When do you feel love in your heart? What does it feel like? Is it a tingly sensation all over? Does it feel like relief? Does it feel warm? Does it feel like you’ve dropped into a peaceful place? Take a moment to reflect on that for me.

Now what do you suppose takes you away from that loving feeling? In conversation with Father Greg from Homeboy Industries on the podcast, he mentioned something that really hit me in the chest about his work - “How do you infuse hope in kids whom hope is foreign?“ It hit me because I have spoken with countless people who, although most haven’t come from tumultuous backgrounds such as gang life, feel as though love and therefore hope, IS foreign to them. In fact, how is it that I myself, coming from a very loving home, and a very privileged life when it comes to loving relationships, have experienced that sense of hope and love being foreign? Like they have gone missing? I feel a little shy saying it considering I have had resources and people in my life that equate to incredible privilege compared to many, but I know it’s a feeling that many of you can relate to, at some point or another in your life. And it makes me curious - knowing that we come into this world as a little ball of love and hope - which I’m sure you’ve felt when in the presence of a baby, you don’t have to take my word for it - it makes me curious…

How is it that we forget who we are?

For me personally, I know that when I’ve felt the depths of despair it’s because I’ve made up a future that scares the living hell out of me. I’ve made up a perspective of myself that isn’t rooted in truth. The world that I’ve created in my mind is absolutely terrifying and I’m living in it and experiencing it as if it IS truth. And the tricky thing about those terrifying times? We only see in life what enforces the current movie that’s playing in our mind, so a terrible cycle gets created in what we’re thinking and what we’re seeing. One reinforces the other.

We all have histories full of experiences that act as different notes of the music being played through our mind, but the theme I notice in us all is that when it comes to those periods of our life, however momentary or long, the love we have for ourselves becomes conditional.

Until we feel fulfilled by what we see in our lives, we must withhold love from ourselves.

Not until everything is in some arbitrary version of perfect - we abstain from allowing ourselves to drop into the essence of who we are - almost as if that abstaining is punishment for not getting it ‘right’ in life. And yet, the more we abstain, the more we avoid dropping into our true essence, the more gas we’re throwing on the fire that is the horrific movie in our mind that creates that cycle of illusory hell that we feel we can’t get out of.

So how do we break the cycle? I understand it can be hard to see who we are at our core when the noise in our mind is loud, I’ve been there. So here are some thoughts that are straight from Father Greg’s mouth yesterday that I won’t even attempt to say more succinctly (though I will comment throughout from my own peanut gallery)...

“Move beyond the mind that you have” (yes)

“Make friends with your wound or you’ll be tempted to despise the wounded” (and it goes without saying that if you haven’t made friends with your wounds, you will be tempted to despise yourself… as the wounded... as illustrated by everything I said earlier... ok, carrying on)

“The goal is not to be a stranger to yourself” (this seems so simple but a point that we so often miss because we’re caught up in running away from a falsified version of ourselves in our mind)

“Fall in love with being loving” (couldn’t have said it better)

“Practice makes permanent” (absolutely) and…

“Ventilate the world with tenderness” to which I would add ventilate your own pain, your own fear, the delusions you have of your life... with tenderness towards yourself. As Father Greg so beautifully put, “Love is like water to a very dry sponge and the moment of connection of water to sponge is tenderness.” And finally, as he shared from his experience of creating Homeboy Industries, “you can create a community that is transformational with dosing one another with love and tenderness”, and I believe you can create an environment inside of yourself that is transformational by dosing yourself with love and tenderness. With that, eventually, you will allow yourself to see from a deeper place, all that you are, more permanently, and the implications of that are infinite.

So how are you feeling now? Do a little scan for me... are you feeling a little lighter? Warm? Is that a bit of a smile peaking through? Ahhhhh... there you are. God I love being here with you.

Sending love in all directions and I’ll see you next week~

Jess