When Love Is the Foundation

We don’t often talk about love when we talk about mindfulness, but in fact love is such an integral aspect of awareness that the two cannot be separated. Spiritual teacher Ram Dass therefore rarely uses the word awareness on its own. He calls it ‘loving awareness’.

Some teachers don’t use the word mindfulness much anymore. They call it ‘kindfulness’ instead to remind us of the love that is inherent in our deeper nature and how it is a part of our shared human condition.

A Non-Dependent Love

This kind of love is an innate quality within us all that is not dependent on another person or what they do or don’t do. It’s not conditional on what happens or doesn’t happen. It’s an unconditional, ever available wellspring of wellbeing that we can tap into through mindfulness and carry with us wherever we go.

The Cultivation of Loving Awareness

When we’re training in mindfulness we’re cultivating this loving awareness and letting it flow through us into our daily lives. We’re also training in unwinding the patterns in the mind that can pull us into unawareness. The patterns that draw us into fear, anxiety, stress, hostility, hatred and craving.

So with every mindfulness practice you become more and more a locus of love, sanity, compassion, and kindness in this world.

But we can cultivate this quality not only in our meditation but in our daily life too. We can do that by making love the foundation of our intentions, thoughts, speech and actions.

When we make love the foundation we naturally bring more awareness, meaning and connection into our lives.

This Week’s Invitation: Make Love the Foundation

So this week’s invitation and practice is to make love the foundation. When we make love the foundation for the way we communicate, there is openness, honesty, understanding and deep listening. When love is the foundation in the way we treat those who are different, there is inclusion, respect and kindness.

When love is the foundation during times of crisis or confusion we care for each other, we look after ourselves and we try to do the kindest thing.

When love is the foundation we forgive, we see past our differences and we choose to rise above them. We unite.

So this week, I invite us all to do our best to align ourselves with love both through our meditation and also through bringing it into our thoughts, words and actions as much as we can. The world sure could use a little more love right now.