Let Love Lead
How Bobby Kennedy Jr. Served Love in Me Today; Living the Governing Principle of Love
Got this clarity, “let love lead.” Warm feeling of rightness, simplicity. Then a little voice says “don’t leave me.” Suddenly it all comes clear. Wet eyes, softening.
It's been a busy morning. I was getting ready to begin a writing retreat day, was in the kitchen, musing over the way I'd spent the morning so far and wondering about it, per usual. Where was This Love in it? I was looking toward the beginning of the retreat that, after a check in, starts with a meditation that I lead. It was coming up in 20 minutes and I was wondering what it would be today. I never know. It’s so fun to gather in, enter in, and let it come.
In the openness of musing, as I considered my writing group, this love for them welled up and warmed my heart. I heard the words in answer "let love lead." Well, I didn't actually hear the words. Together with the warmth in my heart, my mind translated into those words the feeling and impression I got.
I continued on with the preparations for the day. While putting the harness on my dog I felt such warm love for him. I was feeling into the potential of what it would mean to let love lead me into a flow of actions taking care of all kinds of things.
After letting Koie out, I stood in the glass door and heard/felt the little voice, and the sentiment was don't leave me. In that instant I saw how my giving myself over to spirit and love was leaving some little lost part behind, a young part, and how she was acting within me to keep me otherwise engaged. Her sadness and fear of living without companionship arose in the open space.
There are clarities that just come in that reveal a bunch of stuff at once. That’s grace. Suddenly there's a seeing; a felt sense and knowing experience of sanity, realness, coming together. An understanding of what's been going on arrives which makes sense on many levels at once.
The sense of abandonment and exile have been strong components of my life's work. Not just my personal work, but the depth to which these experiences are part of the human condition that comes up in my companioning ministry. Betrayal and rejection are also big. These are the big four core wounds that are basic to our psychological make up.
Tears welled up in the recognition of this little voice speaking of being left, and left out along with compassionate understanding and clarity. While Love's take-over of my system, soul and being keeps progressing, I can feel how she feels left. It makes sense. Such love rose up in me for my little self, this sweet little one who so longed to have consistent tender loving dependable care, safety, and the surety that someone is there who takes care. Not receiving it was so painful that she cut it off like it didn’t exist.
That's been coming to the foreground in my inner work for a while now. In psychological terms, it's called "object constancy" in the object relations that get established as we emerge from the symbiotic stage into the awareness of being a body different than the caregiving bodies.
I had object inconstancy, lots of changing people. My father was the primary person, but he was not entirely dependable. I was sent away to live elsewhere several times. I see how that is in me too: in relation with myself, my life and work. There are other ways in which what is constant and unchanging is right here, embodied and lived. The contrast has served Love’s purposes well.
This Presence of Love is revealing that it can lead, free and remedy what has been confounding me about myself and my actions. It's been doing this for quite awhile, thank Goodness. This is just the latest.
She, child soul, gets to be fully included in the Presence of Love that doesn’t come and go even though my system still seems to stray, trespass into the shadowland of dualistic separation.
The next thing that happens is that synchronicity comes into play. It's during my writing retreat now, I'm taking care of some business related to the meetings and retreats coming up. One of my fellow writers puts a link in the chat for some singing bowls on YouTube. I link to that and put it on. Then I see in the sidebar "RFK, Jr. Who Is God?"
Lately I've been given to listen to and watch a wide variety of podcasts and interviews he's doing now that he’s running for president. I know he's been sober for 40 years and has a spiritual practice. So this piqued my curiosity. Off I went to break my fast and listen to the 14 minute video. The timing was noticeably perfect.
He tells his story and I find it deeply touching, very real and transparent. His sharing has a portion of the background of his drug addiction and how he was able to get sober, what he did, does and how it unfolded. The addiction started at age 15, one year after his father was assassinated. Understandable, yes?
A bit later he brings in Carl Jung who came in at a pivotal point in his attempts to get sober. Where he got to me was via this wisdom:
Watching all the little things that I did that now had moral dimension...when the alarm goes off in the morning, do I lay there with my indolent thoughts or do I jump right up ...
He lists several things as the day proceeds, bed made, towels hung, picking up hangers that fall, water back into ice trays, to putting the shopping cart in the parking lot away.
