Right now as I write this, I am perhaps more connected to all of you that take the time to read this than I have ever been before when I write an article. There is love, there is presence, authenticity, and gratitude.
There is love and gratitude for you, even though we may have never met. There is love and gratitude for the natural world around me, as I listen to the birds of spring light their song unto the world as it reawakens. There is gratitude for the return of warmth and sunlight as winter fades and spring blossoms. Gratitude for the incredible opportunity that I have to share openly with you because of the miracle that is the Internet. Gratitude for every single person in history that has brought our species the opportunity to connect and grow together. Grateful for myself, my light, my experience, my truth, and my overflowing love in this moment.
That is where I am writing this post from. For you. For me. For the world.
This last 24 hours, I have experienced the type of love that changes lives. I want to share how it has changed me.
I am deeply in love with an incredible woman, and our relationship has continued to grow deeper and culminate in moments of great awareness. This love opens my eyes. I am grateful to her for her presence and influence in my life.
Being the person I am: focused on growth, on the future, and on achieving the dreams I have for myself, can lead me to get lost in the future. I know I’m not alone in this. I feel that everyone gets stuck in their planning, their achieving, and their problems. When I am lost in the future or the past, I am lost to the beauty of this moment and I am lost to the potential connections that I am a part of. Something brought me to a place where I was suddenly open to the Now.
What Happened?
Last night, love opened me to the power of the Now in a way that I truly hadn’t been before.
I had been projecting about the future saying, “I can’t wait to look back on our lives, on this love, and see how beautiful it was.”
The loving, beautiful, wise, graceful, and authentic woman I am in a relationship with said, “It is beautiful now.”
“I can’t wait to look back on our lives, on this love, and see how beautiful it was,” I whispered to her.
“It is beautiful now,” she responded.
Did you catch the degree of not-presence in my statement before she pointed it out? Even in making a vulnerable and open statement of how I look forward to a future with her, I separated myself from the present moment, and wasn’t able to fully experience the beauty of the moment I was in.
Until she kung-fu’d me with that amazing and wise statement.
The beauty is here and Now. There is no waiting or looking back nostalgically, and there is no need to. I suddenly felt these amazing and beautiful emotions well up from this source inside me that had always been there that I had not been connected with. Tears of joy and ecstasy and beauty flowed out the corners of my eyes at the truth that I had just found. I knew that the beauty was Now. I grokked her, I grokked us, and I grokked the beauty and fullness of love.
The Effects
That moment was ten hours ago as I write this. That now still is. That now is, was, and ever shall be.
As I experience that intense connection and love, I am overwhelmed by three things:
Giving Back.
The first is that being filled this fully by the beauty of love and the beauty of this present moment, I cannot keep it to myself. I need to share this with the rest of the world, whomever I can get to listen to me. This power and presence and flow is so much more than I am as a person. Love is what connects all of us and brings us all together in fullness. Love is the medium of oneness. Grokking is loving the world enough to say with an open heart, “Thou art God,” recognizing the beauty in every moment and in every being. I am overwhelmed by this desire to give, to share, and to love fully all that I am able.
Pain is not in the Now.
The second is that it finally has hit me how much Eckhart Tolle had it right in his amazing book, The Power of Now – most, if not all of our pain in life, comes from not being here in the Now. From being wrapped in our life situation instead of open to the beauty of the world, the beauty and experience of love, and the knowledge that even though our life situation affects us, it is not this Now that we are in. Our problems, our bills, our futures, our worries, anxieties, and issues are not us and they are not part of this Now. They are separate and they are a barrier to experiencing the full flow of love in the Now. I believe I have had my first taste of the Now in being exposed to the beauty of love and the incredible power that it has. I am more open to my light than ever before, because I know that my light is here now.
The world is in needless pain.
The third impact that overwhelms me is an intense sadness and empathy. As I experience love right now, there is an awareness of the great pain of the world. Not just in the hunger, poverty and injustice in the world, but in the pain that we cause each other. That pain that comes from a hideous not-love. It comes from the acts we commit “in the name of love” that are truly jealousy, anger, lashing out, manipulation, and abuse. I experience sadness around the fact that so many in this amazing world are NOT open to beauty and love and the Now. There is sadness that for so long, that even in the closest and most open of relationships, I was separate from the Now.
Please Share
I don’t know what sharing all of this means, besides that I feel called to share. I don’t know what impact it may have, besides that I hope and pray and love that my story of awareness may somehow open your eyes just a small amount, bring you one millimeter or all the way into experiencing this intensity. I know that in the end, this experience of intense awareness and love is something that I will have to work at in order to be in again this fully. This will fade and be an echo. The experience and memory and footprints I’ve made in getting here are there for me to follow again, and I invite you to find your own path to being fully present in the Now and to fully experiencing the overwhelming joy that is love.
Please, share your own experiences here in the comments. Everyone that reads them will be able to share in them and to grow from them. Your life is beautiful, and you have an impact on those around you. Share with us, and let us grow with you.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Jonathan,
I like this post man. You have lots of good abstract content. I found myself wanting more personal narrative and disclosure. Your concepts are solid and I really appreciated that you shared an intimate moment between you and your partner as a means of rippling your gift throughout the universe.
Many thanks!
Clinton
Clinton,
Your feedback is appreciated brother. I hear you in that you want more narrative and disclosure. I feel that the concepts are solid as well, and the best way to strengthen the communication around them in the future is going to be to give examples from my own life and stories from others that I come across.
Thank you for the inspiration and for the motivation to give more. I am so grateful to know what connects and what is feeling more abstract.
Much love,
Jonathan
so cool to get tweeted, then be able to come in and get the whole content… beautiful. Breathing is what gets me present to the power of NOW… like, NOW, I'm breathing… when I lose presence of the breath I'm in my head, in some faraway land of fantasy… then the breath brings me home. Amazingly I sometimes lose that presence for days… makes me wonder…. what was I doing, where was I?
I can relate to not knowing where I’ve been. I just wrote about it coincidentally in my latest post on The Pain of Should (http://bit.ly/9bCUG7). It really struck me how much my “idea” of what I should be doing (externally applied) was affecting my presence in the moment. Once I acknowledged and owned my experience of it, I felt a flood of emotion and return to presence. I was even able to breathe more fully afterwards.
Thank you for all your sharing here Dale! I think a good word for “What were you doing” is “Noodling” Gotta use your noodle.
I can relate to not knowing where I've been. I just wrote about it coincidentally in my latest post on The Pain of Should (http://bit.ly/9bCUG7). It really struck me how much my “idea” of what I should be doing (externally applied) was affecting my presence in the moment. Once I acknowledged and owned my experience of it, I felt a flood of emotion and return to presence. I was even able to breathe more fully afterwards.
Thank you for all your sharing here Dale! I think a good word for “What were you doing” is “Noodling” Gotta use your noodle.