Beloved

“A conscious relationship teaches us to treat ourselves and others as our only child. And to do it mindfully. It does not break the heart. A conscious relationship is as healing and life-affirming as an unconscious, old-style relationship is at times harmful and life-denying. The harmful effect of an unconscious relationship is that it keeps us so small, dependent on external circumstances for our happiness. More needs than gifts are brought to such an entanglement. But a conscious relationship offers the possibility of relating across the gulf of I and other all the way into the heart of our beloved. A conscious relationship allows us to remain conscious while in relationship. It’s a whole new ball game…

The Beloved is the context into which the wounded and dismayed may enter, as the ever-injured and uninjurable vastness embraces their pain and transmutes it to mercy…
The Beloved is neither a person nor a place. It is an experience of deeper and deeper levels of being, and eventually of beingness itself—the boundarylessness of your own great nature expressed in its rapture and absolute vastness by the word “love.” It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term “the Beloved.” The experience of this enormity we falteringly label “divine” is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and compassion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being—our greatest joy—but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within…

The Beloved isn’t what you know, it’s what you are. It isn’t anything you think. It is that in which thought floats. And that which goes beyond thought. It is the heart of being where pure awareness and pure love are indistinguishable. Your beloved is a thought, but the Beloved is the space in which that beloved thought floats...

To meet the Beloved we need gently let go of that which is unloved, judged, concocted from old impressions and old mind clingings. To let it all be healed into the innate vastness which lies just beyond our acquired conditioning. But we are so befuddled by the mistaken identities of our superficial conditioning that we recognize very little of what we have to share from our depths…

Just as few recognize their own nature as the Beloved, so many do not recognize that being across the breakfast table. Few are committed so profoundly to the heart that forgetfulness does not dull their recognition of their true nature, much less their beloved essential being. Most live their lives without much recognition of the enormity available in the shared spaciousness of being—the spacious ease, deeper than thought or thinking, in which we are always interconnected. And can now interact, able to aid healing at levels previously inaccessible. It is perhaps too much to bear to believe how much we may be missing, that we indeed may be the Beloved.

In a way I think there is something in the mind that says it is just too much responsibility. We are so used to our pain, so long trading comfort for known and recognizable suffering.
Many people suffer from relationship senility. The mind has become utterly fatigued from trying. Self-protection and an unwillingness to go further (resistance) have left us confused, insisting we understand. Many are burned-out and disheartened. The wounds of the past have scarified the heart. The mind has cramped closed. The body atrophied in hard-bellied distrust. But the feeling of loss, and being lost, eventually gets our attention and we see that no one can make us happy but us. And we begin to take responsibility. We begin to build the capacity to respond instead of react. And we focus on our resistance and recognize that relationship is work on ourselves.

Taking what a friend calls “the whole catastrophe of relationship” into your merciful heart and investigative mind so the next one will not be a repeat of the last one. And we commit to “a living dyad,” a consecrated relationship, a relationship to consciousness that recognizes the power of a conscious relationship. And work on ourselves, together. In the boneyard of all our previously unsuccessful relationships—from which we increasingly learned to successfully relate—we were working on that other person. Despising them for not becoming what we hated ourselves for not being. Persecuting them and ourselves in the shadow of our unresolved grief. But eventually we stop attempting to create, and simply allow, relationship. We begin to sense the possibilities and opportunities missed in the moments we closed our heart to another’s pain, moments when it was more important to be “right” than heartful.

Moments of unintegrated grief expressed in tones too loud for love. Recognizing that unclear intentions produce unsatisfactory results, we explore the painful recurrence of unforgiveness and resentment. The unfinished business, the passive aggression and aggressive passivity that continually define the separateness between I and other—the fears of our threatened self-image. The constant displacement of the present by the shadows of the past. The need to be wanted, grinding against the want to be needless. Conflict. Power games. The unwillingness to surrender. Exploring the charnel ground of relationships we felt did not “work,” we awaken as if from a recurrent dream, and relationship becomes what Buddha referred to as “the work to be done.” It means letting go at our edge. Moving out of safe territory into the unexplored and often deeply resisted. It means making a love greater than even our fear of revealing ourselves as unloved and unlovely. A love greater than our fear of pain.

When one commits to practices that clear the mind and expose the heart—such as mindfulness, forgiveness and loving kindness—what once seemed unworkable may well become the very center of the relationship. In those moments when the least movement is possible, the least resolution of our grief, the most minuscule movement is rewarded for its enormous effort. Our intention itself has considerable healing potential. The very willingness not to suffer or cause pain to another becomes the expanse in which healing and peace occur. The open space into which our loved one may let go. Making room in our heart for our own pain, we make room in our heart for theirs. And our process toward the Beloved becomes a reminder that we are all in this boat together.

As Kabir says: The Beloved is inside you, and also inside me; you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed. We are all struggling; none of us has gone far. Let your arrogance go, and look around inside. The blue sky opens out farther and farther, the daily sense of failure goes away, the damage I have done to myself and others fades, a million suns come forward with light, when I sit firmly in that world. I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken, inside “love” there is more joy than we know of, rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds there are whole rivers of light. The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love. How hard it is to feel that joy in all our bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail. The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love. With the word “reason” you already feel miles away. Kabir reminds us again that all relationship is with the Beloved. He completes his poem by saying that this work “amounts to one soul meeting another,” beyond life and even beyond death. That relationship is simply one being meeting another in beingness. That our unwillingness to explore unflinchingly what limits that meeting leaves us mostly unhappy. And that there is wholeness in a merciful awareness that clings to nothing and condemns nothing, that is simply a presence in which nothing obstructs the natural flow of loving kindness.”

~ Stephen Levine, Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path of Awakening
Stephen Levine is a poet and teacher of guided meditation healing techniques. He and his wife and spiritual partner, Ondrea, have counseled the dying and their loved ones for more than 30 years. Stephen Levine’s bestselling books A Gradual Awakening; and A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last are considered classics in the field of conscious living and dying. He is also the coauthor, with Ondrea, of the acclaimed To Love and Be Loved; and Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying.The Levine’s work is said to stretch from the most painful experiences of the human spectrum to the furthest point on the human horizon, from hell to heaven, from pain to ease, from our ongoing sense of loss to the legacy of our unending interconnectedness.