Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
This Friday, March 13th we warmly invite you to join Wisdom Council member Felicia Murell in our mini-retreat The Restorative Power of Love. Felicia will lead us through an exploration of accessing inner wisdom as we join the Divine in the liberating work of Love.
She offers this reflection and excerpt from her book AND: The Restorative Power of Love In An Either/Or World:
I am constantly challenged in life by one burning question:
Do I trust Love?
Do I trust that Love will lead me, and those I care about, into Love’s embrace?
Do I trust the energy of Spirit to participate with Love, even when it seems like I or someone I love is derailing from the path I envisioned?
And what of disappointments? What of the moments and times when people fail me, when institutions I’ve believed and hoped were safe spaces that represent the Way of Love turn out to not be that?
Broken people, who in their unhealed state project their brokenness onto others, create dysfunctional families and messy institutions-unsafe spaces that lead us far from home.
In the bosom of Love’s embrace, I’ve come to understand that the degree of my healed emotional capacity will always determine the level in which I am present and consciously participating in relationship with others. In the absence of healing, I will choose rightness over relationship and protect my defended self with ferocity every single time.
Love is the foundation for mutuality.
Love is the foundation for safety, wellness, and unconditional acceptance.
Love is the structure in which freedom is governed.
To the extent that I do not trust Love, I will not trust in humanity’s ability to live in peace together. To the extent that I do not trust Love, I will not trust that I can find home in the world.
….what I most want is to live in a world where the welcome mat for my whole self is laid out. I want to live in a world where space is made for me to exist how I am, as I am, without any threat to my personhood. I want to live in a world where bad gets better, where a renaissance of inclusion and acceptance blossoms. I want to live in a world where fear does not rob us of our freedom to be. I want to live in a world that is safe to call home.
It takes a lot of inner work to get to the place where we can allow ourselves to be the same person no matter the situation or circumstance, to not become a chameleon who changes based on reading the room. I need places to be my whole self: to be seen, to be known, to be valued, to have my voice and self-expression held in concert with others, without any demands of assimilation, conformity, or diminishment.
We all need that. We all need places and people who hold our safety, wellness, and dignity in the highest regard.
….
How do we begin to come home to one another? How do we participate with Love to create communities of care where everyone is at home in their body and at home in the world?
Establishing home—the lived experience of safety, wellness, and dignity—is an ongoing, infinite process of attentive, intentional care that is lived out day to day as we dance with Love.
Establishing home begins with being honest about what we do not know, waking up to what we are unconscious to, and acknowledging where our perceptions and perspectives have been muddied or distorted. From a posture of humility, we can see what we need to unlearn and where our actions have been harmful and our words have erected barriers to establishing a welcoming home for ourselves and other bodies.
Establishing home begins with inner work: healing our wounded inner child who fights with such ferocity to protect and defend herself, the one whose natural inclination is to choose right over relationship, to guard her heart with anger and rage, to choose retribution as a form of protection. How do I come home to her? How do we come home to ourselves?
For me, it all begins and ends with Love. Love is the Source, the Ground of All Being. Love is the deep source of wisdom within, the fount of our life energy. To find my way home to myself, I have to find my way home to Love.
….
Trusting Love is the path that leads to establishing home.
****
Please join us Friday and enter a supportive space to widen and deepen your own compassionate listening practice with teaching, contemplative writing, and guided meditation practices to cultivate inner strength and self-awareness.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Excerpt from Felicia Murrell, AND: The Restorative Power of Love In An Either/Or World (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2024), 200-203
