Love What Is
Written on May 27, 2008 by Tom Stine
I had a client once who asked me to explain further a comment I made to him during one of our sessions:
When you can for just this moment, just for this one moment, completely, utterly totally, beyond accept, love your experience right now, then you have the power to do something about it.
I have seen, in many contexts, the idea of accepting, allowing or welcoming one’s experience. It seems to me that this is a crucial step to letting go or healing any issue. But these terms, welcome, allow, accept, really don’t go far enough in my experience. They do help, but they don’t have the force, the utter radicalness that brings incredible freedom and power. The more radical approach for me is to love my experience.
Let’s say that you experience a bit of hardship or unpleasantness, something like a break-up in a relationship. You are experiencing sadness, unhappiness, a sense of loss and rejection. The question I would often ask a client is “Could you accept or welcome the sense of rejection or loss?” This question helps the client to get in touch with the feeling, to experience it more fully. From there, it is possible to feel a spontaneous release or freedom around the feeling. And that is very good.
However, as I have discovered in my own experience, if you can go beyond welcoming or accepting, and actually go to loving the feeling, even more power is unleashed. For in the moment that you love something, you are saying in effect, “I am 100% happy with the way things are. I don’t need to change a thing.” And that seems to me to be the source of something miraculous. I think it was Eckhart Tolle truly means by The Power of Now.
The Surge of Peace
Every time I do this, no matter what it is I am loving, I feel an incredible surge of peace, happiness and well-being. It is truly remarkable. It goes far beyond feeling a little better about an issue. It transcends releasing or any other process. It feels as if I have activated some hidden power source deep within me, one that goes out into the world through me, liberating me and everything else from suffering.
I encouraged my client in this instance to go beyond just accepting his problem and feelings about it because of the incredible power of love. But it has to be genuine. It requires a bit of radical thinking. It requires a huge leap. Or maybe not. Maybe it just requires a willingness to see what truly is the Truth. The truth that love is all there is.
Loving What Is and Change
Right about now you might be saying, “But Tom, I really do want to change an aspect of my life. How can loving something to the extent that I’m, in your words, ‘100% happy with the way things are,’ allow me to make changes in my life?” I’ve heard these questions before. The answer is quite simple, really. Nothing, repeat nothing can change if you first don’t accept it as it is, at least to some extent. And the more you can accept it, ie, go beyond acceptance and love it, the better.
Think about it: let’s say that you are wanting to lose weight. You’ve tried and tried, but to no avail. You have done everything, but nothing works. Why? The odds are pretty good that you are experiencing a massive internal conflict that is locking the weight in place. You are fighting reality. You are fighting life as it is right now. You are overweight. That’s reality. That’s the truth.
Subconsciously, you can almost hear the battle. “I hate being fat, I don’t like myself,” and on and on. And then there’s the other side: “I want to lose weight, I must lose weight, I should lose weight, I want to be thin!” Accepting things as they are drains the fight out of you. It weakens the battle. Your feelings relax, subside, and you feel more peaceful. And loving things as they are, well, it takes this process an order of magnitude further. The fight is gone, the battle forever done. You love yourself as you are. Nothing to change.
Change Can Be Effortless
My experience is that when I do this important step, change often just happens, with little effort on my part. Things simply improve. You might get on the scale and find that 10 pounds of anger and animosity has been shed from your system and your waist by shifting to love. Peace brings harmony and flow. I recall reading one time that “retained hate = overweight.” Could be, don’t you think? It is easy to see how this process would work if that were true.
So, pick an area of your life that is stuck. Look at it, examine how you are not loving things as they are. Make an effort to drop your criticisms, your judgments, your struggle against it. First accept, then move toward love. For now, simply identify what isn’t working and see how you are not being loving to things as they are. It will make a profound difference if you do nothing else. In future posts, I will talk more about how you can work this process on any issue.
In case you can’t tell, I love working with my clients and helping them to experience radical growth in their lives. I personally learn a great deal from them. I’m glad to be able to share this learning with you. Namaste.
