Have you heard the Eagles’ song Love Will Keep Us Alive? Released 30 years ago, it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the decades and yet when I listened to it recently, its beauty sent me sailing in an unexpected way. For many years, we’ve been hearing the outcry of the human existential song. Nuclear obliteration. Insufficient food supplies and clean water. Daily, more than 25,000 people die of hunger and more than 15,000 are children — when there’s plenty of food to feed all of us. Massive storms, floods and war. Rape, sex trafficking, genocide. Colossal use of pharmaceutical medication to combat anxiety and depression. Suicide… Repeat… Repeat. Souls are in despair, globally. This is not a pretty song. How could we not be afraid? Watching “the news” feeds our consciousness with fear. Stories are chosen that speak from fear. The reporter starts talking and Oh, no… Gasp. Begin shallow breathing. Lock your door. Get your guns ready. Stockpile food in your basement. Wear a mask and stand six feet apart. Isolate or die. Our mortality is being shoved in our face by the metacrisis we created. Our choice for fear over Love is killing us. Having spent college and the first 10 years of my career in the environmental field, I’ve felt fear up close. We’ve been abusing our life support system, choking her lungs and clogging her seas with plastic. Imagine choking and clogging the life support system in a hospital ICU. What do we expect? It’s scary. How about this — let’s stop running around scared of our own body’s death. To truly feel freedom, we must accept our mortality. When we do, a heavy weight is lifted off our chest. We see that life is now. We feel truly alive, filled with the beautiful desire to express our own unique self. If you haven’t yet “seen the Light” inside of you — the galactically gorgeous spray of divine stars glimmering in your being — this is your invitation to see it. Now! Ask Spirit, God, Love, for help. Get out of your mental head and move your body in a way that makes you feel totally alive. Before a job interview, I like to walk around at a cemetery and feel the mortality, the lives passed. It helps to ground and humble me. It helps me remember that the only time I’ve got is now. Love brings us alive while we’re living, and Love keeps us alive when we die.Let me humbly admit that I didn’t “get the memo” in an easy way. It took five years of horrid monthly migraines, a massive brain tumor, brain surgery and a near death experience (NDE) for me to expansively “see the Light” of the one moment we’ve got: the moment of now. Seeing death’s face up close helps us wake up to — Life! Life. Living! Being alive. My God, what an ecstasy laden existence this is. It is also an inconceivably atrocious “reality” we’re living in, so my dearest darling you, for all it’s worth… CHOOSE LOVE. Choose to see, breathe and live the LOVE you are. Love is the Light that illuminates darkness. Choose the joy that Love wants to feed you. Choose people who uplift and see you, who you uplift too. Choose to feel good, come together and enjoy Life while you’re living. If an extremely unfortunate situation greets us along with the last breaths we take, it isn’t a full basement of food — and it certainly isn’t a gun — that will give us Life. It is Love. When we need food for our children or a sense of safety, it is those relationships we’ve invested in with our time and attention, that will provide us with deep breaths of comfort. Alas, the Eagles were tuned in — that great thing called Love will keep us alive.
When we take our last breaths, it is a feeling of being loved that will make our final breaths peaceful, sending us into the realm of timelessness with sunlit, oceanic beauty swimming in our souls. And I’ll tell you from having “seen the other side” in my NDE, death is not actually death; what we call death is actually rebirth into a whole new landscape of Light. Here’s the song. Play it loud, let it in and with every part of your blessed, breathing being, feel it.
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Since summer, I’ve been overwhelmed. Moving through life as a single mother, stabilizing my financial landscape after a treacherous decade leading my family through nine moves, a divorce and brain surgery, all the while feeling brilliant ideas stream through me like a waterfall during a storm… Intensity, to put it mildly. Too many things to do. Too much, too much, too much. Overwhelm. I ask, How can I escape this battle happening inside of me… Sound familiar? I wonder where simplicity lives. My body reminds me that days are better when we start off with a hike. Morning comes. I hike up steep hills, letting my thighs revel in the blood that moves through them, letting my eyes be massaged by the grace of morning light on rolling hills. I feel relieved, then the storm comes again. I empathize with suicide. It’s not for me in this life, yet I feel like I get it. This human thing is literally insane. And it’s not just the war in Israel and Palestine-- It’s the war inside each one of us, including me and you. So again, I hike. I watch the fog lay God’s breath along the curves of Mama’s body. I see serenity. I keep climbing. My heart rate stabilizes. I feel calmer. I see other people walking up the hills and I imagine they are doing the same work. Feeling overwhelmed, wondering where peace really lives. A flock of small birds lands to rest atop an untrimmed oak tree. They seem to have answers. They rest. They choose peace. Not tomorrow, not overseas, but here in this moment. The only one there is. Oops. It hits me for the 10,000th time. I forgot that Now is the only moment. I forgot that the only place I can be is here, and I can only do one thing at a time. I remember the sticker on my bicycle that I’ve had for 20 years: Begin within. I remember wise ones saying, “Peace begins within.” This morning, a friend called from Vermont and shared about how her meditation practice is reminding her that the way she does anything is the way she does everything — that every single choice she makes has a ripple effect into the vastness of everything. And so as I climb this hill, admiring fog, I remind myself that peace begins with me. If I don’t want war overseas, I need to calm the war within. May these words invite you to join me. P. S. I’m taking a leap! After all, we live in an economy.
“Great writing is valuable and deserves to be rewarded with money,” wrote Substack. Not everyone enjoys my writing; all art is for some, not for all. Many of you have shared gorgeous words about how my writing serves you. Thank you. Last week, I turned up the volume in response to the passion streaming through me. Every single day, I get pierced as a “channel for Love” with writing titles and topics that want to be shared as gestures of Love for humanity. To support myself, I am now inviting readers to become paid subscribers — $8/month, $80/year or, you can join as a Founding Member of this “launch” moment, and pitch in more to help me leap from solid ground. I’ll continue to share all my writing every month with all subscribers. Being a paid subscriber helps to encourage me and support me, my children and my vision for a Love-based world. For today, that’s a wrap — in a fog-kissed, gluten free tortilla, of course. To My Precious Body, For weeks, I’ve been wanting to write you this letter. I knew you had been inviting me to see the cellulite on your thighs and the rolls of fat on your belly through loving eyes. I felt how it hurt you when I criticized myself for all those years of eating too much food and sugar. Then last night my greatest teacher lit a fire under my pen. As she reached for another brownie at bedtime, I yelled at her. That was it. It’s time to climb completely out of my cage of self hatred. Remember when I was 14 and I tore off magazine covers featuring supermodels, and taped them to my bedroom wall? Paulina Porizkova, Helena Christensen, dozens of them. Cindy Crawford was my favorite. I was tall and brunette like her. I thought perhaps if I was just a bit thinner, I might be as pretty as her. After all, these women got tons of attention for how they looked. That meant they were totally worthy of love — right? Years passed and I continued my path of overeating, especially sugar. Mint chip ice cream and rainbow-dyed marshmallow cereal offered a quick kick for my somber moods. When I felt lonely, the pleasure of one more piece of buttered toast gave my tongue and tummy company. I spent most of my life overweight, trying many times to exercise and eat well enough to be slender or even just lean. Once I crashed on my bike and fractured your jaw in three places, dropping from 162 lbs to 128, and boy did that get attention. People stared when I walked down the street. And the weight came back within months; I wasn’t done imprisoning myself through you. Twenty years later, in January 2021, I reached the end of addiction’s tunnel with the diagnosis of a massive brain tumor. You’d had enough. You’d reached your limits and were screaming at me. My neurosurgeon said, “We don’t know why the tumor is there. It could have been growing for 10 or 20 years.” My precious body, you told me why it was there. We have our story. It’s ours and it’s what I go by. I was killing you by outsourcing pleasure. Sweetness for my lips. One more bite. Another. Decades went by like this.I felt utterly hopeless in my dream of fully loving you. Would it ever work? Surely a child would offer miracles. Children are the original gurus. So when my daughter was born in 2013, I vowed to heal from addiction so I didn’t transfer my trauma to her. She’s nine now and has a healthy relationship with sugar. It’s balanced. She’s never been given sugar for her feelings. We talk about “strong body food” to help her be mindful. She eats cookies and ice cream with joy. Her body is lean. Her thighs and belly live without the guilt I grew up with. She was seven when I told her all about my struggles with sugar. When my tumor was diagnosed, I shut the door on food addiction. Now 14 months later, although my body feels better than ever, there are still stains of guilt that creep to the surface sometimes. A big stain surfaced last night. It was bedtime. There was one brownie left and my daughter wanted it. At bedtime?! When she’d already had one before dinner? No, no… that’s just not the way we roll. She asked me once. I answered, “No.” She asked me again. Annoyed by her repeated request, I firmly told her, “I said, No.” A third time, “Mama, but I really want another one…” Out came my full-on tiger fangs. I looked at her and yelled, firm and fierce, “I told you No… three times, NO!” Ouch. Dear body, the roar hurt my throat. And it battered my heart. I stood there in our kitchen, post-bath, wrapped in an orange towel, stunned. My daughter is the last person I want to show my shadow. For her to be aware of my story, its pain and sorrow — that’s fine. But for her to be on the receiving end of my unresolved grief — that’s out of bounds. She stood, frozen. Time stopped. And for the first time in her life, she simply stared at me. Seconds passed, her gaze stayed fixed on me and I couldn’t take my eyes from hers. I watched as her eyes became pillows of tears, her face full of tender, swollen hurt. Fear's ego in me was gone. I had fucked up; I was being so human; here we are. Being frozen in upset with the greatest Love of my life felt utterly potent. We held each other’s gaze until she could fully feel the hurt and I could witness the impact of my immature reaction. “I am so sorry, my girl. That is not the way Mama wants to be with you.” We stayed, gazing, as I watched one tear at a time spill from her precious eyes. She simply let me look at her and she simply looked at me. We were together. And as crappy as it felt to have yelled at her like that, my dear body, you knew that this moment offered sacred intimacy. “Can Mama tell you why I yelled like that?” She nodded, not ready to speak. My dear body, you spoke to me without words, drawing a picture of why I chose harsh tiger fangs over grace. “How does Mama feel when you ask me something once, and I answer you, and then you ask again and again? Do I feel happy about that or do I get annoyed?” She nodded. She knows. “That’s the first reason I yelled. I was mad.” Her eyes, still wet. “And you know that Mama has struggled with sugar and that I don’t want you to to struggle with it, too. You know Mama got a brain tumor and how scary that was. I don’t want that much pain for you, my girl. I was scared when you asked for another brownie.” She kept listening. My heart was humbled, softened, loose. There was nowhere on Earth I would rather be. Surrender spoke. “My lady, Mama wants to tell you something I haven’t told you yet. Is that OK?” She nodded, her heart still softened, calm and yet awake. “My sweet girl, even though Mama takes good care of my body now…” I showed her my belly. “I still have more fat than my body wants. It sticks around because of all the years I didn’t eat well.” I grabbed my belly’s biggest roll of fat to show her what I meant. Then I moved my bath towel to show her my thigh. “Do you know what cellulite is?” She nodded, no. “It’s these bumps on my thigh. It’s body fat. And Mama’s legs have it here because of all those years when I wasn’t my body’s best friend.” We were calm and communed. The moment was still. She listened intently as I shared my story with her. Then we hugged and went about our ways. An hour later, as I pulled out the vacuum from the