LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Davin Youngs!

Don't turn on yourself

Dear Lovelets,

Holy moly, I love you all so much. And I love reading your letters from love, where the Spirit of Unconditional Love (what we call SOUL around here) speaks to you, through you, in your own voices, and as you.

I learn so much from hearing love’s voice, filtered through your consciousness, witnessed through your eyes and experiences.

Here’s a little something I loved from last week’s comments, from a Lovelet named Jolize (cool name! Can’t spell Jolize without Liz!). Her Spirit of Unconditional Love was trying to get her to understand what it really means to dote upon yourself (which was our topic last week — and in that newsletter, I shared that “to dote” can mean “to be extremely and uncritically fond of someone”).

SOUL said to Jolize, “My girl, does this hit home? Like, in a bullseye way, taking the breath right out of your lungs? You’ve never had issues with spoiling yourself with warm baths and nice chocolate, but to be truthful, to you, that is all niceties and spoils . . . (but) criticism has always been your dominant inner voice for as long as you can remember. . . . So let’s get back to the heart of the matter: We are extremely and uncritically fond of you. Always. Without conditions. Jolize, my love — can you take the ‘uncritically fond’ gem from my hand and place it around your neck like a precious necklace? And when the other voices rise up, telling you how you are failing, how you should be doing better — close your eyes, rub our necklace, and poof! There it is, front and centre: you are being loved and adored without criticism. This is our eternal gift.”

THAT’S IT, FOLKS.

That’s it, Jolize. You nailed it, you heard it, you shared it. What we are doing here in this practice of writing letters from love is not about spoiling or pampering ourselves (although fine, yes, of course have the warm bath and the nice chocolate). This isn’t even about “self-care” in the way that “self-care” is sometimes sold to all of us. What we are doing is getting quiet enough to hear, at last, a distinct, distant-yet-intimate voice that comes through us, to us, and for us — a voice that says: I love you without criticism. I am extremely and uncritically fond of you.

Basically, a voice that looks upon all that you are and says with a warm smile, “No notes.”

That is what we are learning to hear. Because that, I genuinely believe, is the voice of creation itself, looking at all of its masterpieces with pleasure and fondness. That is what we come from, and what we shall someday return to. And what we already ARE.

Our special guest this week, my dear and gifted friend Davin Youngs, channels that voice of unconditional love every single day through his own voice, through his own work, healing people with sound and helping them to find their own voices literal and otherwise, their own harmonies. Davin knows more than anyone I’ve ever met how much power sound has to transform us — and the sounds of the words in our own heads are perhaps the most powerful and influential of all. I really hope you will watch the video of him reading his letter, which to me encompasses all that this practice can be. And I hope you will listen as well to the special gift he offered us here — the gift of a sound experience that he created just for this community.

Listen. Listen closely. Listen even more closely.

All I can hear right now is love.

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about using my voice?

Dearest little spark, we would actually prefer it if we could use your voice, as often as possible. Over here at Love LLC, we are always looking for human spokespeople and so, if you could remember at times to pause, listen, and see if you can hear what the Spirit of Unconditional Love would say, and then say THAT, that would be a top-notch use of your voice.

We don’t expect you to do this anywhere near perfectly, by the way, so don’t start sweating it already and worrying about how in the world you are going to rep Big Love, 24/7.

And yes, yes, sweetheart, we already hear the voices of shame in your head, protesting that you are the wrong spokesperson for love because of how imperfectly you often love people, even those closest to you — or rather, especially those closest to you.

(Side note: Do you think that’s rare? Do you think that’s some kind of “Lizzy-only special-special problem” by the way? Do you think there is something wrong with you because you haven’t always been able to make love work in your most intimate sphere of relationships? Babe, it ain’t just you. Only take a moment and look around with an open mind and an open heart, and you will see how hard it is for other people, too, to get along at all times with their families, their partners, their kids, their neighbors. It’s perfectly normal to have difficulties loving those in your most immediate proximity. Even Ghandi had sons who ended up hating him. Even Nelson Mandela was divorced three times — did that make either of those guys frauds when it came to being teachers of love, tolerance, goodness? That they had trouble in their most intimate relationships? No, honey. We didn’t judge them, and we don’t judge you. Intimacy is hard — close intimacy hardest of all — even for the great masters. What did Margaret’s mother tell you they say in Calabria? “The tighter the boot, the more it hurts.” So please relax. You’re doing the best you can. You’re still going to get an A+ at the end of this Earth School experience. Everyone gets an A+ at the end! We can assure you of that. Literally everyone.)

