LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Fearne Cotton!

Serenity is also available

Dear Lovelets,

When this project started over two years ago, one of my biggest questions was, “Is this practice teachable?”

At that point, I had been writing myself letters from the Spirit of Unconditional Love (what we call SOUL around here!) for almost 20 years, and I knew it to be a life-saving daily practice, and one that could change my inner emotional landscape from anxiety to serenity almost immediately . . . but was this practice just my own little weird thing, my own kind of oddball exercise, something that would work for me, but not for anyone else?

And now look at us — many thousands of us gather here each Sunday to practice this concept together, to each write our own letters from Love, and to share what we are hearing and feeling with one another.

So now it is our little weird thing! Yay!

I want to share two things I read in the comments last week that stayed with me. One is from a Lovelet named Anne, who wrote that she’d recently been in a situation with someone that had left her feeling hurt. Actually, she reported, she’d been feeling hurt by this person for a long time. But when that hurt came up again not long ago, instead of instantly responding, she sat down and wrote herself a letter from Love. “And ten minutes into it,” she wrote, “I felt it. It is the feeling of an embodied state of love. And when that feeling returns, it is like clarity returns. I can be more neutral and compassionate (and not to worry, I am no doormat!!!) and centered . . . and then I feel a freedom of movement, a flexibility of being. The hurt was real, there was no diminishment. But I can act from a place of love because I am experiencing the embodiment of it.”

And that is why this practice is miraculous — because it’s beneficial not just for us, but for those around us, too.

If you have not experienced that feeling of the “embodiment” of love that Anne spoke of, or if you who have attempted to write yourself a letter and felt like you were talking to yourself, or crafting the words yourself rather than being spoken TO, or “embodied” by an external force — take heart! A fellow Lovelet named Wendi shared some wisdom in the comments last week about how, when she first started doing this practice, she wondered if she was just writing “what I wanted to hear,” what she thought the Spirit of Unconditional Love would say to her. In other words: was she just making this all up?

But then Wendi realized: it didn’t matter.

She realized that even if it turns out there is no such thing as “God/SOUL/Divine Source, so what. That wouldn’t make this practice any less helpful or meaningful. Besides, I believe that my intuition is one channel SOUL uses to communicate with me. I believe the Divine dwells within and surrounds and connects all beings. So I see these letters as divinely inspired wisdom and guidance regardless of the source.”

Beautiful.

And I would add one final thought: wherever you think these words of love are coming from, or whoever you think is writing these letters, what is most important here is where they are GOING. These words of love are all directed to YOU. You, who need them so dearly. You, who deserve them. And you, who when you hear them, respond with a beautiful softening into all that is. And maybe that’s all we need to know?

Our special guest this week, the wonderful broadcaster, author, and community builder Fearne Cotton, also reports that she felt self-conscious the first time or two she sat down to try this practice. But then, like magic, the voice came to her — not when she expected it, but nonetheless right on time.

Thank you for joining us, Fearne. And let’s all keep going. It just keeps getting better.

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about the rules of life?

Oh sweet ever-frightened mind-child, before we even start speaking in your mind-language, can you just sit with me for a spell, without the words? Can you just feel the life force moving through your body for a moment, before we start talking, before you think of this letter as another item on your list of things to do today? Can we just be quiet and sacred together for a moment?

[I paused for a long, quiet hour.]

Okay dear, let’s begin again. First of all, you aren’t in trouble. My asking you to sit quietly before we speak mind-language was not an admonishment. It’s just easier for me to find you, and for you to feel and hear me, when your breathing has settled, when your jaw is relaxed, and when your pulse slows, and the waves of life roll within you more steadily.

Do you see how just sitting in stillness with me for an hour even quiets the urgency of this question that you have (“The rules, the rules! Tell me about the rules of life!”)?

My obedient, pliant, and eager-to-please little star seed, you have always believed that if you could just understand what the rules of life were, and follow them, that would keep you safe on your journey through Earth School — and you believed that long, long before you had ever even heard of the concept of Earth School, and long before you had much agency in your journey at all. You were a tiny being on a planet of fast-moving giants, and you believed that keeping all the bigger people pleased was the key to your security — and for that little being, for that little bean, this was not incorrect necessarily.

