Whatever you are going through in your life, whatever challenge you are facing, try asking yourself, “how might this be a lesson in learning to love myself more fully?”

Or another way to phrase this, would be to wonder, “What would it be like if I knew that the ultimate lesson in this situation is about loving myself more fully?”  This will always be a fruitful question to check in with, since it will always be applicable.  That is the reason behind every encounter, every situation, every relationship. It is the reason behind every joy, and every sorrow as well.  It is the driving force in life itself.  This whole thing is always a pull back towards love, which itself is the experience of wholeness.  Every moment or idea that is not perfectly whole (which is therefore any objective experience) is therefore automatically imbued with a gravitational pull back to ourselves, which we will feel as the reach of love.  Love is the most powerful force in the world, simply because it is the only force in the world.  And if you don’t think that this is true, then maybe you just have a limited definition of what love is.  Maybe all of our growth is just an expanding definition of what love really is.

Love is not merely an emotion, nor a feeling that pulls you towards some things and not towards others.  It is the stuff that we are made of, the stuff that brings not just people together, but atoms.  It doesn’t need the loudness of passion though it is in that, and it is not excluded from hate, which is freely permits, or fear, which is merely the idea that it does not exist.

When the layers of the world are peeled back, there is an open field of awareness that undeniably holds everything.  You can call it anything you want.  You can call it God, or Self, or Love.  Maybe it is wiser to avoid all such loaded terms, and speak of it like the ancients did, by only describing what it is not.  And the simplest way to say what it is not, is that is that it is non- resistance.  It is absolute allowing.  Absolute inclusion.  Not separate.  Non-dual.  It is the effortless, constant ‘YES’ that holds the universe together; it is our own self.

It is a rainy, chilled Canadian winter morning, and commuters zip back and forth in a bleak convoy outside my urban window.  There is so much that I could pretend is wrong and lacking in the world, or in my little life.  But as I rest in my own silence, it is obvious that the idea that something is lacking, is just an idea.  When I let the rain teach me to include it in my love, when I let the grey cold challenge me to accept it completely, I fall off the cliff of sorrow and find the abundance of the open sky.

Let your pain do its job – let it teach you that the thing that you think you need, the thing you think you lack, is only imagined.  Pain teaches us to let go of illusions.  It shows us clearly our defences, our attachments, our false beliefs.  Save yourself some time.  Go straight to the heart of it all – guess what it might be like to be whole, by practicing the complete acceptance of this moment.  That is love.

It will show you the way.  It always has, and always will.  That is life.

Maybe the rain is ok.

The only purpose of the world (if we can say it has one) is to guide you back to unconditional love.  Whatever you are experiencing right this moment is perfectly crafted for you to do so.  Even the pain and difficulty.  Especially the pain and difficulty.  Get curious. If that were so, what would that mean?

Another way to say this is that the only purpose of the separate self is to feel the pain that will guide you back to unity.  Same thing.  That must be the purpose of the world and the separate self, because when it is achieved, they disappear.

I know that this is true, because in a moment of perfect love, which is perfect unity, the world stops existing.

There is only love.  Alive, present, aware, and impersonal.

The rain, just like you, is much, much more than just ok.