When Love Is the Foundation

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about love. So we don't often talk about love when we talk about mindfulness. But the fact is, is that love is actually such an integral aspect of awareness that the two really cannot be separated. Spiritual teacher Ram Dass therefore rarely uses the word awareness on its own.

He calls it loving awareness. I really, really am fond of that, that name, that some teachers now don't use the word mindfulness much anymore. They're calling it kindfulness instead to remind us that love is an inherent part of our deeper nature. And it's also part of our shared human condition. This kind of love is an innate quality within us all that's not dependent on another person.

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. When we're training in mindfulness, we're cultivating this loving awareness and then we're letting it flow through us into daily life. We're also training in unwinding the patterns in the mind that pull us into unawareness. The patterns that draw us into fear, anxiety, hatred, craving.

So with every mindfulness practice, you become more and more a locus of love, sanity and compassion in this world. So we can cultivate this quality within us in two ways. One is through meditation. And one is through making love the foundation of our daily actions. When we make love the foundation of our actions, thoughts, and speech, we naturally bring more awareness and connection and richness into our lives.

When love is the foundation for the way we communicate, there's openness, respect and deep listening. When love is the foundation in difficult conversations, there's still peace and there's understanding. When love is the foundation during times of crisis, we can still respond with compassion and care. When love is the foundation in times of confusion, you can simply do the kindest thing. When love is the foundation, we see our common humanity and we see ourselves reflected in each others eyes.

So today, and ongoing, 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, our actions, our words, as much as we can, because the world sure could use a little more love right now. And on that note, thank you for your practice and for sharing this time for doing this work together. And I'm just inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.