Surrender to love. Today, and every day, fall in love, again, and again and again. Give more than is expected of you. Expect no reward. The beauty of love will be half won when you learn the secret of putting out more than is expected in all that you do. Make yourself so valuable to your beloved that eventually you will become indispensable. Find their dream and help them live it. Exercise your privilege to support their journey, go the extra mile, and enjoy all the rewards you receive. You deserve them!
Today
Do something special for someone out of love
Laugh even if you have to invent it
Cry one tear of gratitude
Accept a gift
Live a dream
Use Magic
Float
Stay still for just 5 minutes on your own
Breath a breath of life giving air
Clear your mind for 30 seconds
Look up
Say thank you
Give somebody a special treat
Be Gentle
Step back from it all for just one long breath.
Succeed
To be in love, and to stay in love, is to surrender to another person. Then we open to direct communication. There is no trust required if the ego is soft. To be in a relationship, and celebrate the spontaneity of falling in love, we cannot hide. We cannot be embarrassed about our strange collection of qualities. We present everything as it is. And in return we must welcome our lover, without ego, and accept their strange collection of qualities too. Surrender means working together with love. You cannot take the moral high ground and still hold love sacred. You cannot surrender to love and then say, "IF".
Surrender means, "Here I am, and here you are". There is no need to make you better so that "I can love you in the future". There is no "if" in love.
To surrender means you'll need to get used to marching directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it an acceptable and important part of your way of life. Your expectations are not true, they are the barrier to the journey of love, so you must stop hoping to achieve them in your relationship, not want to achieve them, but to dismantle them.
Disappointment is a good sign of loving intelligence, because it reveals an honesty between your expectations and your love. It cannot be compared to anything else; it is so sharp, precise, obvious and direct. If we can open, surrender to love, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are not going to be met, no matter how much we try. Every time we change somebody, move them shift them, love dies. Wanting things to be different than they are is the mark of the ego. This is not love, this is the ego. They are opposites. So it takes courage to say, "You didn't meet my expectations, and that revealed how much I needed to grow." This is sacred love. A moving soft ego, always looking to adapt.
To stay in Love means we come down into the dirty, ordinary, street scene of reality. That is where real devotion and love exists. When we love someone we must learn to trust ourselves, surrender to love. This does not involve preparing for a soft landing, being half in and half out, hedging your bets. Nobody ever succeeded by creating escape routes.
I raced a surf ski in the life saving carnivals in Australia. Sometimes the waves were 20 feet high, and to crash the ski was an amazingly dangerous thing. But it happened nearly every time, because so many of us were going down the waves thinking, "What happens if I crash?". One day, I was out in huge waves with an old guy, a veteran with the oldest wooden ski. As the biggest wave of the day rose behind us, twenty-five foot like a building, I watched this old guy, I saw the look on his face, and he was just like a child. He looked 15 years old, his smile could have lit a city, his hooting and hollering was so enthusiastic, he was having a ball. Instead of holding back, thinking "What happens if...", he just threw his whole heart and soul into that wave and had the time of his life. I just fell in love with his exuberance, and thought that anybody who puts so much into anything they do is going to attract a crowd. He said to me later, "One great thing about age, there's less to go that there was, you know if you die, you may as well die with a smile on your dial, having a ball, doing it all."
Love actually means being prepared to land on hard, ordinary ground; on the rocky, wild countryside of confrontation of your own issues. What you don't like in your lover is a mirror of your ego. Once we open ourselves, then we land on what is, it's disappointing, and this is the real beauty of love. People can reject your expectations, they cannot reject your love.
In true love, you have to allow your "self" to surrender. There is nothing to fear losing once you identify with the simplicity of surrender. The only thing that can be hurt is your ego, so if you can develop a soft ego, you will be free to hold that power of love anytime you choose. If your ego can flex, then there is no hurt. Instead of taking the ego and emotions so seriously, take love seriously. Love can shine through everything. The key to doing this is to surrender the moral high ground, and automatically you soften your ego, you.