...and if I make a whole bunch of those choices right I maintain myself in a posture of surrender which keeps me open to my higher power.
So much about addiction is about abuse of power ... always a temptation to use those (powers) to self-fulfill and the challenge is how do you use those (powers) as ways to serve, instead, God's will and the good of our community.
That, to me, is the struggle, and when I do that I feel God's power coming through me and that I can do things more effectively as a human being. That gnawing anxiety that I lived with for so many years in my gut — it's gone. I can put down the oars, put up the sail and the wind takes me. I can see the evidence of it in my life…
The guided meditation I had done for my group just two hours before this was "Let Love Take The Lead." We do a bit of a check in before we get started, and in the sharing, what these lovely beings moved into was all about allowing, feeling and living in a Love vibration. During the meditation that evolved from all these happenings, in the unfolding of the meditation, I mentioned doing these small "ordinary mundane actions imbued with the vibrations of love." What had dawned in me came to the fore — and later on, after listening to Bobby Kennedy Jr., seeing it as a "posture of surrender" — of letting ego go with its self-idealizations, representations and self-will.
The sense of the Presence of Love consistently watching over me actually activated and came alive in this way different than other ways.
My deepest heart’s desire: Living authentically true to the truth which is always abiding within, is everywhere and always revealing Itself is now clearer. And it’s coming through at a perfect point in time from this courageous man speaking like he's in a 12-step meeting about how the higher power worked a miracle in his life. As he put it earlier in the talk, speaking about Jung and synchronicity,
he (Jung) believed it was a way that God intervened in our lives, that broke all the rules of nature... to reach in and sort of tap us on the shoulder "yeah, I'm here.”
Can you imagine having leadership that lets love lead?
Living the Governing Principle of Love sounds like a big deal, but really it’s all in the simple little things and how we let Love do them.
Sounds like real good news to me.
To be able to share with you all Love's magic at play working my system to resolve troubles is such a blessing. Life can be a profound unlearning of how not to be who/what we are in truth; in unlearning, we are utilized to bring the truth of the Presence alive and well. It may seem quite far away in the moment. That’s the time for faith in the infinite invisible. We're not abandoned or exiled, betrayed or rejected at all. We're actually Home Here on earth. We've only to sincerely seek to find, and This finds us. It’s nowhere else but Here.
Here’s Ringo Starr from his Postcards from Paradise album, the song “Let Love Lead.” So amazing that I just googled the three little words, and this shows up.
May this be a little newsletter from paradise!
Getting up to dance now!
Gratitude to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for his voice of sanity, truth, love and light in these times. Whatever comes of it, that there’s a few people out there who are really speaking truth from the heart is such Good News.
Gratitude to Ringo, and to you for reading, letting love lead in whatever ways you can. May this inspire simple actions of Love’s unfolding in and through us. It’ll change the world.
If you like, please share in the comments how Love leads you; what struggles you encounter. This is a safe, nonjudgmental space where we all honor and respect One another as Love incarnating, yes? Let’s! Bobby helped me out today, so how can we support One another? Together Love in the midst of us grows stronger.
LightHeartedly, Anrael
Love this. ""Let Love Take The Lead."" Miss you my friend. Am in New Jersey visiting my family of origin who could use those 5 simple words as a mantra. They do not let love lead the way rather letting impatience at the very least be the guiding light. LOL not funny but.... Thought about the marathon yesterday. could have used it but the criticism would have abounded ... Maybe will try to zoom in this week... Much love ❤️
Thank you for sharing your truth and enlightening us with Bobby Kennedy Jr. 's quote. Without his spiritual background it would be hard to endure the lies that are propagated about him. It surely reminds me of Galileo who was prosecuted for believing and giving supportive evidence that the earth and planets were revolving around the sun. His books were banned, he was jailed, and he lived the rest of his life under house arrest. There were two worlds then as there is now, religion and science. The theologians wanted to uphold the beliefs of the time. The same is happening now, upholding the beliefs that technology and corporate profit is worth it regardless of harms to life emotionally or physically. What kind of world is this that does not let someone speak, even about scientific research or toxic pollution or corruption that is effecting all life on earth?