76/ transcending all conflicts

all problems are the result of a lack of love

“Love” (conflict and reconciliation) by Alexander Milov at Burning Man 2015, the year I first attended

Love is the only answer to all our problems.

It transcends gender, race, politics, opinions, beliefs.

It transcends everything.

Thanks to some recent challenging experiences around the emerging community of neoslife, I have realised that neoslife at its core is really about one thing:

How much can I love.

How much can I love in the face of disagreement, ego, separation, judgement, conflict and adversity.

The question is not am I right.

The question is how much can I love.

This is not an airy fairy spiritual idea but a very real day-to-day challenge to be fully embodied.

Talk is cheap.

If I truly want to change the paradigm, I have to love no matter what others think, say or do.

This is the challenge.

To unconditionally love all the time and everyone.

I don’t have to agree with you but I can always chose to respond with love.

Love transcends all boundaries.

It might be the hardest thing to ever ‘do’ and it’s also the most transformative.

I pledge that I will embody this to the best of my abilities.

I thank everyone that challenges me and shows me where I need to learn to love more.

You’re all my teachers and I bow to everyone of you for showing me my wounds so I can heal them.

I see you.

I love you no matter how much it hurts sometimes.

We can create a beautiful world, a world that the world has never seen before and cannot even imagine yet.

That’s how powerful we are.

All we have to do is to love a little more, a little more and a little more.

So that’s what I’ll do.

Every day a little more.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Thank you for being patient with me.

I see you, I thank every one of you.

I’m deeply grateful.

I truly love you.

What does this mean?

After a magical retreat earlier this month, I had a number of challenging experiences with team members and participants.

Picture of our first community day at the end of our first retreat on the land.

Taking time to deeply reflect on these exchanges, I shared the above message in the neoslife WhatsApp group here.

My previous perspective was that all (individual and global) problems are due to a lack of consciousness, of self awareness.

However, these experiences have helped me see that there’s a simpler and clearer way to put this:

All problems are the result of a lack of love.

Whatever is seemingly done to me is a product of my perceptions, conditioning and ultimately my unhealed wounds and at the same time a product of the doer’s perceptions, conditioning and ultimately their unhealed wounds.

Whatever we say or do to each other is therefore never personal but simply a reflection of where we are at — both on the doing and the receiving end.

And where I am at is simply a function of how much I have come to be at peace.

As Rumi said:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Therefore, all interpersonal challenges are a result of a lack of love for oneself.

And as I cannot give to others what I don’t have for myself, a lack of self love expresses itself in how I perceive, respond to and treat others.

This is what all great seers taught us:

Love thy neighbour, enemy and everyone as yourself.

Though we might look at it like a reminiscent of ancient times and only applicable to enlightened people, this timeless wisdom is as valid and as important today.

And it’s achievable by every single human being.

I believe all of you readers of this newsletter wish for a more peaceful, more harmonious and more loving world.

The good news: We have the power to create it any day just like I have the power to create a fit and healthy body.

The ‘bad’ news: I cannot wait for others to do this work for me.

I have to create it and it starts with how I receive, respond to and treat others.

There’s no running away or hiding from it. I have to do this (inner) work.

Life is providing an infinite amount of opportunities for me to do this work.

How I receive, respond to and treat others cannot be dependent on how they treat me because then none of us would ever be able to start being more loving and hence the world around us and in extension the world globally would never start to change.

Love is and has to be unconditional. And the power of such love transforms anyone it touches.

My only job is to do everything in my power to be more loving and soon enough everything around me will be more loving.

That is the power we all have:

To transform the world.

All I have to do is to start myself.

And if not me, who?