“I feel our nation’s turning away from love…moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” Author bell hooks
When I feel weary and hopeless, I walk into the garden to return to love. I settle into the quiet, listen for a bird call or the wind through the trees. Soon, my closed-off heart softens and my courage is restored.
When a dear friend of mine feels despair creeping down her spine, she lines up a visit with her family and immerses herself in the simple immediacy of her grandchildren’s curiosity and openness.
When indifference threatens to drown a trusted colleague, he shuts the door and listens to devotional chanting. The sacred melodies seep into his bones and restore his sense of compassion.
Fear and divisiveness fill the airwaves, threats seem imminent from all sides, and the world as we’ve known it is changing…it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to disconnect, to struggle with the coldness of despair.
How can we change our experience? The answer lies with us. While many things are outside of our control, our inner landscape and state of being are ours to cultivate. Even when times are tough, we can change the channel, turn our inner dial towards love and remember what really matters. Conscious leaders know that love is a place to come from, a state of being that changes our lives and the way we lead.
What is your relationship with love? Albert Einstein said to his daughter Lieserl published many years after his death, “There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.” [After publishing I discovered (thanks SNOPES) that this was not written by Einstein. Perhaps he should have. My apologies]
If love is a life force, beyond the give and take of relationships, beyond the passions of the moment, how do we get there? How do we develop leaders who lead with love? A familiar pathway for one person is not necessarily the portal another person uses to return to love. Like a mountain where many streams lead into the crystalline lake, our different experiences of love lead us to the same place.
Positive imagery can help us appreciate the ways we do know love. I remember reading the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis to my daughter and the magical moment when the Pevensie siblings discovered the doorway in the back of the wardrobe that took them into the land of Narnia. Even though we don’t have a wardrobe handy, we can appreciate the doorways we do open to return to love.
Through research and dialogue with clients and colleagues, I have identified five common doorways. There could be more. Discover whether one of these access points is familiar to you.
Relational
Interior
Physical
Creative
Transcendent
Do you reach out to connect when you feel fear? You may prefer the Relational Doorway. Friends and colleagues who know love in this way talk about cherished time with family, grandchildren; adore connecting, teaching, bringing groups of people together. I think of clients who passionately create a culture of care in their teams.
One of my coaching clients steps out of despair through an Interior Doorway. When caught in worry, she returns to a place of love by going into the forest, taking an hour or even a few minutes to sink into her seemingly limitless interior universe. This is her path to reclaim the empathy, compassion, zest, and care she then brings to relationships at home and at work.
Dancers, yoga and movement specialists cultivate their relationship with love through a Physical Doorway. By moving they open to more compassion, find freedom in their expression of deep affection, and feel the natural flow of love enter their lives. They find great pleasure in their own movement and in teaching others to move with ease. One of my runner friends told me about the upwelling of love he feels as he covers miles of trails on the coastal terrain of Mount Tamalpais.
Writers, sculptors, painters, singers, actors and patrons of the arts return to a state of love through the Creative Doorway. Through the creative process they touch a stream of comfort, joy and wellbeing. Designing a program or a new product, entrepreneurs report the flow of innovation filling their hearts with passion. Looking at art, listening to music, receiving or giving the creative touch of a massage awaken a calm and peaceful experience of love.
Worshippers around the world use devotional music to return to love through a Transcendent Doorway. Meditators who wake at 4am attend to the breath as a way through what is sometimes called monkey mind, a Buddhist term for the mind that jumps from thought to thought as a monkey jumps from tree to tree. They focus until the distracted, restless mind settles down and enjoys being open to love. Choirs singing, Kirtan chanting, and Native American flutes take us soaring as a pathway back into connection to love.
Discover your own doorway by observing your experience. Reflect over your life and bring to mind treasured moments where you felt love. Where were you? What was the situation? While we might not be strong at accessing every doorway, when we are present to our preferred doorway, appreciating where we do experience and express love, change can happen more quickly.
We can be renewed in love’s wisdom when we keep in mind the moments when our heart spoke with affection, when we savored a perfect summer peach, when we shared a fondness for music, when we summited a mountain, when we gazed into the eyes of a newborn.
Yet, when doubt, shame, or timidity hold us back and keep us from connecting, we might not trust and treasure our compassionate sweetness and fire-breathing ferocity. Some days, we just feel worn out and it’s a struggle to pause, to let the lightness of love penetrate our aching hearts.
That’s when we know that love is both a natural state of being and an act of will, both an intention and an action. To know love takes time and commitment. Consciously using our doorway takes us back to our roots, strengthens our capacity to pivot towards love, to fiercely, passionately, steadfastly, and delightedly, embody compassion, empathy, and positive regard as an antidote to despair, and a source of effective action.
As Michele Obama said in the opening to her DNC speech “It’s a hard time and we are all feeling it in different ways.” It’s easy to retreat, shut down how fiercely we care, how profoundly we hope. Being gentle with ourselves and with others is essential. This is an invitation to settle into the warmth of our hearts, where we listen differently and can renew our commitment to make a difference.
Will we repeat the past or create a new future? I hope we see that the choice is increasingly urgent. The future we create for ourselves, our neighbors, our planet depends on our choice to step out of despair and walk back into love – as individuals, and as the collective that we are.
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I’ve recently hosted two panels on Mindsets for Change with remarkable global leaders who also see love as a place to start.
Humanity Rising Global Solutions Summit Panels
August 1, Day 72, Mindsets for Change: Conscious Leaders Designing Meaningful Action Toward a Vital World
September 5th, Day 88, Mindsets for Change: Conscious Leaders Innovating for a Better Future