what's luv got to do with it

quite a lot

i went to a wonderful metta retreat recently and loved a whole bunch. it was great. i recommend doing similar if you ever get the opportunity. this was also of great support to all the work on attachment healing i’ve been doing this year.

i thought a fun way to write about the experience would be by sharing and expanding upon some of the tweets that it produced in the days after getting internet again, so let’s give that a go

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BUT WAIT - first i want to invite you once again to check out the gofundme page for the meditation fundamentals scholarship fund! you can see that page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund and read my previous substack post about it here.

so far we’ve raised enough money to cover 5 of the 8 students who are in the highest scholarship bracket for the class. i am grateful to have my time supported in teaching younger meditation students who don’t yet have their own income! thank you so much for any support you can give.

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one of my teachers/guides has a great essay in which she describes healing as taking place when there is a meeting, a witnessing and being cared for of our suffering parts. that meeting can be from oneself, it can be from the imagined other (as in ideal parent figure practice), or it can be from the manifest other, such as an actual friend, therapist, or partner, who literally witnesses you. all of these converge on what might be called the divine, or awake awareness, or rigpa, or our true nature.

trees are cool because they are kind of both manifest and imagined - i get to hug the tree and really feel it! it’s really there, really in my arms, really holding me. and from there i get to imagine its care for me, and feel my love for it, my relief in being held and seen. imagining touch is an extremely important component of my practice of ideal parent figure, so it can be nice to have an actual living being who’s always available for hugs.

my attachment healing work (with the above mentioned coach as well as chloe good and spencer jacobson) has been opening up into a dimension that feels more like energy work than anything else. to be sure, it also involves vulnerability practice, emotional fluidity, keen mindfulness and concentration, recalling memories, using words.

but in my deepest sessions (which are becoming more common!), all of that is in service of getting to a place where the subtle (or not so subtle) energies of the body are leading the way. it feels as if frozen pain that usually is stored deep in the tissues is allowed to surface, when there is enough mindfulness, curiosity, and resourced attention in the system.

i learned from chloe that there’s sort of a two step process here: for many of us, even just learning to access this deep material (deep grief, fear, rage, etc) and feel it at all is huge progress. but eventually in order to start to really change patterns, that material also has to be met and seen and loved (as described in the previous section of this essay).

what i’ve found is that when i touch some of the deepest material i’ve seen yet, the kind of thing that feels like “there’s no way this is from my own childhood, this shit has got to be inherited from millenia of jewish ancestors being persecuted,” it calls on an incredible energy from all directions — from my self, from my coach, from imaginal deities and angels, from the air, from awareness itself. that much energy is needed to actually move the trauma. and the experience of this is astoundingly rich, deep, glorious. i could call it pleasurable, which is true, but it has some whole other dimension to it. another phrase that came to mind for it was being

what a gift. how strange, it should come from such pain.

(this one has nothing to do with love or attachment, there was just a rooster on the property and i liked hearing it every morning)

what is my body saying when i hug? can i hug without needing something from you? can my body truly communicate my care and affection for you? can i be deeply attuned to the subtle information from your body as i hug you? can i come into any hug with an open heart? can i honor the aliveness of where our particular relationship is at right now, in this moment, with this hug? can i honor my own boundaries with this hug? can i let this hug go when its natural life has ended, but no sooner?

when i have entered certain altered states in my practice, i have been astounded at the tenderness and innocence of the heart. it is an extremely vulnerable thing.

try placing a hand or two on your heart and whispering the below words, out loud or inwardly. try navigating your mindstate to a place that matches the words, a place that could really feel them. direct them towards yourself, towards your heart, towards the layer of your being that has been at your center since you were a newborn.

“oh sweet one, oh beautiful one, oh sweet sweet sweet one, i am here, i am here, i’ve got you, oh sweet beautiful one, i’m here, i’m here, i’ve got you, i’ve got you, i’ve got you, oh my sweet beautiful one, oh my dear one, i’m here, i’m here, i’m here”

there is no amount of gentleness, no amount of care, no amount of tenderness, that is too much for our precious hearts. infinite tenderness. the heart of every human, i believe, is like this, beneath the layers of protection.

for some time now i’ve loved eyegazing as a practice. back at zen mountain monastery, some friends and i made a practice of sitting in meditation for a good 30 minutes, facing each other, maintaining eye contact. that practice rocks, and calls upon a lot of vulnerability, but i’ve found that when these moments happen spontaneously in the context of loving friendship, they’re even more powerful.

it can really make me squirm — seeing care in the eyes of someone i know and love, care that’s directed at me, unflinchingly. but then i can relax and just look back. maybe i look back with grief. maybe with curiosity or disbelief. maybe with care of my own. being loved in the midst of genuine expression is at the core of attachment healing, and it feels amazing.

a good question to ask oneself. and a good mantra for practicing the response!

i’m reminded of a quote from the dipa ma biography. jack kornfield gives this description of her:

“She would smile when people walked in the room, and there was this outpouring of welcoming lovingkindness. It didn’t matter who came in, or what circumstances, or what they had to say: that level was irrelevant to her. What was important was simply that here was another person to be loved.”

i believe i wrote this tweet after stopping at a gas station on the road trip home from retreat, and realizing there was nothing stopping me from beaming love at the other customers and cashier. this doesn’t have to be done in an obvious or sappy way, it’s just a feeling in the heart, a kindness in the eyes. sometimes people call this “stealth metta.” how wonderful: here is another person to be loved.

i listened to like the first 1/5th of the audio book of “love yourself like your life depends on it” by kamal ravikant recently, and it was well worth it just for this extremely simple practice the author self-discovered and recommends: repeat the phrase “i love myself” in your head as often as you can remember.

repeating phrases of lovingkindness is an oft-taught and ancient form of meditation practice, but somehow i had never tried it with this particular phrase. and what phrase could be more direct!

as a meditation practice, i found it wonderfully efficient at guiding me to whatever blockages to self love were present, and massaging them. as a practice throughout the day, i was astounded how often i would remember the phrase, and then say it in my head, and then notice: “ah! i forgot! i was thinking i was bad, unloveable, again!”

fascinatingly, even seemingly unrelated situations respond to this. being aggravated by traffic, or technology, or other people. checking: do i love myself? ah, let’s bring loving myself back in! all the sudden, my external aggravations melt.

(nothing to add here)

my system seems to be very sensitive to when i feel misattuned to. if *i* think that someone *else* thinks they understand me when *i* think they actually don’t, i get angry and defensive. and after all, no matter how well we know someone, aren’t they always a mystery to us? aren’t we always still a mystery to ourselves? so i think the loving gaze, for whatever quality of seeing the subject it has, also incorporates this not knowing, this wanting to see.

thanks for reading. may you be happy, at peace, cared for, loved, free, alive.

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if you enjoy my writing and want to support my ability to teach meditation practice for more free hearts, please do consider supporting the scholarship fund for my upcoming class! any amount really helps and is truly appreciated. https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund

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i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal