Being the ‘Love & Light’ friend

A consideration.

This letter is about life and love. 

For some, love is an end goal and for others it is the passage that must not end. We work towards it, we work within it. It’s much easier, in some moments of our lives, to not take the love and light friend seriously. Because “we cannot all be like that” or “we must be realistic”. 

I think about how there is no light without shadows and how love is deepened by discomfort, and then how this may have interfered with our collective misinterpretation of love and light.

To confront ‘love & light’ when we are sceptical of it and when living in light has been muddied by the compromise of getting by and staying obedient, is the work we’re all participating in, knowingly or unknowingly. I use ‘getting by’ as mindlessly going through the motions, preserving self and peace the ways we have been trained to. Ignoring ourselves which is ignoring each other. We stay obedient in simplistic and undetected ways: living in a modern society which devalues self-worth, one which cannot sell you love, versions of it, if you realise (remember) that you are love.

Many feel that the love and light rhetoric can be fuelled by some glaringly anti-love beliefs. I do too. Toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, detachment from emotional complexities, all of this, more. Some of this comes from misplaced though harmful intentions while others are extensions of capitalistic self-soothing which separates self from collective.

Being conscious of how this may influence our capacity and intentions in love is vital and not impossible if we keep a filter of love on, and refuse to take it off to be in office, to be an authority figure, a parent, a person in the midst of unlearning. The allure of being at peace, of heart-mind coherence, of creating new ways of being in love does not have to be superficial and it doesn’t have to belong to a select few.

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In its truest form, love and light recognises duality. The appeal of love and light for some is the absence of the ‘darker’ parts of self and living. It is why leaders in spiritual spaces are often found to be abusive or gaslighting those who put trust in them. It is also why some of you feel repelled by those who claim to be peace-seekers but are dismissive of real-life issues. Some years ago I came across the phrase ‘the dark is a fertile place’, a place of work and birthing and limbic mending/breaking/building. 

When light and love surrenders, it is a momentary pause, a call to sift and become familiar with the gifts of the shadow. And this is as valuable as the gifts of illumination: life force energy, vitality, source, creation and Creator. 

There is research that proves that our hearts are able and designed to influence each other. 

“In 1996, researchers at the HeartMath Institute discovered that when an individual’s heart is in a state of coherence or harmonious rhythm, it radiates a more coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment— and that signal can be detected by the nervous systems of other people, as well as animals.”¹

The continued research in heart-brain coherence provides knowledge about how the earth’s electromagnetic field and the heart’s electromagnetic field are forces for alignment. Coherence comes about by compassion and other elevated emotions which communicate with the heart, which regulates our body’s other systems and impacts us down to a cellular level. Tending to your heart is a social issue. Being present and open is a way to be in tune with your biology which wants to communicate love. The energetic communication of our day-to-day literally sheds light on who and how we are. It encourages deeper altruism or deeper scarcity. This means that regulating your nervous system and locating inner bliss is an act of collective wellbeing, which leads to greater unity as we build better futures. 

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POV: you are love & light trying to reach a world that scientifically needs it but you cannot because it’s cringe.

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“We have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice. Once we begin to replace negative thinking with positive thinking, it becomes utterly clear that, far from being realistic, negative thinking is absolutely disenabling”

- bell hooks, All About Love.

Suppressing the positive voice with one that appears realistic belittles our worth. It’s disenabling, as bell hooks writes, because it prevents true action (or responsibility as she explains). Being negative as a default is what this refers to. It blocks the roots of a love ethic and the knowledge that we are sacredly connected to one another. Because what is a love ethic that is not radically opposed to being made small while lovelessness grows? 

We’re outrageously in need of foundations that insist on love. I see this alongside how we live in a world that is more concerned with respectability politics than activating real change. My circle of friends, loves, peers in light work, inspire me because they seek to know love, and show me, and tell others. This is the love & light that keeps conceiving of ways to incarnate through us so we can get it right.

When I write about love and light you can replace it with the practice and the vow, or listening & unravelling, softening & revolting, self-governing & returning, reimagining & exhaling, sowing & sharing the seeds that will change us and beyond. There is much more. The most important thing is dispelling the myth that it has no place in revolutionising the way that we show up as beings who deeply care. Or that it belongs to only a few who are disconnected from the wider activism of reinserting love into the landscape of everyday living.

What if the love and light, the display of it, the way it sounds in the mouth and the way it lands in the conversation, the intent that it slips into the space, what if it is normality trying to nestle neatly into a world that has adjusted to being cautious of love and kindness? If we seek to truly decolonize ourselves and efforts for all, we would have to be unashamed of the love we want to be present, we would have to see how spiritual, and carefree, and embodied, and deeply vulnerable it is.

What if the love and light friend is you? You on the other side of rejecting the fruitless labour of hiding your loving side.

What if the appropriate beacon or container for love and light, is the body that you’re inside of, already light-filled, already fit to love?

Author, artist and activist Toni Cade Bambara encourages us to ‘make the revolution irresistible’.² I think about this concept and offer it in workshops where I can. We cannot want what we’ve deemed undesirable and shameful. Shame and love are not compatible ingredients for action. We need to feel emboldened in our genuine love ethics as this is how we’ll feel united to action it. 

A remedy: A practice of radical permission, as offered by

adrienne maree brown

and Sonya Renee Taylor, to liberate heart and mind.³ The act of being seen is radical when we’re used to holding ourselves back. What if we decide to normalise honoring true love and light? You can give yourself permission to not feel like less of a change-maker for wanting others to be loved by you. You can give others permission to do the same.

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Thank you, so much, for being here. Thank you for making space for this version of love to orbit your thoughts. I hope it resonated or opened heart and mind. Feel free to share in the comments with the community.

As ever, thank you to my paid subscribers for your generosity. The Life Is In Love With Me newsletter is free for all readers. Your support in keeping this accessible is always met with huge gratitude.

If you’re open to deepening your practice with writing prompts and aligned community, I’m sharing some prompts that I created for you and your community. I hope they deeply support you.

Love,

Amara Amaryah

1. Childre, Martin, Rozman, and McCraty, Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart. (via Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza. I highly recommend if you’re even slightly curious about understanding the relationship and workings of the heart and mind, chronic pain and our emotional and energetic bodies).

2. “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible” - Toni Cade Bambara

3. Journal of Radical Permission - by Sonya Renee Taylor and adrienne maree brown