How can I say this? I think it is intensely invaluable for people (human beings) to learn their own style of loving, how they love and how they want to be loved. I think this is important because this forms an extremely useful template for so much insight for everything else that a person does and can do in life. Learn how to love yourself wholly, love yourself through and with others, and love your own coming into being in this world. Because life is short, and while there is a lot of time, there is so much to do! So focus and love.

I apologize, because I am myself still very much in the process and learning. But I wanted to share this little mini-insight because I have found it so powerful recently in my own life.

What I have learned about myself recently is that I tend to feel things really intensely all of the time. This means everything — the beautiful, wonderful, the awe-inspiring moments, and the fragile, the weak, the intrepid, and the terrified. And in order to not stretch myself too thin and go off the edge with my super warp-speed, fiery mind that always wants to revel, marvel, and see into everything…I have to give myself space, and through that space I can cultivate love.

It is so amazing how when your heart is open, suddenly everything rushes in. People get attracted to your energy, and suddenly the right people who need to be in your life are right next to you at the coffee shop you have been going to for years. And they look you in the eyes and you realize that you may be and in many ways probably are on a very similar path. And people who you had lost contact with years ago suddenly jump out from the woodwork again. And opportunities emerge that you had either forgotten could exist or could never even have imagined coming true for yourself. Suddenly it seems like truly all of your life was just in practice and you are still in practice but you are starting to catch the really big fish. As Wiley Wiggins says in Waking Life, “I feel like this is THE dream…like the final dream, the dream to end all dreams.” And then you just let go into the void, and maybe, just maybe, you will float and not sink. But it is a risk, and in many ways, it is the biggest risk you can ever take because the stakes are so hight. But you have to be okay with that to, that it may not work out just yet. There might be another lesson along the way in store for you through it all.

Photo by Audrey Simper (2012).