Even through the struggle

As I sat though my fourth chemotherapy treatment yesterday, I felt a rush of love for life as my dear friend Laurie and I talked about what we each felt most mattered in life. Having just lost her grand mother last week, she too came face to face with mortality and has been contemplating what kind of legacy she desires to leave behind. We laughed as we walked to the cancer agency, calling it the "spa" and acting as if we were just two girlfriends going for a a treatment, spending an afternoon together, reconnecting over coffee. And that's exactly what it became.

For the first time, I left chemo feeling inspired and renewed. I changed my perspective and started to see all the ways we're shown love. I felt it through my friend and her caring words, through the nurse that tenderly administered the healing medication, through the sun peaking through the clouds, in my baby's eyes and my husband's embrace. Even the food I ate seemed to whisper "I'm love". As Baba Muktananada said, "The world is as you see it, so change your prescription of glasses".

When you open to see all the ways love shows itself through out the day, you see it in every experience, even the ones that aren't so comfortable. Somehow, you're always given just enough strength to endure, just enough energy to do what is needed. Moment by moment we are being breathed- isn't that love?

May we open our channels to receive and give love, and may we cultivate a legacy of Love.

Even in the struggle, you are loved.

You are being loved not in spite of the hardship, but through it. The thing you see as wrenching, intolerable, life’s attack on you, is an expression of love.

There is the part of us that fears and protects and defends and expects, and has a story of the way it’s supposed to turn out.
That part clenches in fear, feels abandoned and cursed.

There is another part, resting at the floor of the well within, that understands:
this is how I am being graced, called, refined, by fire.

The secret is, it’s all love.
It’s all doorways to truth.
It’s all opportunity to merge with what is.

Most of us don’t step through the doorframe.
We stay on the known side.
We fight the door, we fight the frame, we scream and hang on.

On the other side, you are one with the earth, like the mountain. You hum with life, like the moss.
On the other side, you are more beautiful:

wholeness in your bones, wisdom in your gaze,
the sage-self and the surrendered heart alive.

- The Real Life, poems by Tara Mohr