I Love You to Peace

    ​Recently, one of my spiritual daughters said to me in a text message, “I love you to pieces.” I responded, “I love you to peace.”
  Love is an amazing force. It has the capacity to bring tremendous excitement and elation. Love can give us such a strong and powerful adrenalin rush such that we feel that we can handle anything, as long as we know we are loved. Love can stimulate the endorphins that give us the sensation of walking on air.
   All of this is amazing. And imagine if you also experience love as an energy that fosters peace – within those you love and within you as give love. Imagine what life would look like for you, your loved ones, and the world.
   Peace. As you are reading and hearing that word within your spirit, you can feel it wash over you right now.
   So often when I meet people during book signings, in organizational consultations, when I’m leading workshops and retreats, coaching sessions, and so on, the most common longing expressed is for peace. Many express feelings of discontentment with our lives, confusion about what steps to take next, unfulfilled with our jobs and relationships.
   We operate with the narrative (a core belief that directs what we think is possible for our lives) that if something or someone in our circumstances would only change, then we would have the peace that we long for. Because of this narrative, we become frustrated, resentful, and perhaps hopeless, when those people or circumstances don’t change.
   Many of us have confused the absence of chaos for peace.  What’s the distinction between peace and the absence of chaos? The absence of chaos is dependent upon how other people relate with us and how life seems to treat us. When external situations or people determine your degree of peacefulness, can only bring short-term, peace that is a temporary absence of chaos. True peace only comes from within – it comes from a state of love and is not dependent upon what the external realities might be.
   Love is the pathway to peace. To a peace that is not dependent upon, people, situations or conditions. When notions of peace are dependent upon people or situations that you cannot control cannot really bring the deep relaxing and trusting that all is well.
   So how do we move beyond the absence of chaos to the experience of peace? Focus on love – both breathing it out (giving) and breathing it in (receiving) love. A few years ago, when I was feeling very hurt by a loved one, Spirit spoke to my heart, “Love like you’ve never been hurt.” The more I have embraced this expression of giving and receiving loved that is not conditional upon my circumstances or people, the greater my experience of peace has grown and deepened.
   Back in the 1970s, Dionne Warwick sang, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” Ultimately, this song is a reminder that love is the pathway to peace. The more we give and receive love, unconditionally, the more peace there is within our lives and in the world.  May it be your heart’s desire to love yourself and others to peace.