Radiant Love

Dear Community,

In a recent meeting I was sharing about our logo and how it beautifully symbolizes the meaning of Dayaalu, “compassion in action”. I’ve always seen this image as seven hearts that connect to form a sun and create the feeling of radiance. Then I looked more deeply at the image and my perception of it morphed – as if it was a Rorschach test and I was suddenly seeing it anew. Instead of focusing on the hearts, my attention was drawn to the sun in the center of the image and I felt the light radiate off the page as it pulled the hearts together to form the whole image. Through this visual metamorphosis, I sensed a subtle but quantum shift in my insight into unity and the experience of compassion. The concept of connection is based on the premise of separation and that some action needs to be taken to create connection. Finding words to explore unity consciousness is not easy territory for the English language to travel through. I took a look at the etymology of unity and discovered something interesting. Though unity comes from the Latin root unitus, meaning ‘joined together’, it originated from an earlier root unus meaning ‘oneness’. Even in our language we see an evolution in the concept of unity from one that requires connection to one that is indivisible.

Thich Nhat Hahn introduced a beautiful word, “interbeing” that reflects a reality where we “inter-are” with one another and with all of life. This feels like true Love with a capital “L”. A love that is not an experience of connection with another but a love where we embody our interbeing in every cell of our body. From this perspective, compassion isn’t something we offer to another, but rather something that arises when we remember our oneness. When we forget, we slip into the many forms of suffering that are rooted in our fear of separation. It is powerful to remember that inside a human body we have over a trillion non-human cells. In fact, we have more non-human cells than human cells inside us and without them we could not survive. This is a perfect way to exemplify how ironic it is to create belief systems based on otherness. Unfortunately, most of us seem to have an automatic reaction to push away and create resistance when something is unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Awareness of these feelings can be an invitation to turn towards our resistance and with time come home to our interbeing. Our hearts hold a tremendous capacity to open to our oneness and release the knots that block this awareness.

With Love,
Sue