Investing Love

"In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die.Where you invest your love, you invest your life."
- Mumford & Sons, "Awake My Soul"

Over the past several years I have been learning about meditation, centering prayer, spiritual direction and mindfulness. The learning has been directed at the brain but has not traveled to the body. My spiritual director says that the greatest distance in the world is the distance between your head and your heart, and I have found this to be true, as all the learning in my head did me no good until I got really sick and had to embrace and practice it with body, mind and soul.

Meditation time is now one of my favorite spaces in the day, and one of my biggest challenges is fitting the two sessions in my schedule, while at the same time starting early enough to get to bed on time. Before the illness (BI) I rather dreaded meditation at my Just Faith meetings, and fidgeted through the twenty minutes. Now I go for forty and I am about to step up to fifty minutes, though I confess to cheating and using a guided meditation led by Dr. Joe Dispenza. He wrote the book How to  Break the Habit of Being Yourself, which I am hopefully using correctly to alter my brain and change my life's direction.

I get distracted often in meditation, by my still-aching head or by Daniel's wandering in midstream to ask for water. Often I start to fall asleep, or wander to the day's events, but mostly it works. Dr. Joe says "love yourself enough to do this," and I guess I do. Time to give control to my heart, and trick my head into thinking she got the better party of the bargain. I want to invest in myself and my relationships and shift away from desiring control and ego-strokes. It can feel a bit like War and Peace in here, but I'm betting on the home team.