love

What do we do in a world where our natural resources are diminishing, our society is in many ways stressed, depressed and afraid, and our political and economic systems only seem to perpetuate these troubles?

Love. It is a renewable resource and one that we all have the potential to access. It is not like money, water and oil, where only a small percentage of people in the world can own the majority of it. Love heals. It gives me hope.

Why then do we find ourselves in such trouble when love, this powerful and abundant resource, has always been and will forever be here?

I believe it is the armour we have built around our precious hearts, the protective covering that we started to build the very first time the world hurt us, the shield we continue to engineer to save us from the pain of feeling. There are times when these defenses are helpful and perhaps even necessary. The problem is that we tend to keep these layers as permanent security when they should be flexible, temporary and discarded when no longer needed. The longer we keep them around, the easier it is to mistake them for our heart. We suffer when we begin to act from the armour instead of the heart. The armour demands that we respond with fear, while the heart invites us to respond with love.

To respond with love, we must learn to truly love ourselves and heal both our individual and collective wounds. I have experienced times in my life where self-love and healing seemed elusive and impossible or I felt I made major breakthroughs in both areas only to have life illuminate even more layers of self-hate and deeper wounds.

The lessons of this past year have taught me that love is a practice, a commitment to courageously and compassionately ask: What would be the most loving thing to do for me, for the others involved and for all that we are connected to? It’s a complicated question and the answers are always changing and unique to the current situation.

Sometimes I make a mistake, which invites me back to love. I practice being accountable for any pain I have caused and cultivating compassion to forgive myself. The encouraging part is that the more I ask what the most loving thing to do is, and live what arises from it, the more I am able to love myself, heal and see that we are all just doing our best given our circumstances and the armours we’ve constructed. This type of healing softens the armour around my heart, so I can lovingly engage with the world and inspire healing.

Healing is required to honour our deep interconnectedness. We share the collective wounds of colonialism, racism, phobias, an exploited planet, war, greed, delusion, trauma and disease. These wounds impact us all differently. To understand this difference, it is important to recognize our privilege/power and meet our hurt with compassion.

I live with the privilege of belonging to a family and a community who support and care for me. I have a face, skin colour and education that insulate me from many forms of oppression and I am committed to working through what that can, will and could mean. I have the gift of practice that teaches me how to safely open my heart more fully and reminds me to take better care of myself. I see so much beauty in the world, and at the same time, hurt when I touch tragedy or see how it touches others.

My mission for Kula is to be a place that cultivates community, holds space for healing, supports practice and makes time for play.

With love,
Christi-an
Director | Kula Annex

photo credit: Andréa de Keijzer