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Dear Friend

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love comes to us and through us in archetypal forms, the eternal pathways through which Love expresses itself in the world - lover and beloved, parent and child, Creator and creatures, Buddha and all beings, Sita and Ram, Laila and Majnun, guru and disciple, Shiva and Shakti, a child and her puppy, an artist and their art.... so many forms reflecting different facets of this sublime, universal, mysterious, and inexhaustible Love that we celebrate today.

What forms of Love have you delighted in? What forms are present in your life right now? What forms do you long for?

How do you embrace and embody your own sublime, lovable nature? First you have to be rooted in knowing the truth of how exquisitely lovable you are, right through to your very core essence.

You are lovable and you are loved.

Try watching the mind and its reactions as you repeat over and over a few times in your mind "I am lovable and I am loved, I am lovable and I am loved..." Now try looking in a mirror and looking directly into your own eyes, saying "I am truly lovable and I am loved."

Very often there are parts of us that don't really believe that and they resist this contemplation in various ways. Those parts too are lovable and especially need to know this is true. You can play around with this exercise and try it at different times when you are in different moods, ready to discover whatever insights you may gain from it.

For some it is easier to bring to mind those who are dear and say to them, you are so lovable and so deeply loved. We can bring the faces of those dear ones to mind and say that to each one and feel the profound flow of love that pours through our hearts.

But here's the challenge, the challenge put to us by great beings like Christ and Buddha, Kwan Yin and Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, bring to mind the face of your enemy and open your heart to the same flow of love that clears your vision so you can see their heart essence and genuinely say, you are lovable and you are loved, you are lovable and you are loved. This is the Divine Love, the unconditional Love that we are invited to know. And we can only know it by opening our hearts to having it flow through us.

One of the greatest poems on Divine Love is Jnaneshwar's Amritanubhava. Jnaneshwar was a 13th century Siddha master and poet saint in Maharashtra, India. Amritanubhava is an expression of the love that unites the primordial pair Shiva and Shakti, the two who are really One, God and Goddess forever merged in loving ecstasy. We are their creation. Shiva/Shakti is our true exalted nature, our Self, the root nature of all creation. Love unites us all. There is never a place, there is never a moment, when you are not fully embrace by Divine Love. You are lovable and you are loved in ways the mind simply cannot imagine.

This short selection from Amritanubhava's first of ten chapters may give you a taste of that nondual, all-embracing Love that pervades our being.