet, to get better at loving and accepting myself.  

Have I arrived?  

No.

But the stories that connect back to the ones I shared above and beyond have continued to unfold.  The spiral path that brings me closer winds around and mostly upward.  So many iterations of being invited and saying yes - sometimes out of naivety, sometimes out of not having the courage to say no, but many out of trusting that life is conspiring in my favor.

The invitation:

I am inviting you to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against Love.  This happens when we meet in a circle of people that listen and speak from their heart (non-judgmental community) and go into Shamanic Breathwork with an intention to do so.  I experienced it happen within me when I do this, and I have witnessed it happening for others right before my eyes.

Will accepting this invitation become a link in the stories that you look back on as the path to experiencing more love in your life and more love for yourself?  I hope so.

Will enough Love in the world bring us into a better relationship with each other and the Earth?  I believe it will, and that we should work for it regardless of the outcome.