Yoga and the Inclusive Facets of Love

“Love is the respecter of experience—allowing each and every memory that time and space requires to tell its tale, inform communities, and inspire collective change in honor of all it endured and had the power to survive. Love is the glory of oneness, so settled in its transcendent purity with nowhere else to be but wherever and however diversity is expressed. Love is the parent of mind, holding sacred space for each theory, conclusion, and rationalization, as the conceptual aspects of the human being sets each idea aside to find safety wherever threat may lurk. Love is the freedom of will, allowing all to be as they are and do as they wish, knowing only the magnificence of progress can be born when allowing each truth to be shared. Love is the redeemer of dignity, giving back power to every person who has been stripped of self-respect, imprisoned in labels, and judged for the role they never agreed to play in other people’s perceptions. Love is the unraveling of indoctrination and the undoing of justification, providing no further space for a tradition of cruelty to establish a culture of hurt. Love is the Angelic choir, signaling the arrival of Heaven’s eternal presence that can be heard through the melody of liberated pain. Love is the depth of character cultivated in the aftermath of struggle, daring to dedicate time and space for the benefit of others, so no one else has to endure the story each breath came to tell.

Love is not the corrector of conduct. It does not tell anyone a better way to be when it is the very force holding each feeling, impulse, and reaction, making it safe for all to be felt and heard exactly as experiences wish to be conveyed. Love is not a fast-track to more preferable circumstances, since the nature of enlightenment is a soothing stream of heart-centered empathy no matter how muddy the water ever becomes. Love is not an opposite to sadness, fear, anger, guilt, or shame, but the Source of these sensations that creates each visceral expression for the potent transformation it offers, once surrendered into its benefit by respecting each expression. Love is not the condemnation of volatility, but the clean-up crew that always births greater realities in support of all from within the ashes of that which no longer serves the sum of the whole. Love is not the impatience of preference. It does not demand anyone ‘get over’ anything, so to allow pain to be heard, processed, felt and integrated in its unique timeframe — no matter how much anyone wishes it were different or healed at a faster rate.

It is not love versus assembly. It is love while we assemble and assembling as acts of love for the voiceless we are ready to free, welcome, hear, acknowledge, and honor. It is not love instead of fear, but loving the anticipation of pain and the despair of hopelessness, as a chance to welcome innocence in its most exposed, vulnerable, shameful, guilty, abused, neglected and unprotected form. It is not love as a higher vibrational escape route from things labeled “lower” or “less than”, but the clarity that allows all aspects of experience to be honored as light, no matter the conduct any part chooses to express. It is not love as anything other than the breath of unity consciousness — bringing together a vast array of similarities and differences as golden threads woven together as a tapestry only truth knows how to make. It’s a tapestry to warm the hearts of those left out in the cold, cast aside in ridicule, and abandoned by an unconsciousness that is too greedy to be decent and far too afraid to share.

Love is not spiritual choreography anyone can perform incorrectly. It is the expansion of global virtue through a dance of change inviting everyone into the grace of sacred movement as we receive the recognition and support that brings us out of hiding. Love is the acceptance of truth dwelling in every heart, allowing all to be however the beauty of creation envisions itself. Love is the lamppost of eternal clarity guiding us along as we remain authentic to the healing at hand, with nowhere else to be, but exactly as we are, wherever we may stand.” ~Matt Khan~