“We’re all looking for love, and we’re all swimming in it at the same time.”
A friend sent me a poem with this line today, and it brought tears with its tenderness and truth.
In my meditation practice and teaching lately, I have been exploring how to truly open to resource and support. This is another way of learning to fully infuse love into our lives, and live from that inner fountain of strength and clarity that love creates. It is allowing the truth and wisdom of the heart and spirit to guide this life forward, rather than the conditioned mind, habituated patterns, or survival strategies that want to manage, dictate, and improve everything, especially the project of me.
Sometimes the gateway to receiving this love is recognizing that it is already here. What is required is not acquiring more love, but letting go of what blocks it. Often those blocks take the form of shame, a sense of imperfection, or deep feelings of unworthiness. When we believe these stories about ourselves, they can prevent us from recognizing and swimming in the love that exists within us and all around us.
I have been practicing with a teaching from Rumi:
When you move, don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
When challenge, overwhelm, or fear arise, I notice the impulse to contract, compensate, freeze, or posture. Through meditation practice, we learn to recognize these feelings and the impulses that follows them, and to remain present and loving toward our experience.
We do this by staying.
By breathing.
By witnessing.
By loving what is here.
No matter what.
And when we can do that, something new and open begins to arise. We no longer need to move the way fear would have us move. We stay present for what we love instead.
As Stephen Levine said,
To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.
When fear arises, when an old pattern of contraction appears, see if you can stay with it. Love it. Be curious about what happens next.
Because love is not scarce. It is not reserved for the partnered or the lucky.
It is something we practice. Something we embody. Something we extend.
Because it is, in truth, the deepest and most essential thing about us.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
Share Seeds of Light Elizabeth Astor
Only a few rooms left!
Dates: Thursday March 12th, 4:30pm through lunchtime/1:00pm on Sunday March 15th
Location: Vajra Vidya Retreat Center, Crestone, CO. 81131
I am so happy to be offering a retreat in Crestone. It is one of the most supportive places for practice I have ever encountered. You will be held deeply and lovingly there - by the land itself, by the generosity and kindness extended to all who come to Vajra Vidya, and by the teachings and practices we will explore together.
Giving yourself the gift of retreat - time to drop in, receive, let go, and practice - is a profound offering not only to yourself, but to this world and to all the lives you touch.
We will explore how to walk in this life with an open heart, strong spine and an awakening mind. Practices and teachings will be offered that explore the art of enjoying and caring for this raw and beautiful experience of being human, as well as showing up fully within your luminous potential.
“Wherever I stand, may I be the soul of that place.”
Rumi
Together, we will explore what it means to be a pillar of light in this world, a present, divine human being in this life, awakening your true presence, tending your human heart, and shining from the inside out.
We will be held in a space of silence to support deep inward listening, with times for teachings, questions, and shared inquiry woven throughout the retreat.
Retreat Schedule (subject to slight changes):
7:00 am Silent sitting
7:30 am Breakfast
9:00 am Community practice with Vajra Vidya teachers (optional)
10:30 am Teaching and guided meditation
12:00 pm Lunch
3:00 pm Silent sitting or small groups with Elizabeth, with breaks in between
5:30 pm Dinner
7:00 pm Q&A, poetry, and discussion
8:30 pm Silent sitting
9:00 pm Close for the day
Pricing:
$680 per person for private room with shared bath and 3 meals a day
$710 per person for private room with private bath and 3 meals a day
$545 per person for commuter option with 3 meals a day
$215 for zoom participants
Sliding Scale is available for those experiencing financial hardship. A limited number of reduced rate tickets are available to help make participation possible for this who might not otherwise be able to join.
A Bigger Love (for Valentine’s Day and Every Day) by Jeff Rockwell
Love is so much larger than we’ve been told.
It’s the way the sun doesn’t ask whether you’re partnered or single before it warms your face.
It’s the earth beneath your feet that holds you up whether or not someone holds your hand.
The trees don’t withhold their oxygen from those who eat dinner alone.
Nature keeps teaching us this radical hospitality,
this love that doesn’t require you to be anything other than alive to receive it.
I think about the Buddhist monks who walked 2,300 miles from Texas to Washington DC,
step after step after step, walking for peace.
They didn’t walk because it was Valentine’s Day.
They walked because love sometimes looks like blisters and sore feet
and refusing to stop moving toward justice.
They walked because real love isn’t about feeling good;
it’s about doing good.
It’s about showing up for a world that desperately needs
our attention and our action.
So maybe today, yes, kiss your beloved if you have one.
But also: speak to the person everyone else walks past.
Put your hands in the soil and remember you’re part of something larger than your own story.
Stand up for somebody who can’t stand up for themselves right now.
Walk softer on this earth that gives you everything.
Because here’s the truth that makes my heart want to break open:
we’re all looking for love,
and we’re all swimming in it at the same time.
It’s in the bread someone baked,
the bridge someone built,
the song someone wrote,
the tree someone planted knowing they’d never sit in its shade.
It’s in every act of service and resistance and mercy.
It’s in the way the world keeps trying, despite everything, to stay beautiful and kind.
So let this day crack open our narrow ideas about what love means and who gets to have it.
Let it remind us that we’re here to love everything —
the person beside us and the person across the world,
the mountain and the person without shelter,
the river and the refugee,
the forest and the forgotten.
Let it teach us that love isn’t a prize for the partnered
or a consolation for the lonely.
It’s the work we’re all here to do,
every day we’re lucky enough to be breathing,
every morning the light comes back and asks us again:
How will you spend your inheritance of hours?
Sometimes an open heart is not soft - it is honest. It allows anger and strong emotions to move through the body, releasing what might otherwise close us. This song helps me when I need to move that energy:
A good song to practice the joy of swimming and dancing in the ocean of love:
“Stand up for somebody who can’t stand up for themselves right now….Love sometimes looks like blisters and sore feet and refusing to stop moving toward justice.”
Practice is not separate from the world. Love moves through us as courage, participation, and care for those most vulnerable.
If you feel moved to take a small step today, this 5 Calls app makes it simple to call your representatives and speak up for what matters! Thank you.
This is an ongoing group that meets monthly online with Elizabeth to practice how to ride the waves of the challenging moments in our lives and work with our different mind states. We practice ways to cultivate resilience, self connection, and deep wellbeing. Our time together includes teachings, guided meditation, as well as space for questions, discussion and sharing.
It is so nourishing to have a group of open hearted people to practice these skills and teachings with each month. Come join us!
We gather on zoom 2-3pm MT, the 3rd Tuesday of each month.
$20 / Month
Seeds of Light is the blog of Elizabeth Astor, LAc, MSOM, CHom.
Elizabeth works as a Medical Intuitive, Meditation Teacher, Mind-Body-Spirit Specialist, Acupuncturist, Herbalist and Homeopath in Boulder, CO. She offers private sessions, which include a blend of her medical, soul evolution, and energy healing skill sets. Elizabeth has been asked to teach meditation and the spiritual awakening path by her teacher Sharon Landrith, and has been confirmed as a teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. Elizabeth teaches the heart opening path of meditation and aligning ourselves to the light within, as well as intuition practices for individuals and health care providers, in local groups, retreats and internationally online.
Visit www.elizabethastor.com to learn more about Elizabeth, and her upcoming events, guided meditations, and teachings.
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