New Work: Spring Blooming
24x36 Ink, oil pastel, gouache, beeswax, acrylic on canvas.
Its all about those roots baby!
The most overlooked part of love is receptivity.
Meditation, energy work, and artistic expression are beautiful places to practice receiving.
Receiving love from yourself, for yourself.
Because if you can’t soften enough to receive love, you’re not only limiting your own life experience…
you’re also denying the people who love you the natural joy of giving their love to you.
Sitting down and becoming aware of how you talk to yourself, how you treat yourself internally can be the hardest thing. And here is the kicker, it is one of the biggest indicators of how well you’ll be able to give and receive love and how much you can enjoy your own self expression, in my humble opinion.
Lots of us humans focus completely on what and how and who we give to and measure love based on past experiences we've had. We receive based on being hurt in the past or what we think will happen, good or bad. We do not think about how we can work to become better at seeing and receiving the love that is being given.
We are often forgetting to ask if we are really able to receive with grace and kindness the love that is present in order to help it grow.
Letting others guide you, support you, even help restore your capacity to be with yourself in loving kindness (without attachment or fixing) can be a hugely powerful place to begin this softening.
And if you fight it, distrust it, or shut love out… Meditation is a great and safe opportunity to look inward instead of walking around blaming or projecting on everyone else.
(We love to do that, don’t we?)
The best place, and often the most challenging place, to begin is by creating safety inside yourself.
By being willing to look within.
By saying hello to what’s actually happening in there. To start to really see and bit by bit really learn to be friendly with yourself.
For some of us we do not believe something so simple can be so powerful.
For some of us, there’s so much pain that looking inside can feel uncomfortable and unbearable.
But here’s the good news:
I don’t believe there have ever been any meditation related deaths.
There are definitely meditation related jerks, the folks who treat meditation like a competitive sport and find new ways to torture themselves with it and who endlessly sit in their own ego sauce. But no fatalities that I know of.
What we do hear about are the stories of transformation.
Healing.
Resilience. Recovery.
Sometimes even the big E… enlightenment.
(Which, for most of us, shows up in moments and seasons, not one permanent halo. But that’s a story for another love letter.)
How you receive your own loving kindness says a lot about how you receive love from others.
This may be a good time to ask. How am I receiving love from myself and the people who care for me in a real way?
In other words is the relationship I am having with myself limiting the love I am able to experience with others? And can I take more responsibility for this part of the exchange?
Some of the biggest steps toward closeness that my husband and I have taken in our 16 years together have come from our commitment to deepening our own self awareness and practice.
Now, I do not want it to sound like we have it all figured out and we are always coasting on heavily meditated easy street.
We are not, we are indeed still very human, but our ability to continue to love, grow and support each others dreams in a real way is fueled by our commitment to our relationship with ourselves that we tend to by going inward and bringing our creativity and love out to share.
The key for us to keep choosing love and celebrating each other and growing has been to keep on choosing to deepen our practice of knowing and giving ourselves the space to know ourselves.
Through a commitment to growing our inner connection!
It sounds simple, almost obvious, but it’s surprisingly overlooked.
Unsurprisingly, love really thrives when each person is tending their own inner garden.
When we sit to practice, we’re practicing meeting ourselves.
Noticing what arises.
Learning how to respond and be friendly with ourselves, because if we can not be friendly with ourselves, then what the heck are we doing here? Maybe it would not surprise you how many of us really struggle with simple inner friendliness, but the struggle is real.
So much of learning to love is first unlearning habitual relentless, sneaky freaky, neglect or abuse of ourselves. woof.
With energy tools practiced in guided meditation we can learn to clear what no longer serves. Not just rely on our ability to think our way out of our old ways.
Giving our natural growth the space it needs, the light, the water, the soil.
When regular meditation and energy work become part of a relationship, friendship or romantic, individually each person develops a deeper capacity for safety, softness, honesty and presence.
From that place, we can truly receive each other.
And be received.
With love,
Jade
Take what you like, compost the rest.
"Wild Ride" 14x12 Ink, oil, beeswax, gouache, acrylic on canvas.
Get what you need weather it's with me or someone else who inspires you're deep freedom, infinite value, self expression and transformation! And if you know someone you think will love this letter...share it with them!
ps. If you have questions about a piece of art, Energy Work, or would like to book an Intuitive alignment session do not hesitate to reach out.
This space is now a Newsletter space called This is a Seed for Everything! Here I will share art, meditations, energy tools, psychic stuff, and ideas for growth, peace, and radical self expression.
It is written by my hands and brain, so forgive me, sometimes it will be filled with human mistakes. The only AI I use is to help with spelling and format, because I am not so good at the spelling and I am pretty dang dyslexic but I'm here writing my heart anyway :)
I plan to send this to you twice a month depending on the weather. This week the weather was just right to keep writing!
Love to see you stay, but feel free to go!
