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PASSION
wah!

You have to fall in love. You have to. Or you will never know what selflessness is. You have to get excited about something in your life, or you will never reach your destination. Passion is a combination of falling in love and being driven to repeat the experience. Have you fallen in love? You have. Do you remember how it feels? You stop remembering what time it is, you don’t know what day it is or how much time has passed since you were together. You lose yourself. It’s buoyant and nourishing and beyond time and space, and altogether ridiculous. And you don’t care a bit how it looks, because you are so in love. You’ll go anywhere, right? Falling in love is part of the human experience. It is a great gift in each incarnation. We fall in love with certain things, on our way to falling in love with everything. We worship certain people, certain idols, certain beings, on our way to worshipping all that is. It has to start personally. It has to start as a one-to-one thing. It is special. It has enormous impact. It lets you know how special you are. What you have to offer, and what you bring to the relationship is vital and inclusive.

You know what love is. You had a grandparent or a teacher or a sibling or a lover who showed you love. You will never forget that feeling. They cared for you. Gave you special attention. You meant something. Can you remember someone who cared for you like that? Go back in your life and find one experience of love, of feeling whole, and try to recreate it in your mind and body. Remember how the sun felt, or how they looked at you, or how you felt when you received their love. This is a great tool that can be used with visualization – you can store these feelings of love in your muscle tissue, bones, and cellular structure to facilitate healing.

The way that person loved you is is exactly the same way the whole Universe co-exists with you. The energy of Love that you receive is special and personal. It has enormous impact. Through your relationship with the Universe, you understand that your being is special. You realise that what you have to offer in this life is vital and means so much. Each human life is taken very seriously in the spirit realm, did you know that? What you do with each life and each situation is enormously important. What you are doing right now is the result of many efforts before this. You have tried before to get to this point. And here you are – hoping to be able to let go and open to a higher energy. And you’re dragged down with this person or that situation, and wondering how can it all work out? How can you ever get to a place of self-acceptance and a feeling of oneness with this situation in your life… And that’s the whole program. It’s feeling a sense of Love while doing the relationship, while being a hated leader, while practicing kindness. Changes of the heart do not come easily. Hindu scriptures describe it as a speck of dust on the mirror of the heart. That’s how small the issue seems. And yet, when you try and dust it off, what happens? Does it go away? No! It moves to another place on the mirror! (Oh, and you thought it was all resolved this time…)

The path leads to Love. Any path. Not a spiritual one, not an artistic one, not a serviceful one. Every life journey leads to Love. In the end, your conclusion has to be Love. Love. Love for yourself. Love for the people in and around your life, who are also working towards selflessness. Love. It’s the end all. If you have reached another conclusion, you’re not finished yet. Love will be your last thought after you’ve worked it all out. It’s not a concept. It’s a feeling that permeates everything you do. Love is rushing at you, every minute of the day. Love. It’s rushing at you, every moment.

What gets in the way? Why is our experience of Love so inconstant, when it’s so available all the time? We turn our own heart away from the experience of Love. There are a million reasons to turn away. We won’t allow ourselves full freedom of Self and self-expression. Or we have learned somewhere that everything has a price and we don’t feel we’ve paid enough for it yet. Or we feel we have to do everything ourselves to get it done right. Look in your own heart and ask. As you watch yourself go through your day, ask yourself How much Love is present right now? You can use the question as a barometer, to see how much you resist the inflow of Love. We all do it. It’s not something unusual, like your incarnation is different from anyone else’s. Life is hard. The human incarnation is a difficult experience. It is looked at as almost heroic in the spirit world. Wow! You took a human incarnation?! (Yeah, you know, you get some respect for taking it on.) Lots of lessons and deep-seated issues get brought into the open for you to work on, throughout the years of your life.

Passion is what drives us to continually seek a great experience. Call it God. Call it Love. It’s not WHAT your passion is, but the fact that you have passion. For something. In ayurvedic terms, passion is fire. The fire energy can be applied to anything. Passion fueling lust creates sexual desire. Passion fueling creativity creates an artist. Passion for a deity creates longing. It’s a remembrance. If you’ve tasted it once, you want to taste it again. An artist will remember being at one with a creative energy and having the painting flow into completion. He or she will want to experience that again. A meditator will remember the experience of deep absorption, and will strive to get there again.

You long for it, but you don’t know how to get there every time. Factors of nature converge in a multitude of ways, never repeating the same pattern twice. We have to use deeper senses like intuition and creativity to navigate the Universe and its workings while being fully present. Your passion may not come from this lifetime. Some people recall a sense of wholeness from previous incarnation and seek it in present time. For me, my passion sources from a previous incarnation in Africa. As a tribal elder, I loved and cared for my people. We drummed, danced, worshipped, and shared in community. I felt very close to God. It was the last time I can remember that I actually got it. I understood how it felt to be personally close to the Universe, how it felt to be an important keystone in the energy of the group. My passion this lifetime was to find music again in a spiritual way. With all the travelling to Africa and India at a young age, it might have looked idiotic to an outsider. But from the inside, it was a continual search – a passion – to find musical settings which could enrich and uplift spiritually. Trance, drumming, chanting, gospel, Hare Krishna… I have saoked in as many of these sacred musical gatherings as I have been able. They take me to an experience of oneness. Of Love. They let me know that I belong, that I have an important part to play, not to anybody else, but to myself. I seek the experience of oneness so it can spill over into the rest of my day and enhance it. Embellish it.

It’s not for someone else. Don’t look and see if other people have light or love or passion in their lives. Forget it. You can’t see it from the outside anyway. And the way it looks from the outside is never how it feels from the inside. Your thirst for spirit, your longing is drawing you forward. Passion makes you one-pointed. It creates clarity because ‘you’ are present, looking for something. You’re showing up. You don’t know exactly what it is, what it looks like, or what the current product is called. But you know what it feels like. So you try out different experiences to see if it gives you an inkling of wholeness.

You’re passionate about something because it’s working for you. It’s connecting you to what you need. It’s based on your inner belief that what you want exists out there, somewhere. You experienced it once so you know it’s there. Whether you have Love or not, you know it exists. Whether you feel the Light or not, somehow you know it’s possible. You might have seen a beautiful sunset sometime. And even though you can’t see it now, you still remember it. You will look the next day to try and see that beauty again. In the same way, you know what it feels like to have Love. And so you long to experience it again. Passion is the driving force that compels you forward. It might propel you into a quandry, or maybe you’ll look look an idiot to your friends. Who cares? Passion is illogical. It’s not step by step; it’s all the way or not at all. Good or bad, it’s all welcomed in your search for The Experience. That’s why we travel hundreds of miles to see our loved one. Or to be with a saint. Or to go to a concert. We want to feel open, expansive, free. We want to feel that space of selflessness.

Passion. It’s a feeling thing. You can’t use your eyes to find it. You have to allow your desires to lead you. You have to go forth blindly, searching for landmarks without eyes or intellect. It’s using your heart and soul. Listening to your heart instead of what people say. Watching what is instead of keeping track of what people are doing. Searching for even the smallest taste of bliss. It’s a madman’s way. Hafiz, Rumi, Ramakrishna – their lives were directed by this inner thirst, a passion for the sacredness of every moment. Everyone has a passion, something they love to do or create. Each passion ignites a spark for living, for being part of this Creation.

THE HEART IS RIGHT

The Heart is right to cry

Even when the smallest drop of light,
Of love,
Is taken away.

Perhaps you may kick,
moan,
or scream
in a dignified
Silence,

But you are so right
To do so in any fashion
Until God returns
to You.

from Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master
(translation: Daniel Ladinsky)