Loving Kindness Wins. I repeat this message over and over because it is true and powerful if you allow it to soak into you. At our core we are the energy, the light, of loving kindness. So this instruction, loving kindness wins, is one of alignment with our true nature. The nature that is behind all our contractions away from it – the worry, the “what if such and such happens”, the intense judgement, the confusion of not being able to understand how such and such can happen.
This next week or two as we go through the elections in the US fear and anxiety and worrying abound. As they have for many months now. Is this what you’re going through? I feel for you with all my heart. If you give me a few minutes to slow down and read this, this is my mission: to help you come back home to your loving kindness nature, and to be less fearful, less anxious, less angry, less confused and scared.
It’s not that there aren’t bad, difficult, challenging things happening, there are. But the answer to this cannot be to live in fear and worry and anxiety about each and every one. To spend every opportunity you find to engage in it, to prolong it, to scroll and scroll the stories, to read all the comments to find the most outrageous ones, to seek validation from others about it, to constantly recreate the worry over and over and over. Not if you want to be healthy, and be of real benefit to yourself and others.
In a very practical way each and every one of us can shift our own experience of this. Away from anxiety, and towards peaceful being, equanimity, and beneficial action. How? Loving Kindness Wins.
Practice this, and I mean yes right now, today! Many times today. Whenever you notice that you are in the middle of a rant about whatever the bad thing that is going on based on some article you read written by someone about something that someone said somewhere in the country in a speech sometime…… interrupt yourself. Become willing to do something different.
Connect with your own true nature of loving kindness. The loving kindness you feel when you pet your dog and they look at you with eyes of deep unconditional love. Or when you stroke the arm of your lover. Or what you feel for your family. Or when a friend says something about how they appreciate you that makes your eyes water with love and the feeling of being seen. Or wherever you feel the leap of your heart, the aching vulnerable powerful love in your heart.
That is your true nature. It lies underneath everything, all the fears and anxieties and layers of contraction that we build up as defense mechanisms. Come back to your true deep nature as loving kindness itself. For an instant you will know that loving kindness wins. Revel in that!
And, a moment later you might hear in your head “yeah but”. Yeah but, what if this happens. Yeah but, that’s pointless. Yeah but, that doesn’t accomplish anything. Yeah but they’re so wrong. Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but. The next time you read an article and then jump into another one and another one. Or you read some ignorant angry comment on a post.
Breathe. Stop.
Rather than engage in that, interrupt yourself again, and repeat the practice – come back to the feeling of loving kindness deep in your heart.
It is a deep wide nurturing cradle, this loving kindness. It pervades everything. It is wide and powerful and beautiful. But we don’t trust it, we forget it, we abandon it in favor of the fear. It is much bigger, more fundamental than the fear. But we bring the fear close, we wallow in it, we recreate it over and over. And so it becomes all we see. We think that is what is really fundamentally there. But it’s not.
Our fundamental nature is loving kindness. We need to pull back from our unconscious commitment to keep recreating fear and anxiety, and recognize that loving kindness is outside, surrounding everything.
Use Loving Kindness Wins! Use it as a mantra, a practice, an instruction, a truth to come home to. Commit to being more of yourself, your nature as a being of loving kindness, rather than the being of fear that another wounded human is unconsciously trying to get you to be.
Then you can do whatever is helpful and useful. Being in equanimity and vibrating with loving-kindness is not passive inaction. The actions you take from a place of loving kindness will have a very different, more beneficial outcome than the ones you take from fear and anxiety. So before you act out, throw the hateful comment onto a post, or keep reading the stories someone created about all the horrible stuff someone has done, first come back to Loving Kindness Wins. Then from that place, choose what you want to do, where you want to put your precious attention and time.
Make your choice, and vote. If you are called to work in the campaigns do that. Otherwise what path do you want to choose? You might choose to spread the message of Loving Kindness Wins instead of repeating and spreading hate, confusion and fear. Which path is going to help you more, and help our community navigate these times?
You could choose, instead of repeating the actions that are creating your anxiety and fear, to shift your attention to sharing your loving kindness with your friends and loved ones in the simple beautiful ways of your awakened heart. The core thread of love, affection, joy that is underneath your fear. Trust this, cultivate this, share and give this to everyone in your life.
In order to share your loving kindness with others it requires that you cultivate and grow your own connection with it, and so in sharing it with others your own experience of life will change, and move towards one of pure loving kindness all the time. Practice this every day, all day, every time you can remember, over and over and over, and loving kindness will win.
I challenge you to create this as a daily practice for the next week as you move through your life towards the elections and beyond. Practice Loving Kindness in your thoughts, in your words, in your actions at least once a day consciously choosing into this as a daily practice. Visualize it, feel it, connect with it, and share it with your family, friends and neighbors. And tell them to share it with theirs!
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being courageous in these difficult times. Thank you for choosing to try and do something different even if you try and fall down 1,000 times. Loving Kindness Wins.