Dear Readers,
Love. It’s one of the most asked about and sought after topics in life. In this issue of The Circadian Collective, we dive deep into a heartfelt question about finding love and what it truly means to be in a loving relationship with ourselves and others.
Let’s explore this journey together…
In everything we trust,
Sylvia
Questions
Q
How do I find love?
A
When I was in my late twenties, I fell in love with a wild heart. This man rocked my soul. We shared parallel spiritual paths, shared a birthday, and shared a community of friends in common. I loved him recklessly, fully, and we often fantasized about marrying and starting a family together. One day, he asked me to join him for a walk around NYC. It was late January. The wind was bitter cold, but we bundled up and wandered.
We went to visit Ground Zero, as 9/11 had just happened a few months prior, and sat together gazing into the deep cavern of scorched earth when he turned to me, and said, “I don’t want to be in a relationship anymore. Not with you, not with anyone. I need to be alone.” I was blindsided, totally caught off guard. I was frozen, unable to even respond. I watched as he hailed a taxi, got in, leaving me with a huge hole in my heart that matched the giant hole in the ground. I returned to my apartment, alone.
I had never experienced such a painful heartbreak. The pain was so great it radiated down both my arms. It was a Saturday night. I sat in my kitchen nursing a glum cup of tea, looking at the blackboard on the wall. I picked up a piece of chalk and wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” I looked at it and felt worse. I erased those words and then wrote, “F*ck Him”. That felt better.
Then I went to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I was in and out of bed, restless, angry, sad. When I finally fell asleep, it was nearly dawn. As the sun rose, I dreamt. I dreamt that I was on a big beach in Big Sur with one of my spiritual teachers, Gabrielle Roth. I could see her in the distance, looking into the ocean. I walked towards her, and when I got close by, she turned to me. She was holding a wedding dress in her arms. She extended the dress to me and said, “Daughter, it is time to dance a marriage to yourself.” I put the dress on and danced on this beach, like a Sufi, like a prayer, while she watched me, beating her hand on a skin drum. I married myself. When I woke up the next morning, my heart still felt tender but tender as if I had run a marathon and my muscles were in recovery. The healing had begun.
What I learned in this moment of terrible heartbreak is that the only way to find love is to be love. Love attracts love, love is love, not something you can find. If you could find it, that would mean that you don’t already have it and that is a lie. For me, it took having my heart fully and completely broken to know this.
To find love, know love. Know love in every single moment of every single day. Your spiritual practice is the practice of love. Practice loving everything. Start with the easy stuff, like loving a tree as you walk the dog in the morning. Loving your face as you brush your teeth. Loving your laptop, loving your phone, loving your shoes. Graduate with the tough stuff. Loving your nemesis, your thighs, the traffic. If you deeply practice love, you begin to radiate the very thing you are looking for. It can’t help but multiply like fertile yeast in spongy dough.
Another spiritual teacher of mine, Gangaji, always says, “The very act of protecting yourself from a broken heart is the broken heartedness.” I invite you to find love by being love, but also by letting your heart be broken again and again and again. Marry yourself, saturate yourself in love, and do not fear the broken heart. You are on one of the most sacred journeys of a human lifetime. Finding love by finding self love. See where the journey takes you—I promise it will be good.
