LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Lisa Becker!

Dear Lovelets,

Hello all, and welcome back to our Sunday gathering space. I hope you can breathe here. I hope you feel safe here. I hope you know how loved you are here — and that we don’t need a thing from you, and that you are always welcome.

I want to say what great writers all of your Spirits of Unconditional Love are! Have I ever mentioned that? When you share your letters with us, when you share what love pours through you and into you, not only do I see wisdom and grace, I also see gorgeous poetic writing — and yes, that goes for those of you who do not identify as “writers.” What you write is beautiful. It is always beautiful.

I was so moved last week by a Lovelet named Mario, whose Spirit of Unconditional Love (what we call SOUL) shared this with him, and through him, about his struggles:

. . . if you were to stand on a busy street corner and take a survey, you would find that nobody is asking for cancer, a congenital heart defect, herpes, HIV, Alzheimer’s, poverty, or a hurricane . . . How many people have you met who were willing to venture into the flaming furnace of life without the conscious knowledge of how to open the door from within? . . . And yet, here’s an important secret about why you should greet struggles with gratitude, rather than grimaces of disquiet or panic. My beautiful boy, there is absolutely nothing in life that is superfluous; everything has a purpose; and the purpose of everything is to present every soul at the doorstep of the experiences that it most yearns to touch through the fleshy vulnerability of life.

Which brings us to our subject this week — the question of silver linings, which dovetails neatly into our subject last week of struggling. Those unexpected and usually unasked-for gifts that often come through the experience of the things we have feared and dreaded the most. Our special guest this week is my old friend Lisa Becker, who is going through what Mario’s SOUL so beautifully described as “the flaming furnace of life” with a cancer diagnosis that is showing more strongly than ever her “fleshy vulnerability.” And yet.

And yet . . .

And yet, she is finding something in the inferno (many things, as it turns out) that are strangely, unexpectedly, un-asked-for-ly beautiful. Something that feels an awful lot like love.

The mystery is thick, and yet so is the magic.

Let’s see what Lisa’s SOUL has to say about it — and yours. Let’s keep going.

Love,
Your Lizzy

If you’d like to write your own letter from love but don’t know how, let us hold your hand.

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(Part 2: Let the record reflect that indeed, Pepita does enjoy running, when she’s not lounging behind me in videos. She wants you to know that while she loves to chase bunnies and squirrels, she would not know what to do with them if she caught them. She just wants to help them stay in shape.)

Dear Love, what would you have me know about silver linings?

Oh little sugar glider perched at the top of the bookcase of the world, looking out with your oversized eyes, trying to make sense of it all — we would have you know that you will never make sense of it all, so you can rest a bit from the calculating and the attempting of it, and just enter into a listening state of mind.

So listen to this.

First of all: nobody gets what they want, sweetheart. By which we mean: nobody gets everything they want. Everyone in Earth School gets some of what they want and some of what they don’t want, and, yes, that goes for everyone, no matter how much privilege or luck anyone appears to hold (and we have allowed you to be a guest at times inside the world’s great stately mansions, so that you can witness the naked suffering, pain, and losses of the inhabitants, and we let you see this so that you will not go out there thinking there is anybody who is getting everything they want, even when it appears so).

So let’s begin with the understanding that nobody gets everything they want. But there’s more.

As an addict in recovery for seven beautiful years (what a mythical number of years to be sober!) you can see now and have learned from spending day after day in the rooms of recovery, and in those steps, that getting what you want can actually be quite dangerous.

Here are two things you heard people say in those rooms only very recently — wise people, people who have been around, who are tuned in and who have really seen some stuff and survived some stuff.

One person said recently, “Life has taught me that when I get what I want, it doesn’t make me happy.”

Another person said: “Here’s how I can tell I’m an addict. When I get what I want, I just want more.”

Yes, dear. Same-same for you.

Which is why you are mindful these days about what you want, and how hard you are willing anymore to fight to get what you want. Because you have seen and observed in yourself and others that getting what you want does not necessarily make you happy, that getting what you want can lead to unexpected suffering and misery, and that getting what you want can immediately lead you to only want more — which is another level of suffering, what the Buddha called tan-ha, craving. And oh how it hurts to crave.

You know this. Earth School has taught you this.

But if this is all true (and it is, little monkey butt, it is true) then could it be that the reverse is also true?

Must it in fact be that the reverse is also true?

Is it possible that not getting what you want — or getting what you didn’t want — can lead to unexpected bursts of happiness? What your friend Lisa called silver linings?

Have you not accumulated a lifetime’s curriculum worth of evidence to support this truth as well?

