BEING IN LOVE!

I wrote this back in July for the Berlin magazine, Sein, and just now came across my original English version. So here it is.

To be present is all that really matters. Without it, our being is accidental, uninteresting, uncreative, unsafe and unloving. When we are really present to what is happening here and now we experience life with a kind of brilliance – in both senses of the word. We sense and feel everything vividly because all our receptors are turned on and tuned in to all the nuances that this moment contains. And we can play, respond, create and work brilliantly because when we are totally present we are one with all our personal resources and talents. We are unconcerned with all the stuff that keeps us otherwise preoccupied. Our genius – and we all have one – can come out and celebrate, which it does by being brilliant!

When we come out of our preoccupations into this state of total presence, we are also in love. It cannot be otherwise because our heart is an integral part of our totality. To be here now is to be in love. It manifests in the way we make love with our beloved, of course. But also in the way we greet a friend, or say thank you to a shop assistant, or dig the garden, take the dog for a walk, listen to music, play the piano or tennis or the fool. It is even there in the way we disagree with a colleague at work or do menial household chores, face impossible predicaments and deal with death. Our presence expresses itself as a lightness in our being that celebrates life’s blessings and can accept with grace life’s challenges. When we are, our love is. And all of this is why we love people who are truly present. When asked what quality they most desire in their man, women again and again say, “Presence!” Of course, it applies also the other way round, and all ways round!

When I was going through the darkest passages of my life (you can read about them in my book next year!) what saved me were the people who showed up, who REALLY showed up, because they met me with their being. They loved me. Not molly-coddling and “there, there, everything will be fine!” but real love - presence that cared for what I was afraid of in myself, that loved me before I could love myself. The first time it ever happened changed my life for ever and is why I do the work that I have been doing for the past thirty eight years – creating the space in which people can open and awaken into BEING. By being loved, over and over again, I learned gradually how to love.

When I came up with the name THE ART OF BEING for my work, back in the eighties, my heart was less open than it is now. My workshops reflected this. They were much more confronting than they are now. Like the participants, I had to fight my way into being and loving! They were wild happenings and what made them precious was that always, finding our way into being, we found the love too. My workshops were my teachers as well as my vocation. But the love was a precarious thing that came and went. I was still too afraid to stay open to everything going on in me – too many childhood wounds still pulled me back into fear, and fear closes the heart as it closes so much of our inner being. I would fall back into fears I thought I had grown out of until they seized me by the throat and shut me down again. I remember how naively sure I was, the first time all the doors opened, that I was open and awake for ever. Then life showed me how much I had to learn, how much I had still to befriend in myself, with more than a little help from wise friends.

The other day Inanna, my eighteen year old god-daughter, said to me, “When I come to your house feeling stressed out, I always become peaceful and relaxed. I feel so easy here… actually it’s not your house. It’s you!” It was the sweetest recognition of what my life is about - to create an ambience in which people come to love who they really are. My work, The Art of Being, is to catch the moments when they don’t, and to find ways to help them wake up and love being here, anyway. Death, sex, relationship, childhood wounds, soul retrieval – no matter the workshop - they are all one journey into being here now, being in love.