It's February! A new month! Even though our calendar is a human construction to give order to our collective lives, we have had the good sense to link February to matters of the heart. While January, identified with bringing on the New, is not always traumatic (although the weather can be fierce), January 2025 has carried a harsh, chaotic, disruptive energy. Time to let it go. Personally, February gives me relief, as we turn to the Heart. The history of February as Heart Month has expanded from the one day religious celebration of St. Valentines Day, to a cultural celebration of Romantic Love, then reaching to friendship-and-favorite-people-kind-of Love, and now more recently (1964!), February includes a public health focus on self Love, expressed by cultivating Heart Health. While Love does have a "medical" relationship to the well-being of our hearts, today, I want to begin February with a call to meditation.
Why not approach this February 2, and the month ahead, from a spiritual perspective! Is "Spiritual Love" separate from all the other forms of love that humans experience? It's a good question to contemplate over the next month. When the world around you, or people, or even your own emotions, actions, or thoughts become unmanageable, meditation is a powerful antidote. It isn't always an immediate solution, yet in my experience, it rarely makes you feel worse; meditation has a way of "setting things right" inside. Heart ache of every type is eased, even if just a tiny bit. That little bit is the beginning of healing. That little bit of time that you disengage from the drama of life, to sit in Allness, or perhaps in the Presence, in Stillness, in Letting Go, even in what feels like "giving up", becomes a new awareness of Love.
My many years of meditation, with changing patterns and methods, has come to a point where I see that meditation simply feeds itself. By that I mean, there is not one way to meditate and meditation is not at all about technique. It is about stopping. In that sense, it is a form of disruption. Sometimes, the mind-body-spirit initiates a moment of stopping, but usually, we seemingly make the choice to stop, disengage in the moment, and enter in a space of freedom, or the space that for you, becomes meditation. Even the "being fully in the present moment" form of meditation, is a form of disengagement; we move away from the 10,000 things that demand our attention, to the one thing that is before us right now. Meditation finds us, no matter how briefly, and we can allow it to expand, by simply giving it our time and attention.
If Love is eluding you in this first week of February, concede all your chores as well as your grudges, and enter--even if only for a few moments--stillness, silence, "meditation". It doesn't matter what you call it, or what technique. Stop and breathe; let Love find you. Your heart will thank you. (Susan Nettleton)
for poetry: https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/.../DeSpirituSan/index.html https://outofcontextsite.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/light/ https://equallywed.com/wedding-poetry-series-denise.../ https://allpoetry.com/Love-After-Love