Life is challenging and loving everything in it may feel next to impossible. On any given day you can pick a suffering to sit with and there will be a seeming unending list to choose from. Today I’m sitting with war and how to love that and I’d like for you to join me while I work through how it’s possible to love such a thing.
One of my earliest teachers, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, helped me to understand that life in general operates from one of two origins, love or fear – and when I apply this concept to war it’s easy for me to see that what precipitates war is fear. And, as with the gentleman pictured above, and as we’re currently seeing with the war that’s unfolding in Ukraine right now, fighting to protect what one loves is sometimes necessary and has nothing (mostly) to do with fear.
For some of you, it may make sense and be easier to approach today’s task because while most of us do not want to see countless, seemingly unnecessary deaths, it seems that most of us do want to live in fear and this is exactly where love enters the picture. In some ways, I’m inviting you to enlist the help of stoicism , which doesn’t exclude love, but it can help us to be less influenced by more the more extreme feelings that we can experience around things like war.
So how do we love war? Welllll…..we start and end in the same place on this, with people. We are continually evolving species that seeks to live, no matter what. Some say that the force that creates us and keeps moving us forward is love, but there are others who insist it’s fear and the threat of being overtaken by the bigger, stronger, richer something is enough to keep some folks in a perpetual state of defensiveness and delusion. Yes, of course a pinch of fear is necessary in our lives to keep us from oh say, walking out into traffic and thinking the cars are all just gonna stop for us or from maybe robbing a bank – but if there’s too much fear then we….can see how it can cause problems.
Practically ANY ONE PERSON or any group that has been responsible for starting wars is operating from a place in themselves that is comprised more from fear and its variations (envy, greed, hate etc.) than from love, and it this person or people that need loved, perhaps more than others to help transmute negativity into positivity.
Sit with yourself now for a few moments and if you can, love that all things that are happening are happening because more love is needed and however that love shapes itself is what will take us through to tomorrow.
TimeSpaceOne 