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Friday, December 11

Our dear, dear friends. ❤️ We offer our words today with a necessary trigger warning: death shows up here, in both of our writings. It is wrapped in love, and love abundant.

lightward.com/newsletter

 

“I love you”

In my dream, he was dying. I had slipped a man a fatal injection (it had to be done, to save the world, you see), and as he was lying there on the ground, suddenly he was Abe. And when he realized what I had done he was pissed, briefly and intensely (understandable), and then he looked up at me and realized that his time was limited. And he dropped the anger, instantly, and in its place there was only love. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you…” He paused, sensing that he was beginning to go. He half grinned, half grimaced, shook his head to slow the oncoming cloud, looked up at me and repeated, earnestly, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love—”

I couldn’t take it. I woke up, sobbing.

The night before, I vomited leeches.

Something is opening, loosening. I don’t think I realized that I had built up these layers of resistance, these filters dulling the signal as it moved from my heart to my expression, from my senses back to my heart. But they are beginning to seriously lift.

What’s most clear in my memory is that Abe-in-the-dream immediately chose love. When there was time for anger, he allowed it, but suddenly there was no time left—and then there was only the only thing that mattered most, that mattered utterly: the love, the love, the love. I will remember forever that half-distracted grin as he registered and pushed aside his own failing consciousness, to lock eyes with me again and make sure that this is how we spent these moments, these last moments we had in this way.

“Inspired” doesn’t touch it.

This is how I want to live. With this unrelenting choosing, choosing again to hold the live wire of love, and to hold on tight.

The tears come easy, when I consider this, when I remember.

I choose this. I want this, badly. The last 24 hours have felt tender, like new flesh—not raw-as-in-bleeding, but raw-as-in-I-can-feel-everything.

And, to my surprise, it feels like relief. I didn’t realize how tiring it has been, to resist my own flow, even if only a little at a time. It is a relief I can feel, bodily, to drop all those layers of resistance at once and to lie open, open, open, allowing all, feeling all. And I feel like I can feel what’s coming, too, in a way that feels new—there’s some new sense opening, and I can hear it calling, though I do not yet know its tongue.

Today is Abe’s birthday. There is no better gift I can give him than this thing I think I asked for at some fundamental level, beyond thought: this opening, loosening, free-en-ing sense of being. We can only love others as much as we can love at all, and this love (how is this possible) feels more present, more itself than ever before.

I haven’t really stopped crying since yesterday. I don’t ever want to stop.

 

Wellness, for you
and for me

Hello fellow breathing humans! Here’s your weekly reminder to slow down and breathe. This week, try inhaling and exhaling for 6 seconds, each way. Here’s something neat—one of my clients suffered from a mild case of insomnia for many months, and breathing before bed helped her fall asleep faster! She would literally stay up most of the night, and now she falls asleep within 5 minutes. This gets me so excited! Another friend posted a meme saying how their eyes are open all night only finally close with an hour left for sleep—the alarm rings and it's so hard to get up. I encouraged them to, while laying down, inhale and exhale for 5 seconds at a time, focusing their attention solely on the air coming in and out of their nose. They reported back: after a short time of breathing like that, they immediately felt a lot sleepier. Try it if you are feeling anxious before bed or simply want to ease into sleeping. Breathing like this really helped me in the beginning of the pandemic when I was struggling to sleep for the first time in my life. Breathing allowed my mind to calm down a bit and before I knew it, I noticed my body feel less tense and my mind more peaceful.

Celebrate (trigger warning: death)

I’m 31 today! Woo! I LOVE my birthday. I love seeing my friends and being showered with their love, hearing affirmations about how I’ve impacted their life or the things they appreciate about me—it’s so inspiring! I just got done watching 60 videos from friends from near and far, sharing their words of love for me on my birthday—it was SO MOVING. I feel so loved.

My birthday! It’s a day to really remember how incredible the gift of life is. I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before but I often think about how mind blowing it is that the chances of being born are 4 trillion to 1. Yes, you are one in 4 trillion. YO, FRIEND—THIS IS SUCH A GIFT! Do you feel it? Do you celebrate it?

I also love my birthday because I LIVE to celebrate. Life throws enough random sad, tragic, bad things at us so why not spend the rest of the time creating experiences that we can fully sink into and celebrate? My mom died when I was 22. It was March and I had just gotten home from a transformational community service trip around the United States with an organization I helped grow at my university and across the US. Those trips, called The Pay-It-Forward Tour, left participants with immense amounts of hope and optimism about themselves and the future of our world. I credit a lot of how I operate and move through my life to this incredible organization that I was a part of during my formative years. I felt on top of the world. Then I got the call that my mom had a brain aneurysm and was on life support, and I was told to bring my suit for the funeral.

How could this be happening to me? I’m so young—how am I going to live the rest of my life without my mom? I was holding her hand when she took her last breath. In that moment I promised myself, and her, that I would never take this life for granted. That I would celebrate every day I’m alive. She always celebrated who I was—from the times I dressed up in her nightgown dancing and sang to Selena to the last conversation we had on the phone where she expressed her excitement about me receiving an award from Bill Clinton. Her celebration gave me courage to do the things that scared me, and it still does to this day.

My life changed that day. I have spent the 8 years that followed diving deeper into my purpose, into exploration, joy, and freedom as a human being with a sense of celebration and openness that I stepped into with her passing.

So, I celebrate. I celebrate the opportunity to breathe and love and grow and fail and fear and look and feel and sense and taste and explore and wonder and make and dance and LIVE. I celebrate knowing that I have the ability to create the reality I live in, every single moment, through my focused attention on transforming my thoughts into ones that are productive and hopeful. How can I not? I know death, and that makes me know LIFE. And while life will throw us things that we are not ready for, like it did for me, we have an opportunity to experience it, then learn and create something from it. And I’ve chosen to create a life so magical, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My invitation to you is to notice all the things about you, in your life, in your now, and celebrate the shit out of all of it. Because, friends—we’ve been gifted this incredible life and it’s worth. celebrating.

I believe in you, fully!

-Abe, the birthday queen x

 

Things we’re making

  • Empowered Human Academy, a podcast. Each episode, a new exploration into what it feels like to step into the power that is intrinsically, ineffably yours.

  • A Perspective of Joy, a coffee table book. Each page, a photographical communication of joy, and a written description of joy manifest.

 

We love you, we love you, we love you. :) Thank you for being here.

Lightward Inc, 1321 Upland Dr., PMB 11999, Houston, United States

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