Sorrow … that crippling, numbing, make-you-not-want-to-get-out-of-bed emotion.  There are very few emotions more powerful, or persuasive, in our lives.  Something catastrophic happens, and your world is changed … forever … there’s no going back.  You will never, ever, be able to be in the place you used to be … a place you might have loved very much.  Whatever it was that fills us with such depths of sorrow … was very powerful; something we don’t want to let go of.

We hold on to our past sorrows like a child seeking comfort from his blankey. Like Kahlil Gibran said (in my quote for meditation today, “Sorrow’s Shaft“), our greatest sorrows are the things we took the most delight in … the things we loved the most and invested the most in. We don’t want to let go of those sorrows. They are a link to the thing that was our greatest love, and so we cling to them desperately.

The problem is … this prevents us from EVER being in the Present.  We obsess about the Past, and then from that place we project our fears into the Future … and change everything about our lives in order to try and avoid such sorrow again in the future.

In fact, some sorrows can be SO deep that we end up avoiding ever going to that kind of a level ever again … for the rest of our lives.  If anyone comes along, and stirs those old feelings in you … the ones that have any kind of tinge of that old sorrow … you just run away from them, or cut them off, of block them out.  You still WANT a relationship, but you end up seeking out people who will NEVER touch the levels of that ancient sorrow … and thus you wind up in a perpetual string of failed relationships, or rejections … because not only does that person never touch those levels of sorrow … the also never touch that level of Love.

Sorrow is one of the primary roots of Fear … I tend to think of them as the Faces of Fear … the ways that Fear manifests itself in our lives.  Sorrow, when obsessed upon and not let go of, can be crippling (like Dodinksy said in his quote from today’s post for meditation) … and it is something that some people NEVER work through … they spend their entire lives crippled by this sorrow.

Ultimately, Sorrow is from the Past.  We end up projecting it into the future, and that is when it becomes a manifestation of Fear in our lives.  So you end up going back and forth; from Past to Future like a pinball in a never ending game.  The way to end this, is to come into the Present.  The sorrow you feel from that even in the Present is only residual … you might still feel it, but when you bring your focus to things in the Present all of that other stuff falls away.  Of course, it’s difficult to maintain that perspective … every smell, sound, sight, sensation, “pings” us back to that old sorrow … so then it takes dilligence.  It takes work … like Gautama Buddha said in the final quote for my post to meditate on:

“When I pulled out sorrow’s shaft
I showed you the way.
It is you who must make the effort.”

If you don’t do the work … you will be lost in a never ending game … a dangerous game that will affect the rest of your life.  This is not God’s will for you … God LOVES you … God wants you to be happy … and you will never be happy by hanging onto sorrow … ever.  Happiness is there for you whenever you choose to embrace it … in the Present, with God … there is NOTHING that has happened, or that you have done, that holds God’s Love back from you … only you have that power.

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Picture taken from Science Daily.

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Religion4All is an idea: that every human being (no matter their race, religion, sexuality, social status, lifestyle, or any other possible factor) is LOVED by God; just … as … they are.

We all are loved by God, and NO religion or person has a monopoly on it. Every single person on this planet is loved equally by God … SO many are cut off from God because they are told they don’t belong. God loves everyone … we ALL are beautiful creations … we don’t need to cringe when we hear the words “God”, or “religion”, or their judgments … God LOVES us all!

There is no requirement to change in order to be LOVED by God, or to LOVE God. God is LOVE, and LOVE is God … period. There is no one who God loves more than anyone else … there are only those who choose to LOVE more … to love God more, and consequently then to love each other more. In doing so, we grow closer to God … and know God.

By opening our hearts, and minds to God (free of boundaries like religion, or social trends); by LOVING God … we are exactly where we are meant to be. If we maintain that openness, never allowing any person or event to make us close our hearts, we will be guided by God to be who we are meant to be.

In that space of openness we can then live a life of LOVE, and be guided to where we are meant to be … forever in LOVE.

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