Love is within us all: God is Love. You are in love and love is in you. Love is in your heart and in your soul and in your mind.  It is in your blood and bone.  It is in your very spirit. We meditate to reach the spirit within. Controlling the breath typically leads to subtle tensions defeating the value of using breath to calm the mind; if you concentrate on your breathing you will never get to a meditative state. In meditation the goal is to separate the mind from the body – to get beyond your ego, to find your soul, to find the love within.

Love simply takes us as we are; it isn’t drawn in with the air we breath it is already within us. Love is in every part of you – in your blood and bone.  When we meet, our soulmate is a mirror reflecting our best self and our worst self – if you don’t love yourself you can’t love your soulmate. The mirror does not change us; it simply shows us what we are. Our soulmate is one with us experiencing us as we both are. We are love, unconditional love. In marriage we love the romance, intimacy, mutuality, and vulnerability of each other – that is what it means to become one.

Our heart is the core of our being – physically pumping blood and emotionally serving as the place where our judgement, character and beliefs are formed. The heart is the seat of Love.  When our beloved dies the heart (or the empty space around it) is where we feel her presence and her continuing love. She is really present within our heart, not merely symbolically or metaphorically. Christ’s victory was over death. God is Love and is not God of the dead, but God of the living because we all live in God. (Luke 20:38) and Christ’s victory was over Death.

There is in all of us an essential energy that is basic to our existence.  Pat recognized it and was convinced it was the basis of our existence after death. We do not feel it because our attention is occupied by every day living and our ego. I do not know what I am or who it is doing the knowing. Yet something tells me to reach beyond my ego, to listen, to seek. To look within we must go beyond the ego to see our self as we are in sleep. I must awake into an entirely different life I must awake to another life in myself, the self that knows God within me. I must awaken as though by a light – that same light at the end of the tunnel in the Near-Death Experience. We must wake by becoming aware of God at the end of the tunnel. We must awake when we are not entirely awake.  We can awake to a higher reality in ourselves. We must awake to a state that is of an entirely different quality than we experience all the time. It is like when we die awakening to the reality of God.  As Paul says, “that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. (Ephesians 4:22-24)

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  — Rumi