This morning, I sat outside soaking up the sun, listening to the sounds of different birds, feeling the cool breeze on the nape of my neck, sipping cacao offered to the land first, and deeply sensing in my body the purity of the love that runs through all that is nature, which is also who we are.

This love has asked of me to let go of everything this last year—from relationships, to all my belongings, to roles in my family, to where I was living for 11 years.

All in the name of releasing unconscious vows connected to loyalty to suffering as love. Which, to me, has been the deepest unwinding of the profound conditioning toward codependency and addiction we’ve received in a wounded culture at this time.

Staying loyal to pain, struggle, and suffering is not love.

Trying to fix ourselves to be okay in toxic situations, constantly feeling insecure or playing games, blaming ourselves if life is doing what life does, or for other people’s shadows or inability to love us, enabling addictions, and feeling stuck because of our fear of letting go into what is truly loving is all suffering and loyalty to a dynamic we need to collectively let die.

Love simply does not want us to suffer, to feel insecure, to be in pain, or to martyr ourselves in order to not hurt other people’s feelings. Often, what is in our highest good is also the highest good for all, and love is there, holding us.

At times, love has us leave behind patterns of suffering to make room for more life, to bring the liberation we deeply long for and the freedom we know to be true in our bones. It takes a lot of resilience and devotion to leave something that isn’t truly loving and serving our hearts when we deeply care and have formed attachments.

Letting go into becoming feels like death and birth happening at the same time.

The erotic pulse of life, and the great cracking open of the heart with grief for the love of all that has passed, all that was loved, wasn’t loved, that was survived, created, destroyed, and forever preserved in the etches of memory in song, vision, scent, taste, and feeling.

There’s such a deep connection between cultivating our capacity to grieve and opening up to Eros, the loving life force energy of all that is, in order to release our need to suffer for love, to punish ourselves, or to maintain attachments to addictions that give us false nourishment or an illusion of freedom we have to keep reaching for until it destroys us.

I’m reminded of a nature documentary about a herd of elephants I was watching while packing up my apartment in California.

The elephants followed the rhythm of nature, gathering around a water hole after the storms where there were orgies of frogs leaving foam-filled eggs of new life. The eggs became tadpoles, and some found their way to the water, while some were eaten, and the fish-eating the tadpole-filled foam were eaten, and the creature that ate them mated with its beloved to create new life to be released into this cycle.

Life is constantly giving birth to new life, making love to herself, and dying back into herself.

This death is always serving more life.

This is the letting go into the great becoming of all that is truly meant for us, for life, and for love itself.

It’s aliveness.

Later in the film, a baby elephant got stuck from weakness and died. The elephants gathered for days and grieved. Wailed, knelt down, one by one acknowledging the passing of this babe, and waiting patiently for the mother of this babe to be ready to move on, while nourishing themselves via the lush life living and dying into itself around them.

There was no suffering because trauma doesn’t exist in nature.

Grief does.

Grieving liberates us from trauma; it also liberates us from the patriarchal contract we unconsciously signed where we must be loyal to this form of suffering as a kind of love.

Trauma bonding isn’t love; it is what our nervous systems learned as attachment.

Love doesn’t always want us to stay put; sometimes, we need to say goodbye because love is asking us to individuate into a more whole, authentic version of ourselves, that, in the liberation of loyalty to suffering as love, has space for love to flow through.

There is no fear because in the letting go, there is the wisdom that we are letting go into more and more becoming.

The form of a thing, the picture we try to paint isn’t love; love is love, and the forms often need to change to accommodate more sanity and love as we move into integrating from living in such a constricted world that sells us the picture of Eros, rather than teaching us how to open to the love constantly trying to find her way into our veins.

Love isn’t settling.
Love isn’t enabling.
Love isn’t suffering.
Love isn’t addiction and dopamine highs.

Love takes time to unfurl, to die into herself, to give birth to herself, to crack our hearts open.

Letting go into becoming has its own pace and rhythm.

I’m constantly feeling this in my body as I watch the world as we know it dying around us, the rush to “new” and to what will be, rather than trusting that the “new” and what will be is forming itself right here, in this dying—and it is all love and nature and the chirps of birds and the cool breeze, and the rain coming is the thing, along with the deep knowing that spring will arrive in her own time.

Take refuge in what nourishes you; fill up more of your space with what gives you a sense of stability. Being with uncertainty is the skill that cracks us open to the fullness of Eros and grief in this moment, this very moment of letting go into becoming.

It’s the end of a potent era, one asking all of us to relinquish and void our contracts to suffer as love.

More love.

Not less.

~