How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love by Sarah Blondin
I started using Sarah Blondin’s beautiful meditations on surrendering and self love when I was in a terrible mental place last summer. After going through all her courses on Insight Timer, I bought this book and it has been such a gift in helping me come back home to myself.
Introduction
This is how the great abandonment from ourselves begins. At some point, something felt too big for us to feel and too scary for us to hold and in our innocence, we decided to turn away from our deeply feeling core and our hearts. We became like lost children without a mother, without a safe place to land.
Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Heart
If we look within, most of us can identify a vision we have, an image of who we want to become, an enhanced vision of ourselves– something like You 2.0. This image is often kinder, more loving, openhearted, accepting, inspired, and creative. This self doesn’t succumb to fear, anger, or hardship, and rises above everything with grace and ease. This is the representation of our heart-minded selves. It is the call of our heart.
Chapter 2: Mind, Meet Heart
The mind attaches; the heart lets go
The mind operates out of fear and distrust;
the heart operates on faith and ease
The mind is frantic in function; the
heart is slow, deliberate, and peaceful
The mind thrives on and enjoys problem seeking and solving;
the heart thrives on acceptance of all things and levels nothing as
“wrong” or “right.”
Chapter 3: Waking to Grace
What I wish someone had told me was that my first step, the first step we must all take in our life, needed to be inward. The most important thing I could learn to do was to sit still and open– to open to what was inside me– that the rest would come more easily from there.
Grace is always at work, nudging us to explore our internal landscape
No matter the size of our pain, there is a stillness and deeply loving force trying to life us above it.
The things we do to make ourselves feel secure and in control are often the very things that make us feel somehow threatened and at risk.
Grace disguises itself in accidents or disasters. Sometimes it will– not to cause you harm, but to bring you back into alignment with the trust of who you really are, with your immense life force. It comes to help break you free from your cage.
Uncomfortable times are what lead to higher levels of trust and love for life.
Chapter 6: How to Retrieve Feeling
Our heart either speaks and translates our experience by radiating life-affirming frequencies and vibrations through the body or by seizing and contracting. We call these frequencies feelings.
When we are not in alignment with our heart, we create uncomfortable sensations in the body. This is the way our feeling intelligence speaks. This state of discomfort is not relieved until everything we are feeling has been acknowledged and then fed with love.
Sustained vulnerability is a continued practice of remaining in the face of things that make us want to retreat.
Choose to let your sensitivity instruct you to freedom.
Chapter 7: Give Name
We all know these places of storm within us: uncomfortable restlessness in the body; addictive behaviors like overwork, overeating, drinking, shopping, judgment, and gossip; too much screen time; an internal discourse of abuse and criticism; and fits of panic and fear. Our pain is disguised in these habits. These behaviors are an attempt at creating a solution for a feeling we don’t know how to hold and address. When we escape from our suffering by getting caught up in these habits, we are ignoring our call for healing.
Painful feelings and memories arise not to dig themselves deeper into you, but to wedge themselves loose. They are asking for their emancipation.
When hard emotions or memories surface, begin by opening the door and paying attention. Our job is to notice and touch these things with thoughtfulness.
We relive until we are set free. We relive until we are loved back to wholeness. We are not meant to hold on to fear and pain.
In this practice of awareness and turning towards our discomfort, all pain goes back to where it came from, and often leaves no trace of having been here, except for leaving us with a bit more space around our hearts, a little more spaciousness in our capacity to love, to give, to be with our lives.
Hardship does not come to pull us into despair, it comes to inspire growth and acceptance in all directions, across all time and space.
If you cannot transform from your moments of discomfort, you will forever be running from your life. But if you learn to stay, you learn how to be.
Chapter 8: Retrieval of Personal Permission
You will look to the external for something or someone to blame for your feelings.
It is you and only you who wields the power to reverse the damage. You are wholly responsible for what you see, feel, and perceive.
You are the gatekeeper and curator of your life.
It takes ongoing effort to walk in the direction of our hearts and highest truth. For many of us this is the work of a lifetime and yet it is also work that rewards us quickly and gives our life meaning, showing us that it is worth our effort. This hope only intensifies as we permit ourselves to come into alignment with our heart.
Chapter 9: Retrieval of Our Body of Light
The Shadow of the Mind will attempt to keep us safe. It will try to stop us from evolving and changing. It will do whatever it can to prevent us from following through with our deepest calls and dreams.
We do not realize we are in an almost constant state of bracing ourselves, rather than opening up to our life.
Each time you are pulled toward your fear, you also have the chance to say no. We are here to learn the mastery of our own beings, to discover the divine and the many gifts within us. Until we learn for ourselves what we are capable of, we do not know.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” wrote poet Kahlil Gibran, alluding to the fact that one must confront the shadow of sorrow or agony in order to find rapture for their life and their being.
