all quotes (c) jeff brown from his book, "love it forward". asterisks represent my most favorite of those shared.
*Out with the old, in with the true.
Be like the river that doesn't wish it were the ocean. Surrender to who you are.
*You can connect from all kinds of places- energetic harmony, sexual alchemy, intellectual alignment- but they won’t sustain love over a lifetime. You need a thread that goes deeper, that moves below and beyond the shifting sands of compatibility. That thread is fascination- a genuine fascination with someone’s inner world, with the way they organize reality, with the way they hearticulate their feelings, with the unfathomable and bottomless depths of their being. To hear their soul cry out to you again and again, and to never lose interest in what it is trying to convey. If there is that, then there will still be love when the body sickens, when the sexuality fades, when the perfection projection is long shattered. If there is that, you will swim in love’s waters until the very last breath.
*Savor every bloody moment of aliveness. Don’t delay the delight to a day that may never come. Don’t wait for the last breath before you wake the f*#k up.
*We can’t find our path without getting messy. Messy comes with the territory. We came in messy. We learn messy. We love messy. We leave messy. I never found my way to clarity without first befriending confusion, in all its chaotic forms. I never found a path that felt like home before falling into quicksand. I never established a new way of being without trying the wrong way of being on for size. I never found the light without stumbling around in the dark. I never tasted God before getting a little dirt in my mouth. In the heart of the chaos is the clay that shapes us home.
You are the sculptor of your own reality. Don’t hand your tools to anyone else.
***When you add soul to sex, it’s not sex anymore. It’s God.
*You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch- it’s timeless. It doesn’t care how long you know someone. It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary if there is no juice in the connection. What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, resonance that enlivens it, resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins.
Truth is the gateway to the moment.
Sometimes love finds you when it’s ready. And when you’re ready too. How that happens is anybody’s guess. Love is the great mystery stew, its secrets well kept, its ingredients known to providence alone. While both people are being prepared, marinated, skewered, cooked to readiness in the fires of life, the cosmic alchemist is turning the pot, reverently preparing the base for the lovers who will meld into it. Only God knows when the stew is ready to be served. Divine timing, Divine dining…
***Although meditation was a helpful spiritual practice, it also reminded me of the limits of solo travel. When I would expand my consciousness in isolation, on the meditation cushion, alone in nature, at the tail end of an emotional release, there was a way in which I could never touch eternity. It was like I was skirting the edges of God- touching her toes, smelling her skin, watching her breathe- without ever penetrating her depths. With love as my meditation, God opened herself completely to me, inviting me deeper in with every breath stroke. In loving my beloved, in surrendering to the merger along the heart-genital highway, another portal opened, one where the eternal nature of soul-life was revealed. Our unified soul was the alchemical combination that showed us God.
It’s all very complicated until time makes it simple.
***That’s the thing about great love. It elevates everything around it. You walk through a forest together and it becomes a great temple. You eat a meal together and you sit at God’s banquet table. You merge your bodies and all heaven breaks loose. That’s why we can’t stop singing about love. Every verse is a serenade into wholeness.
This life is a hero’s journey. Anyone who sticks it out and gives it their best shot is heroic, in my eyes. What we call normal is so often extraordinary. Just overcoming the weight of the world, and making a genuine effort to identify and honor our true-path is profound. Kudos to anyone who is making a genuine effort to get through this life with originality, awareness and authenticity.
It’s not about giving up on the fairy tale relationship. It’s about landing it in reality. It’s about giving the fairy feet. It’s about peeling away the prince’s armor and loving the human down below. It’s about wiping off the princess’ make-up and loving her divine humanness. It’s about finding romance in the naked fires of daily life. When our masks and disguises fall away, real love can reveal itself. Forget fairy tales- the human tale is much more satisfying. We just have to learn how to get turned on by humanness.
***There is a time to seek, and a time to find. Seeking, exploring, excavating our true path is essential to the journey, but we need to be careful not to miss the signs that we have discovered something that is ready to be lived. Sometimes we know more than we are admitting to ourselves about our path because we are afraid to live our truth fully. Perhaps we were not met with acceptance and support when we revealed who we were; perhaps we are afraid of the consequences of owning our path. Whatever stands in the way, let us courageously live what we find so that we can expand into wholeness. The universe delights in our actualization.
I am all for aha! moments and other peak experiences, but my most lasting transformation happened in the subtleties, in those private moments of decision as to which path to walk. In every moment, there is a choice: Will I open, or close? Will I take responsibility, or blame? Will I download the learning, or deflect? Will I go to my edge, or fall back to safety? Will I honor my intuition, or listen to the world? Millions of moments of decision that inform who we become. Getting out of Unconscious Prison is a life-long journey. True path is built with choices. I choose authenticity.
*Everyone decides what love is for them. Some of us stop at practicality. And some of us will only stop when the most profound love connection walks through the door. The practical ones have a much better chance of lasting. But the soulful ones actually have a chance to touch God. Their odds are lower, but they don’t much care. Better an occasional banquet with God than 3 meals a day with a stranger. Pick your path…
***I didn’t realize how alone I was, until I wasn’t. It is such a relief when great love comes your way after years, lifetimes without it. Let there be no doubt that all love connections are not created equal. Some bonds are simply practical. Others are blindly rooted in pathology and old traumas. Still others are opportunities to heal and have essential needs finally met. And some have a mystical quality from the first meeting. Pure and simple. Apparent from the first outbreath. Unmistakably sacred. God rising on the wings of their love. This is how the timely and the timeless become indistinguishable- when love meets God deep in the heart’s inner temple.
