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 I was born, my father has worked in hospitals. As an engineer, his jobs were all about safety — making sure the machines worked well to keep people alive, prevent illness and infection. Now he’s almost 80 and we’re closer than ever. We talk or text every day. He sends jokes. I send photos of my daughter, his youngest grandchild, or concert videos of his cousin Oscar, who also spent childhood in the Bronx ghetto and now has four Grammys as composer and pianist of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. The NYC ghetto isn’t known for safety. My dad used humor to cope. It served him well and still does. Yet even though he’s lived in safer towns for almost 50 years, his brain is still wired with these words: Be safe. At least once a day, his texts say, “Be safe.” What does this really mean?It means his love for me runs inexplicably deep. It means he doesn’t want me — or my brother or sister — to die before he does, and he’s afraid of the grief he would feel if we did. He got a scent of this possibility in 2021 when I was diagnosed with a massive brain tumor (which, thank God, was benign) and was anesthetized for nine hours with my skull cut open. Perhaps the same fear surfaced when my brother joined the Army. All parents I know agree that losing your own child is the most awful heartbreak.
When my dad would say, “Be safe” in my 20s and early 30s, I sometimes found it annoying because it seemed to come from fear. With a bit more maturity in my veins now, and a lifelong devotion to Love as my “religion”, I see through its eyes and am filled with gratitude. Love knows tenderness. Compassion. How fortunate I am to have a father who loves me this much! Every day now — when I read a text that says, “Be safe” — what I am seeing is: You mean so much to me. There is risk and danger in the world that I can’t control. I don’t want to feel the pain I would feel if you died before me. I love you so much. P.S. Text me later when you’re home safe... and get a real job. My heart’s response back is: Dad, you’re the best. Keep those Bronx, New York jokes comin’ strong. I am vibrantly alive and I intend to live for many more years. My heart will break when your body dies, and that’s OK — I am not afraid of that grief. Love is what we’re made of, and you will live with me forever. Six months ago on a call with my coach, I was struggling with my relationship with money. And let’s not pretend financially wealthy people don’t have this struggle. Everyone on Earth can relate to this in some way, including those who are resource-poor and billionaires. My coach said, “You are rich in the most important ways.” For two seconds, I was surprised to hear his words. And then, I got it. He was addressing my scarcity perspective. He meant that I’m rich in the ways that matter most — health, friendship, communication, creativity, spirituality, community, self worth. The ability to breathe, eyes that see, taste buds to greet sweet potatoes and pomegranates, the freedom to dream-up and write about a world based in Love over fear. So why was I caught up in thoughts of scarcity? One of the world’s most respected thought leaders on the subject of money, Lynne Twist, said, “The money culture hijacks our lives.” Phew! Lynne is the author of The Soul of Money, published in 2003. What a relief to hear this, since I sometimes wonder, Does my fluctuating relationship with money mean I’m not “up to bat” in Life the way I should be? Did I do something wrong? It’s astoundingly complex. Our relationship with money, in some ways, rules our world. And scarcity mindset is at the root of the problem. As I continue this journey of consciously harmonizing my relationship with money, I try to remind myself that I am rich in the ways that matter most, and I am in good company — alongside billions of others on this planet who are also doing this work. How is your relationship with money? Do you have a deeply intimate connection, a sense of reverence, abundance and gratitude, in your dance with it? Yesterday I came across a free 5-day online course with Lynne Twist, called The Soul of Money. I signed up immediately and started listening. (There are now two days left with this free offering.) In her first share, she told a story about how she began fundraising in kindergarten, out of love for her sister. This was an early expression of her core life purpose: to serve humanity in finding financial freedom and fulfillment. Those of us doing the work to harmonize our relationship with money are engaged in a massive reclamation which is crucial for all of Life as we know it. We are reclaiming our innate abundance, which is colossally beneficial to our primary Life support system, Mother Earth. We are reclaiming money, away from toxicity and toward goodness. Lynne said, “Moving money toward the highest good is an act of Love, an act of caring, an act of the heart.”
I salute you for choosing to examine your relationship with money. It is a crucial piece of humanity’s need to greet fear with the only thing that can heal it: Love. I’m writing more about this in my book, Making Love to Fear, which will be published in 2024. |
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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