Breathe and Let Love Lead

By Holli Sharp,
Science of Mind Magazine Editor & Creative Director

That was more challenging and draining than I anticipated. Energetically, changing our beloved magazine to a double-issue format felt heavy. I know it's the right choice for our future, but it was hard. I had to let go and trust, again.

I’ve been working on the magazine monthly for almost 10 years. It's a blessing I don't take for granted. This is the 112th issue I’ve touched. I always feel a certain amount of pressure because I know what this magazine means to you, and I don't want to let you down. And I apologize for the times I have.

I’ve worked in deadline-driven jobs for almost three decades. When I came to CSL, something shifted in me that I still practice today: I breathe and let love lead. I know it won't be perfect. And I know I'll always do my best in any moment. Sometimes that won't look pretty. And it's OK because ultimately, love makes no mistakes. …

This first double issue is packed with useful insights for integrating unconditional love into your thoughts, actions and emotional reactions to outer circumstances. Peace and love start within, and it's powerful to know you can call on the Eternal Resource at anytime. Just breathe and know It's always by your side.

Every longing and yearning we have ever had, every secret desire of our soul and every constructive ambition is but a whispering of this Power, assuring us that we are one with It, that we are a manifestation or personification of It, that we are a center in It.

— Ernest Holmes, “10 Ideas That Make a Difference,” page 45 

Embrace a Community of Love

In a wide-ranging conversation with Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, writer bell hooks pondered the nature of community and the role of love in creating a community. She wanted to understand why it seemed people were moving away from love and how to move our society back toward it.

Thích Nhất Hạnh opened by describing his own community. “In our own Buddhist sangha,” he said, “community is the core of everything. The sangha is a community where there should be harmony and peace and understanding. That is something created by our daily life together. If love is there in the community, if we've been nourished by the harmony in the community, then we will never move away from love.”

He added that we might lose this focus if we always look outside ourselves. “That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves,” he explained. “This is, I think, the basic thing. That is why we have to go back to our community and renew it. Then love will grow back. Understanding and harmony will grow back. That's the first thing.

“The second thing is that we ourselves need love; it's not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can't expect that love to come from outside of us.”

hooks delves into the concept of community in Western societies, saying, “I think that we best realize love in community. This is something I have had to work with myself, because the intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It's not community-based. … I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community.”

The challenge then is to learn to live as a community rather than as individuals. And to do so in love. “I think this is the love that we seek in the new millennium,” hook adds, “which is the love experienced in community, beyond self.”

—Excerpted from LionsRoar.com. Read the full conversation at https://www.lionsroar.com/bell-hooks-and-thich-nhat-hanh-on-building-a-community-of-love/.