One of our favorite stories about this is the tale you heard on the radio one day long ago of twin brothers, children of immigrants, raised in Chinatown in New York City, supported by a father who owned a small basement business where people came in for traditional foot massage and reflexology. A difficult business, handling the feet and the moods of strangers every day while hunched over in a tiny basement storefront with very little natural light, working all hours of the day for a small margin of profit. Such a small margin of profit that in fact when it came time for the twins to graduate from high school, there was only money enough for one of them to go to college and pursue their dreams. The other one, it had long ago been decided by the father, would have to stay home and take over the family business, and support his parents.

As you remember the story, the young men either flipped a coin or drew straws and they left the decision entirely to chance. One of them would be allowed to go into the world and get educated and follow his dreams; the other would be forced to live a confined life, never leaving home, never being able to get further educated, having no choice but to be hunched over the feet of strangers as he worked to support his aging parents.

One young man was lucky and got what he wanted — limitless opportunities. The other young man was unlucky and faced a limited future. And after they flipped that coin, they both agreed on who was lucky, and who was unlucky.

But in the years that followed the coin toss, or the drawing of the straw, a surprising thing occurred. The young man forced to stay home and work the family business reported that he was having a happy life. His days were exactly the same, one to the next, and while that was limiting, it was also sort of comforting. His routines were simple. There was no point in having any grand ambitions, and so he didn’t need to strive, or to have the anxiety of worrying if he had made enough of himself; he got to relax and just live. He became serene. The silver lining of his constrained life was that he never had to make any choices — because he was never given any choices. Instead of this turning him into someone resentful and bitter, he accepted his fate and ended up quietly loving his life.

The other brother — the allegedly luckier one — had a harder time. Every moment was a neurosis-inducing flood of too many choices. What college should he go to, now that he could go to college? What should he study, now that he could study anything? Should he go to graduate school? For how long? Where should he work? Had he chosen the right career? Whom should he marry? And, given the fact that he knew at all times how “lucky” he was, he also struggled with guilt, and the worry that he was never doing enough to maximize his opportunities, especially because his unlucky brother never had those chances in life.

His life had become materially richer than that of his twin, but fraught with ambivalence, indecision, doubt, and anxiety.

So, who won? The winner, or the loser? Or was the game rigged all along, by fate? Who was the lucky one? Who was the unlucky one? Or should we just surrender the words winner and loser and lucky and unlucky completely, and stop trying to manipulate the outcome?

One last tiny story. Remember when Rayya was dying, we whispered in your ear something so radical, so shocking, that you could scarcely believe what we were saying, and yet you knew it was love speaking. You were suffering and struggling over the question of how in the world you would live without the most beloved person in your life, and you heard us say: “There was a life you could only have with Rayya, and that life is coming to a close. And there is a life you can only have without her, and that life is beginning to open.” And we whispered to you: “Aren’t you a little curious about the life that is beginning to open?”

Aren’t you, my love? Aren’t you still a little curious about every single aspect of life, no matter how strange, radical, shocking, unexpected?

Life is not an event, sweetheart, but a series of experiences. It is not something to be won or lost, but something to be felt. And that, ultimately — the ability to feel and experience it all, whether good, bad, lucky, or unlucky — that is the silver lining of everything. And experiencing the dream of life, we can promise you, is what you came for, and what you are actually doing.

All of you. All of the experiences. All the time.

Stop judging and controlling, and keep feeling and experiencing. That is our loving guidance. That is the silver lining. Stay open, and silver linings will continue to surround you forever, like the shimmering wings of angels.

A reminder that I have two weekend-long creativity workshops coming up this fall!

• September 25-27 at the one and only Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Click here to learn more and register.

• December 4-6 at the magical Art of Living Retreat Center, nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. Click here for all the details.

We get a lot done during these weekends! They are all about getting out of our own way in order to live authentically, about choosing curiosity and self-mercy — always self-mercy — over fear and doubt, about going inward without distraction, and then going outward to be in community. And as always, you do not need to have any kind of project in mind in order to attend; you just have to be willing to bring a notebook and pen, and an open mind and open heart!

The last thing we would promote here at Letters From Love HQ is toxic positivity — like everyone else, when we’re in the thick of a crisis the alleged silver linings look more like tin foil. We don’t feel like looking on the bright side. We don’t celebrate bad luck as opportunities for self-improvement.

But hear us out: if the bad thing is already happening and there’s some sort of apparent upside, why not dwell on that instead of the doom for a bit? We can always go back to our regularly scheduled doom, but for now let’s ask: Dear Love, what would you have me know about silver linings?