Ritual
Try taking time to sit quietly in nature daily and imagine how much you love your lover, or ex-lover, once you drop any expectation of them. Consider all the issues you see in them as a mirror of you. By finding the balance, see if you can love those issues in you. You must remain committed to continuously improving this skill of discernment between a love free of expectation, and a love filled with judgments and projection. The real power you have in life, is to drop your ego driven judgments of right and wrong. Just love. No forgiveness. Love like that day on the beach when I saw the moon. Let go, fall in love with all those who have been on your path. Feel it sitting behind all the facades, and know that it is always there. This is nature's healing.
We bring our devotion into everyday life through the art of ritual. Rituals are more than acts of anchoring, they become acts of devotion to something beyond the self.
Ritual is an act of respect for someone or something outside ourselves, a large or small act of giving without need or desire to receive. Ritual can be spontaneous, but the true value of ritual is a relentless commitment, come rain, hail or shine.
That is the difference between doing something for ego, and doing it for ritual. Steadiness is the mark of ritual. Rituals of steadiness are repeated day, after day, after day. They are not for self, but are a mark of respect for something higher, like a purpose in life.
Ritual is how we bridge the inspiration of our inner stillness with the spontaneity of everyday life. If you walk around India, you will see this ritual as a way of life. Small paintings on doorsteps, the day couldn't begin without it, or the candle lit in the hall in honor of a deceased relative, or incense burning as a thank you to the Gods. Flowers adorn alters, not requesting privilege, it is an act of ritual. And nothing could prevent it happening. It is a mark of respect to something bigger than the individual.
Rituals are acts of Devotion. Here are some wonderful examples that people have developed and shared with me over the years. Remember, ritual is not an act of manifestation of anything, it is a remembrance of the divine nature of life.
1. Maintaining an altar in your home and keeping it clean daily.
2. Lighting a candle in the evening.
3. Saying a prayer of thank you at meal time.
4. Holding hands in the park.
5. Maintaining a garden.
6. Having a photo wall of those you love.
7. Having an affirmation wall with pictures of future dreams on it
8. Writing love letters to each other and posting them.
9. Cleaning the kitchen as an act of love.
10. Saving money according to an agreed plan for the future.
11. Never going to bed with an argument in progress
12. Loyalty, always standing up for and speaking well of your lover.
13. Prioritisation of your relationship over other things.
14. Maintaining health and wellness so you can turn up for love.
Can you see that we can re arrange many everyday tasks so they become acts of love? Even taking the garbage out can become a ritual act of love that makes your partners life easier. Then we are acting with loving intent, and it will be rewarded ten fold. In this way, we are not feeding the ego through what we do, we are humble to ritual, and the key is to be willing to maintain that ritual even when you don't want to, or need to, any longer. These are just a few ideas on the rituals of love. I am sure you can think of a few more unique ones between you. Remember to make them every day events and easy.
Today, love without expectation. Love someone you hate, love someone you fear, love someone you left behind and don't take their reaction to heart. Make every day a Valentines day, and see how many people you can honor, past present and future. Love them from a place if gratefulness. Love them knowing tomorrow may never come and know that the deepest regret any human being can have, is to hold back their love, even for a second.
Today, light a candle in your heart for all those people that you love or have loved. Drink a glass of fresh water to their beauty, their gifts and their ways. Hope and wish that today, on this everyday Valentines day, they are in love, with love and they are happy. What else could real love be, but the wish for someone else's happiness.
Loving acts are acts done out of love, because of love, and without the expectation of love in return.
Humility is important as well. To get past the Ego is to cut away the rough edges of vanity, which hurts and disturbs those one meets in life. Vanity is separateness. Truly loving individuals will recognise themselves in others, and rather than judge them as less, they appreciate the mirror. It is of no service to yourself or your relationship to judge another as less or more. It is expansive to acknowledge our own humility. So many of life's stresses can be extinguished at the source, if we are able to recognize ourselves in others.
Devotion means that our lover's happiness becomes a high priority. This is the demonstration of our love. There is nothing more important, nothing more potent, than the small acts of our devotion. We dedicate every circumstance we can to their improvement and happiness.