Chapter 10: Retrieval of Shameless Vulnerability
We must no longer see our vulnerabilities as weakness
Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Jesus, MLK and Buddha were all vulnerable, compassionate, exuberant leaders who radiated love and kindness. They led with sensitivity as their greatest tool. They knew that they were being called to change the world and would have to persuade others to rise in goodness and not in fear.
You can do the same. You can invoke the power of your feeling body by consciously setting the intention to allow yourself to be led by your unfettered heart. With no protection placed on top of your softness, you will grow wild and unencumbered.
Chapter 11: Soul-itude
Truth will always be calling. Create space to listen, and you will hear it.
I asked for truth, I did not realize that I was asking that I be emptied.
If you have a sincere longing to find peace and love in your life, you must first come to find both of these things within you.
Pull away from the regularly doing, striving, achieving, and we face a sort of social suicide, or risk being forgotten. Or so we fear. This is why we remain to tethered to the external world and the identities we create to work “successfully” within it. It’s as if our very lives depend on it.
But in order to become heart minded and to discover who we are and what we feel, we need to slow down. We need to be willing to “fall behind” in order to fall within.
Trust me when I say that all that will matter, all that will ever amount to anything, is the relationship you have with the world you carry around inside of you. The heart speaks to those who become still in its presence.
Ask yourself if the price you are paying by listening to your fear is worth the sacrifice of living in alignment with your heart.
The more you respond to the call, the more you will feel love suffuse your body and the easier it will become to breathe, move, create, and yes give and receive love. Honor your body’s calls is what heals your foundation and brings your intelligence of love and kindness back into proper functioning.
May you be a student of your spirit. May you fill the small corners of the world with the things you love. May you discover that it is you you must learn to love and you who will show you how. It is you you are most longing to know, so hush, listen, follow through.
Deep within the center of all living things is a heartbeat and a well of tremendous beauty. Valleys, river, pools of starlight. We marvel at life outside of us but never gaze within ourselves with the same amazement and worship. Never unearth our sweetness, our crystal, our deep rivers of water and sap.
Chapter 13: Love of the Self
When we become radiant with our own love, we offer ourselves as medicine to the world. When we love ourselves, our eyes no longer write the story of hurt over the surface of our lives.
In Good Morning, I Love You by psychology professor Shauna Shapiro, it cites that the brain responsible for growth and change actually shuts down when we are in shame and judgment and activates when we express self-compassion and love.
Chapter 15: Comfort for Deep Suffering
Let nothing convince you back into your smallness, for you are now moving toward your highest potential.
When we are in the terrain of panic, anxiety, depression, and high stress (high fear), we are being shown that we need to birth a greater awareness. We need to learn how to hold our hearts in the dark. This holding does mean gripping, it means surrendering. It means opening wide against our instinct to tuck in tight and shield. We don’t need protection in this place, we need grace, and in order to find this grace, we need to learn to sit in the hard places– to stay and wave our white flag and surrender– while also claiming our fierceness.
Chapter 19: Letting Go of Conditional Love
The more we allow our heart to touch us, the more we feel fulfilled and satisfied and the more meaningful our life becomes.
The ones closest to us trigger, mirror, ignite, and reveal both our great beauty and great ugliness. To attempt love is to also suffer an honest revealing of our darkest tendencies and selves.
It was far easier to love myself, to become heart minded, when dealing with my private inner thoughts than it was in my intimate relationships. I always had a hard time being loving if my conditions were not met. “Treat me this way and I will love you.” This conditional way of loving in relationships acts as a hindrance to love.
To soften in the face of betrayal or disappointment or hurt seems as dramatic as inviting someone who has just punched you in the face into your home for a warm cup of tea.
Chapter 20: There are No Wrong Choices
Even if all my fears prove right, nothing– not one choice you have made in the name of love– will be wrong.
Each relationship, regardless of whether it “succeeds” or “fails” brings to us an understanding about ourselves that we never could have had otherwise.
In the moments when we are in true alignment with our hearts, these voices do not speak.
Chapter 21: When We Harm Instead of Love
If you have inflicted abuse onto another, then you too have suffered abuse. There is no separation between you and the external. You will feel your actions rippling through your very tissues. We are not separate.
The larger the struggle, the larger the insight at the end. The more painful, the more grace, compassion, and wisdom will be poured into your heart.
Chapter 23: Sit Awake Before The World
In the end, all you will be truly left with is how much peace you gained, how much peace you found within you. This peace will carry you through your life– no matter the praise, no matter the critics, no matter how the world takes form in front of you.
No matter the scenario, truth will find a way to speak. Listen, hush, quiet. You already know this in your heart of hearts; you have the power to surrender yourself to the gentle current of life.
Life is not fully lived, until you have freed your heart from hiding.
Nothing is as dark as it appears, for somewhere within each of us is a heart calling us home.