To live a surrendered life is to be present moment to moment with our experience, to accept our experience without judging it. Or if we judge it, to forgive ourselves for defending, for pushing away. To be with our experience does not mean that we do not space out, detach, disappear emotionally. It means that we become increasingly aware of when we dissociate and gently bring ourselves back. This "bringing ourselves back" is the essence of meditation. To meditate, it is not necessary to stop thinking. But it is necessary to become aware of the thoughts as they happen, to see how they take us out of the silence. To see how they prevent us from being wholly present.
Seek refuge in inner silence, free your thoughts from the external world and you will feel the rays of God's goodness and love pouring over you and the universe.
If you would but practice loving, you would make yourself into a fountain of healing energy where others could drink the balm that heals the pain of the soul. For it is love, only love, that can heal all levels of the human being. Remember also that the earth being needs your love. Not only is the earth a living, thinking, feeling entity like yourself, but she needs the love and the thoughts of the human race in these dark years as she has never before needed anything. You can be among the growing number who realize the mother planet is suffering. In your prayers, and in your meditation, send her your love and your thoughts. The darkness of her days can be lifted by the love of the race she has nurtured since its inception.
~ from THRESHOLD -- a letter to a 13 year old child by Hilarion
Love matters. It matters more than anything else in the world. Yet is is very easy. All you have to do is be who you really are; for you are made of love and made to love because of what you are: an interconnected part of a whole whose life and fiber is love.
To feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love. It is love which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world, and o the reality of God.
In the presence of the Ancient Ones, we deliver new vows in whispers by the authority of our own remembered hearts. Standing before these Elders of Time, we entrust ourselves to each other. Our vows are simple, spontaneous. "Yes, we are here to love. Yes, we are here to experience both shadow and light, forgiveness and joy. We return to each other, rejoined. Together we will love this beautiful, broken world of which we are a part."
