The Awakened Heart

With Valentine’s Day still fresh in our minds, let’s take a minute to reframe our intention and energy.

This time of year, most of the messaging around love is centered on romantic love. But romantic love is the easy kind of love. It’s not difficult to love someone that you’re sexually attracted to. It happens naturally.

What is much harder is the love you extend to strangers. To the person that cut you off in traffic. To the person who wronged you. And to yourself. This patient, enduring, and kind love is much more difficult.

One of my favorite spiritual writers Pema Chodron says that the awakened heart is the basic goodness of all beings. In our wounded, softened heart lives the love that will not die.

Our ability to love is the thing that unites us all. It is what has allowed us to endure here on this earth in harmony with other creatures for thousands of years. It’s the most important thing we all share.

I’ll leave you with this: another favorite writer Jen Pastiloff lives by this motto: “When I get to the end of my life, and I ask one final, ‘What have I done?,’ let my answer be, ‘I have done love.’”