Clever girl, nimble child, remember the game that you played as a little one — the game that all children across the world play — of climbing on furniture or rocks or trees, with the fantasy that the ground beneath was lava, or alligators, or alligator-infested lava, and that you had to be very, very careful not to fall, or you would be killed.

A fun game, but not so fun when you take that concept into your entire system and make it into a sort of theology. Navigating the people of this world, for you, has always felt like scampering above an alligator-infested lava pit; one false move (meaning one failure to prevent anyone from disapproving of you, or from having an opinion about you, or having their own frightening emotion or reaction) and you’re dead. And thus you have always craved an understanding of THE RULES, in every situation and every new group of people: “Just tell me what I have to do or say or be in order to be safe, and I will do, say, or be it!”

But you learned something recently in one of your 12-step meetings that pierced your consciousness and awakened a new understanding. You heard someone say: “The rules you were taught in childhood did not keep you safe then, and they will not keep you safe now.”

When you heard that, you had such a powerful reaction, it was as if your mind went offline for a moment. You were stunned, for you could see that it was true. You were not safe then — if safety can be defined as freedom from anxiety, and please tell me any other definition of the word that works better — and you are not safe now by following the rules.

But look where your nervous mind immediately jumped to after that initial realization that the old rules (which you had interpreted as: be pleasing, be perfect, be lovable, be accommodating) were no longer safe, and perhaps never had been. Your mind instantly started casting about for new rules, better rules, updated rules! What are the rules of life as an adult that will keep me safe? Who are the adults? Who are the grownups in this situation, and how do I gain their protection?

And now you have come to me for the answer. Let us put this to rest, my dear.

You are afraid I will say, “There are no rules! Fly free, little bird!” — and that does not reduce your anxiety a bit, because WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Also “no rules” feels like anarchy to you, which feels anything but safe.

Or you expect me to deliver unto you a new code of ethics or morality, in which I lead you to a mountaintop and some new rules of behavior, in order to make you into a better person. But I won’t do that, because your nature, dear, is one of goodness. You already work very hard to not cause harm, to tell the truth, to take responsibility for yourself, to observe the behavior of others with the most generous possible interpretation. Do you think that I will tell you to work even harder on those things — that those will be the new rules? To work harder to be better? Even as you are typing right now, you have no idea what I’m going to say are the “rules of life,” and that is good. That signifies an open mind.

It is not that there is some new set of rules that I, or anyone else, can offer you that will keep you safe. It is not even that I will tell you to try or not try to be safe — of course you will always try to be safe, and you will always try to be good, and it will always be confusing for you when you don’t know how to do both at once, and this is only one of the many reasons that life in your realm often feels hard.

But I will tell you this: there exists something else besides just rules and safety, or lack of rules and safety. Not necessarily something better, not something in contrast — just something else. Something you rarely inhabit when your mind is scrambling to figure out what the rules are.

There exists a thing, my love, called serenity.

This is the best word we can come up with to communicate with you what it feels like in your nervous system when you release not only the rules and the need to understand them and the fear of breaking them, but when you release everything else besides.

Serenity also exists, little friend. It is an “also” state, and also available, if you pause.

When you first started meditating, you were told that this state of being was called “emptiness” — but that word never worked for you, because when have you ever felt empty?

Serenity, however, is a state that you can return to no matter what else is happening above or within the lava flow, above or within the pit of alligators. Serenity is a state that you can enter by accepting that you will never understand the rules, and the rules will never understand you, and that is okay. That everything is okay, even when it does not appear to be okay.

We started this letter by asking you to just sit with us for a moment. To close the notebook and close your eyes and follow your breath. To invite your solving, puzzling, ever-worried mind to rest with us, with love. To simply feel and to be. We asked you for a moment, but you gave us an hour, because something lovely was happening in that quietness. And when you opened your eyes, you had no better idea of what the rules of life were that would keep you safe, and the world had not changed a bit in your silence. But you had shifted. You noticed the “also” state. You noticed serenity, and it noticed you.

That is our answer. That’s our whole answer. We can see that you understand, and so we will end here. And no matter what, we love you.

Prompt

If you are like me, a rule follower, a perpetual student, if you still sometimes feel like you’re navigating the world like a confused child (just taller), then hello! Join me this week in posing this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about the rules of life? And if that doesn’t speak to you, remember that this more general question usually works: Dear Love, what would you have me know today?