Give It A Name

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.~James A. Baldwin

Have you been gardening?  I’ve been digging…deep.  Pulling out weeds, turning the soil, planting flowers.

Not in my yard, as much as in my heart.  I just returned from an 8-Day yoga training (more like a yoga-boot-camp-mind-overhaul) in the Arizona desert.  Baptiste Level One Teacher Training helped me with more than my teaching.  It helped me find LOVE.  

I have always known, in my head, that love is the opposite of fear.  And have believed that any emotion that we experience, create, or dwell on  pulls us closer to the love end of the spectrum, or to the fear end.  I have known that we choose, moment by moment, to live in love, or to live in fear.  And I’ve always thought I was choosing love.  But…during 8 days of intense self-inquiry, I learned that I do a lot of talking about love, and I do a lot of living in fear.  I’m really good at loving ‘people’.  I’m really good at loving my kids, my students, even strangers.  And I really suck at loving the one person I have promised to love, honor and cherish, in sickness and in health, etc.  My husband.  Which means that I don’t really know how to love.  In the trenches.  Where it counts.  So, I’m gardening.

If fear is the opposite of love, what am I fearing?  Our work is to answer this question, and then speak it into the world, so we can have power over it.  Once we identify our fear, and name it, we can truly walk toward love.  So here goes.  Here is the one line that changed my heart, and my whole way of being. A poster on the wall in the training hall read,  “I am a concern for looking good”.  I AM (not I have) A Concern for looking good.  I am.  A living, breathing, walking, talking concern for looking good.  I live in fear of not being liked, of not getting approval.  And while this makes me really good at doing my job, it holds me back.  It keeps me in a state of chronic busy-ness, trying to please, and do, and be what I think you want me to be.  It becomes a wall that keeps me from really BEING LOVE in the world.

So I came home with a new resolve.  My new way of being is of love and openness.  I give up the need to be liked, and to have everyone’s approval.  Instead, I will focus on the power I have to really see people, especially the ones closest to me.  To take a step each day closer to love, and away from fear.  Will you join me in this effort?  Will you speak about your fears, out loud so you can walk away from them?  Will you speak to me about love, and hold me accountable to my new way of being?

Do you need more LOVE in your life?  Here are some suggestions for surrounding yourself with LOVE.

• Create a Love playlist and push play before you even get out of bed.
• Check out my friend Nate Bagley’s project ‘The Loveumentary’
• Watch One Love…on repeat!
• Never miss Michael Franti in concert…anytime, anywhere!
• Check out my hubby’s LOVEBRAND Facebook Page and consider LOVESLC if you need a fabulous realtor
• And finally…Do More Yoga!!!