Love is Like Water by Michelle Chua

​I can understand the jadedness some people express about the word “love.” Valentine’s Day candies inscribed with messages like “be mine” as if to love someone is to possess them like property. Pink and red fluffy hearts with doilies decorate love with a feeling of daintiness and fragility.  
 
But what about the kind of love that drives a single mother in Bangladesh to work in a sweatshop 14-16 hours everyday to try to feed her toddler who has to live with her grandparents and hardly see her mom?  Or, the love that chooses to liberate a suffering pet of 15 years from their painfully aging ailing body despite the sadness of losing their best companion? 
 
Author Sharon Salzberg likens love to water in its soft and strong qualities—so flexible it takes on the shape of whatever vessel it flows into, “yet over time, water will carve its own pathway even through rock.” And it’s a testament to our interconnection, “an incarnation of the water in the juicy fruit you ate yesterday may have fallen as rain halfway around the world last year, nourished a flower offered to a beloved in India…” and so on.  
 
As we’re surrounded by holiday decorations of “love,” I’m compelled to look into the ways it deeply connects, inspires, enlivens and heals us as a pure expression of our inner nature.  
 
Compassion is a highly regarded practice by mindfulness authors, like Pema Chodron, who teaches that it expands our capacity to love without condition and necessitates our ability to fully feel our difficult emotions.  In metta meditation, one practices sending sincere loving kindness to themselves and others in a series of stages.  

This is a valuable tool for feeling and rippling love from within, and I’m inviting you to join in.  Sat, 2/13 @5:30-6:30pm PT on Zoom, I’m facilitating a mind-body-spirit practice of Gentle Yin Yoga, breath work and Metta Meditation, by donation of whatever energy exchange you can afford.   

To access the live event, 'Metta Date' Night, RSVP at Root2RiseYoga.org/Community-Events 
 
May we feel the love that is at the core of our being and all beings, as Mother Nature exemplifies.