LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Monique Gray Smith!

An invitation, not a challenge

Hello family! Welcome to another edition of LETTERS FROM LOVE! The subject today is Love. That was also the subject last week. It will also be the subject next week! So let’s settle into it!

My video today discusses how it is possible that someone — many of us — can live decades on this earth without ever having once spoken a kind or loving word to ourselves. What practices might we implement to remedy such an unfortunate situation? We are not meant to live on the outskirts of Love, dear ones. Welcome home to the center of your very own heart. Here we go . . .

Dear Love, what would you have me know today?

The little plum in the palm of my hand, rest with me for a moment. Let us be together. I have asked you this week again to slow down, to let go of certain self-inflicted duties and deadlines. To ask for time and space. To take on a little less work. To volunteer slightly less often for service.

Please do not misunderstand me — it is a beautiful thing to work and to serve. I want you to experience plenty of both. But it is also a beautiful thing to sit in silence with me and to practice noticing how the world seems to be perfectly capable of carrying on without your constant administration and involvement.

What governs all that you see, my love? Not you, tiny monkey. Not you.

My love, I will remind you again not to fill your hours and days with so much activity. Much of it is unnecessary. You charge into life with an urgency that is not always warranted. I do not abide in urgency. That’s all you, babe. That’s all you.

Don’t be seduced by the cries and struggles and daily little dramas and guilt trips of your mind. It isn’t all real. And even if it were real, it will all pass. Let it pass.

I will also remind you that the most important work you have ever done in your life, both for yourself and for the world, was generated out of silence, stillness, and solitude. So please, settle more deeply into quietness and put some trust in me. If I want more discipline from you in any realm, it is only in the realm of stillness. It is there that you can hear me and I can find you, poised on the edge of your own heart, waiting for, certain in, my presence.

If you’d like to learn more about the metta loving-kindness meditation I practice and describe in the video, you can start by reading about it here — and here is a guided meditation. Though I don’t use this practice every day, I do it enough that my compassion for both myself and those around me, known and unknown, has amplified in a way that’s nothing short of life-changing.

And if you find you need a little hand-holding to connect with Love as you sit down to write your letters, you can always try the tips that live at the top of my Substack. No matter how you arrive there, hoping that Love finds you when you need it.