hallway closet, I heard my daughter call to me from the bathroom. I walked in and found her standing at the sink with her head hung low. “Mama?” “Yes?” I responded. She looked me straight in the eyes, her face ripe with a fresh pool of tears, and said, “I like your body just the way it is. I don’t want you to be thinner.” Yes, I could have died happy right there. In the presence of the innocent heart of a child, 46 years of self-loathing slid off the surface of my skin. Cellulite formed on my legs because I, as an innocent baby, and then a child, and into my teenage years and further, couldn’t find my way to freedom. With every chocolate chip cookie I ate and every judgmental thought I chose that followed, I kept thickening the walls of my own prison. Perhaps some people don’t choose addiction to cope with their childhood trauma. Perhaps some people don’t create experiences of severe pain and near-death — whether consciously or subconsciously — in order to see more Light. I admire people who listen to their bodies' subtle cues and don't need to wait for a scream. I’m not one of those people. Or at least, I wasn't until now. For me, a path of gnarly physical rigor was painted in this Life. And now that I’ve unlocked my prison door and set myself free, I can see that you, dear body, have always been here for me. Impeccable in your communication, resiliently digesting and detoxing all the junk I stuffed you with all those years, surviving brain surgery and continuing to breathe. Today I give thanks for deepened empathy. With a big scar on my skull and lots of dimples on my thighs, I extend my whole tender heart to my billions of human sisters and brothers who dance with addiction. Cellulite, you are a call for Love. And yesterday, you were embraced by the innocent heart of a child. I am sorry for demonizing you all these years, when it was me who chose the prison I was living in. You weren't the "bad guy". My eyes for Love were closed.
Do you forgive me? Dear body, I thank you for being my teacher until we go to the grave. In this Life, you have always been one of my best friends. Words begin to escape me when I contemplate how different it feels now that I, too, am your best friend. When we part ways and you become rich food for worms and whales, may we still be in Love. Yours, Jessica Dear Teton Char,We share a friend. Andrea and I met when we were 14. You live near her now, in the Tetons. She tells me you asked how my brain tumor got there. You and I have never physically met, just as I never met your sister whose brain tumor eventually led to her body's death. But my heart mourns your loss. I honor you as a woman and sister. So I'm here to answer your question. When my tumor was discovered through an MRI, the neurosurgeon assigned to my case told me, "It could have been growing for 10-20 years." I named her Fidela. Somehow, to me, she was my friend. As was Dr. Lewis Hou, whose Buddhist nature shone through his eyes and silently said, You can trust me to get that tumor out. So when he offered the options: 1) We can do nothing. 2) Neurosurgery. 3) Chemo. 4) Radiation... My response to him was, "Let's go in. Let's get it out." Though Fidela was my friend, she wasn't meant to stay inside my brain. "We don't know why it's there," said Dr. Hou. That was fine. I didn't need him or western medicine to know. I knew why Fidela came. Right or wrong don't belong in this place. My story isn't "right" -- it's simply mine. In 2006 I did a workshop called It's All Made Up. Its lesson landed. We make up the story, the why, the reasons things happen in our lives. While science is useful, continuously, it disproves itself. Factual, material "realities" are consistently rewired, reworked, rewoven. Just like the human brain. Fidela was my body's latest and most effective attempt to get my attention. It was a piercing cry, a roar, a terrorized plead, a prayer from a body who knew she was worthy of being held by loving arms. I had a lifelong addiction to sugar and food. As a baby, my big feelings were met sometimes with EQ's tender, loving arms and gentle words. Other times, I was given sugar -- with no blame or judgment of my parents or others who would pass me "a treat" to soothe my cries -- I was given toxic and highly addictive pain killers called sugar. My brain had been wired by mine and others' choices, |
AuthorJessica Rios, Founder of Leaning into Light, was born with a divine pen in her pelvis. Her heart writes for her; Love is her 'religion'. A lifelong letter writer and a thought leader in Love, her blog is devoted to her greatest passion: illuminating the beauty of the human spirit so we all move closer to remembering that Love is Who We Are. Categories
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