When you don’t know what to do.
When you don’t like the task ahead of you.
When you don’t want to do anything because it seems like an impossible situation.
When you aren’t happy with how you’ve handled the situation thus far.
When you are avoiding the real issue, the difficult person, the challenging decision, the moral dilemma.
Ask yourself: What would Love do?
Yes, as if Love were a person, or some other beneficent entity, ponder what Love would do.
If Love were in this exact same situation that you are in or if Love were faced with this difficult decision, what would Love do? What would Love say? What perspective would Love have? Would Love think about this differently than you are? Would Love power through an unsavory situation? In what way would Love handle this difficult person?
You see, when we send familiar subjects or new problems through the same old filter in our minds and hearts, we may end up with a rather static approach and perspective, a perpetuation of old patterns and suffering.
But when we bring in an external persona, the gentle beaming face of our friend Love, we might get a deeper, higher, or more heartfelt answer to our dilemma. Because Love, as we well know, is an honorable, trustworthy, highly regarded character who admittedly knows a thing or two more than we do about how nice things could be if we only would let them be so nice!
Love will tell us it’s effortless to be good, caring, and kind. Love will tell us it’s preferable to go the extra mile. Put aside our grievances. Trash our desire to get even or show that other person a thing or two. Do away with the temptation to teach them a lesson. Always take the easy way out.
For years I did not want to put down my heart wall and open myself vulnerably to a family member who had scared me, angered me, shocked me, and really turned me away over time. But recently I remembered the days when we laughed together and shared play time as children. Then we had a lone giggle together which surfaced from a sea of anger, ignoring and clipped communication. In that moment of humor we connected ever so briefly, but it served as my invitation to engage differently. That was my opening.
So I bravely posed the question: What would Love do in this relationship?
Would Love continue to ignore the pain in my family member and the chasm between us? Or would Love jump in and start to mend, start to open, reach out, and become vulnerable?
With a feeling of warmth passing over me, I knew immediately the answer. Thanks Love!
The almost miraculous part to me was how effortless it was. Anger, bitterness, and conflict melted away. With Love taking the reins of my heart, I felt a soft presence of acceptance and courage surround me and I watched in amazement as my heart opened and out of my mouth came kindness and understanding. My will force felt like I was “all in”. How silly the long-suffering grudge I had been holding felt. How regrettable that I hadn’t been able to do this years earlier.
But here I was now. Choosing Love. Emulating Love. Taking Love’s advice. Everything both inside and outside of me seemed to be different. Better. Much much better.
Choosing love counters dark forces. It makes the terrain where the darkness takes hold inhospitable and uninhabitable. The resistance to connection with my family member I had held for decades was fertile ground for darkness to root and flourish. However, this wasn’t made apparent to me until I let love in.
The contrast that Love’s light provided is what allowed me to see the darkness as it was lodging inside my heart. I wasn’t evil. I didn’t feel evil. But I was harboring evil and therefore I was neither fully free nor doing my part to be the change that I wanted to see in the world.
Where in your life does love need to come in the most? You can bring a little love in everywhere or bring a lot of love deeply into your darkest corner. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but there might be one that feels more freeing to you.
What if light was allowed to penetrate a battered and neglected relationship? Would you feel more free?
What if love infiltrated a deep pain of regret or shame? Would you feel lighter?
What if love and light were allowed to wash through feelings of jealousy, resentment, or hatred? Would you feel more joy? More energy?
We expand ourselves when we let love in and thus we become more whole. When we are expanded and whole, everything and everyone around us also expands.
Letting love in, practicing love, feeling love, approaching situations and people with love, asking WHAT WOULD LOVE DO? are all ways to elevate your own life experiences and spiritual growth. But doing this also allows more love to jiggle the quantum field and make known our hearts’ intention to choose light and reject darkness. By darkness I literally mean dark forces.
We may see these dark forces overtly portrayed as greed, corruption, and manipulation. Or war, torture, violence, and theft. But evil also dresses up to confuse us in the many temptations and justifications that we bump into in our daily lives and on the world’s stage. Or even more stealthily in the things that we hide in the deepest recesses of our hearts, pretend that we are fine with, and/or think that we can’t do anything about. The latter ones are probably the most slippery, but in reality, they are the ones we can do the most about.
My work – which oddly doesn’t feel like work – is to continue to ask “what would Love do?” as I navigate the opening of this relationship and the opening of my heart. This transformative task is the biggest contribution I can make right now in the battle between good and evil that continues to rage all around us.
Please ask the question in your life too and join me in opening to the ways of Love.
Love this well done!
Changing the world one open heart at a time!