Universal Love
The Backstory

This is the description of the process that I went through specifically to experience Universal love, which opens us up to a way of being where we are just a container for the Universe to express itself through us, rather than something that is actively doing something in the world.

What I Went Through

Awakening is a process that we go through together, it is not something that we experience on our own.

We only exist in our connections and by connecting with each other in news ways, this is what allows us to open to new parts of ourselves. Unless this new part of ourselves is loved, or received, by someone or something, then it doesn’t really exist in this moment – it is more like a blue print of possibility for the future.

Meditation teachers and gurus teach us new ways of being that they have opened up in themselves by following the practices that have been passed down through traditions.

When someone breaks the mould, they have to have accessed some kind of mystical relationship with life or experience in order to cultivate a new or different depth of experience. I was given an insanely intense dose of this mysticism.

I went through a process that led me to experience the Universe as being able to listen to me and me being able to listen to it.

My whole life became a prayer where every tiny detail was a sign or something meaningful for me to listen to.  I had a lot of deeply insightful, moving and hilarious conversations with the Universe itself. Whether you can believe this or not, the results of the clarity and depth of experience that this has cultivated in me are staggering.

I never really resurfaced out the other side of this experience, I just went deeper and deeper into it until I was totally immersed in the meaning that is baked into every drop of the Universe. That is where I live my life now.

The process of connecting with the Universe in this way allowed me to open to a Universal level of love, which meant I was able to reach the parts of experience that other people wouldn’t have been able to connect to. It freed me up from the limitations of what had been done before.

This all sounds very beautiful but it was mostly integrating shadows that had previously not been integrated in a human. It became a tour through hell; visiting all the darkness of humanity and the Universe. I was repeatedly swamped with unimaginable darkness, while every shred of anything to hold onto was ripped away from me again and again.

It was indescribably awful and if someone offered me the choice between certain painful death for me, the entire Universe and everyone in it or having to go through half of what I went through again, I would choose the death with no question or hesitation.

If I felt that I had any free will in the process, I would have undoubtedly committed suicide. It was too much for one human body to go through and one of my deepest desires is that no-one ever has to go through anything like that again.

Spiritual Practice

This process has, however, opened up a new way of being in me that has some overwhelmingly positive aspects to it.

Part of this is that, because I know every shred of my experience inside and out ,I can help people understand and connect with their experience better. Including all the most challenging aspects.

This process of teaching and guiding has been an insightful process of integration for me – it is through guiding others that I have had the opportunity to meet myself and understand how my experience integrates back into humanity and reality.

Truth is not something that belongs to one person, it is something that arises in each moment and in relationship between things and people. Understanding this is important for coming into relationship with the world in a meaningful way.

Fixed hierarchies in spiritual practice get in the way of this. As soon as there is a fixed hierarchy, it creates a pyramid scheme where, rather than sharing what feels meaningfully true being the guiding force, people are enforcing the fixed perceptions that maintain their status in the system.

Any spiritual tradition or religion that uses a fixed hierarchy as part of its delivery is inherently hiding truth through this process.

It can still be very good for keeping practices alive, but it is not so good at liberating people into the real truth of experience. These traditions essentially create clones who move up the pyramid scheme, rather than whole beings who can be present with the full  force of reality as it is.

Hierarchies can be useful but they need to be able to be flexible – i.e. based on the situation and what feels most supportive in that moment, rather than based on a person’s fixed status.

Part of opening to this Universal Love is seeing through the dynamic of this and being motivated through compassion to call it out. To create a world where spirituality is about inviting people to step into their own experience and give them space and support to explore that, rather than about them having to adopt a fixed identity to fit in with a belief system or community.