Because, honeyhead, we know. We know what a calamitous riot it is to live in this great big chaotic dormitory of the planet where all of you ascending souls are currently living out your own karmic dramas and experiences — experiences that often collide with each other’s experiences, sometimes violently, heartbreakingly, devastatingly.

And we know how risky it can feel to try to express love to others, especially when they are living in their own trauma and their own nightmares. Only very recently you took the shaky-handed risk of reaching out to somebody you’d had conflict with in the past and sending them an open-hearted message of best wishes, blessings for the holidays, and sincere love — to which they basically responded, “I hope you die in a car fire.” (They didn’t literally say that, of course, just basically.)

Oh well, it was worth a try. Loving others is always worth a try, little one. Even when it seems impossible. So use your voice to speak words of love whenever you can — but don’t be willfully naïve about it. If you express love to someone and they respond with an attack, you’re allowed to cross the street and keep it moving.

But loving others is not the only kind of love we are talking about here, nor the only way we would like to use your voice. Please, darling, let us use your voice to say kind things and only kind things to you, and about you. Even if you are only speaking to yourself within your own head, please let us use your voice — your deep, private, inner voice — to only speak gently to the being who you are, the being who is a captive audience to everything your mind says about it, the being who cannot simply cross the street when she’s under attack from a bully, if that bully is living inside her own head. Be sympathetic to the person who you are, dearest. Be kind inside.

Some words we would like to see struck from your inside vocabulary and no longer directed toward yourself include but are not limited to: idiot, klutz, loser, dummy, moron, asshole, crazy, hopeless, pathetic, weak, bitch, greedy, lazy, selfish, fool, fat, hag — okay, wait, sorry, you can keep hag, because I know you actually love that word. Hag is yours for the taking, and yes, we here at Love LLC do give you permission if you want to, to get a tattoo across your aging belly that says HAG LIFE but that’s only because you say it affectionately!

But let us provide, dear little hag-let, words to use toward yourself, to describe you. Let us borrow your mind. Let us call you what we see you as. Child of God is one thing we would call you. Student is another. (Do you remember Rob Bell’s friend who got a tattoo of the word STUDENT right across her hand, so she would remember every time she made a mistake that she is just here to learn, that she doesn’t need to get it right?) Lover of life, we would call you. Angel. Courageous journeyer. Seeker. Participant. Risk taker. Artist. Giver. Equal. Sweetheart. Honeyhead. Child. Child is always good. Good listener. Searcher of mystery and mysticism. Precious. Prized. Exquisite one-off creation. Eventual forgiver — that’s a good name for you, because even when you don’t forgive other people or yourself immediately, you do eventually get there, because you try. You really try. Trier — that’s another good name for you. You get an A+ for trying, Lizzy. You get an A+ simply for being, as we have discussed.

The other day you were in a tiny short meditation — just five minutes of silence at the beginning of a 12-step meeting. And in that little meditation, you heard a voice in your head say: Don’t turn on yourself, Lizzy. That was us, borrowing your voice to do the very best possible thing with it — to speak to you, from you, as you, within you, for you. For you, and then out from there to the world.

Let us keep doing that, precious.

Let us keep using your voice.

We are here for all of this, and we love you. You’re doing great. You try really hard to be a good person. All of you are doing great. A pluses all around!

Prompt

I was inspired this week by our guest Davin Youngs to consider this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about using my voice? You’ll see that beneath his gorgeous letter is a video of an original “sound healing” experience that Davin has created for our community. Davin uses his actual voice as a way to facilitate his own and other’s healing — but his letter is also about how important it was for him to find out who he is and what he stands for, to celebrate that he is no longer hiding, that he’s developed a voice to bolster his own sense of identity and well-being. With all that in mind, this week we invite you to interpret the subject of using your voice in whatever way feels best to you.