6/27/2018 Lissa rankin's wedding vowsI choose you today.
I enter into this sacred union prepared to give my deepest commitment to making this marriage both a refuge and a sanctuary, but also a crucible for soul growth and transformation. I am here to walk this spiritual path with you with my blown-open heart, my overflowing gratitude, and the purest awe for the generous Force of Love that brought us together and gave us this gift. I stand here before you—raw—exposing all of my parts to you, fully in my radiance, but also sharing with you all the parts I might wish to hide. I choose to unconditionally love, accept, and become intimate with all of the parts of your Being, not only the glorious, powerful parts, but also the parts you might wish I didn’t see. I vow to do the same with all of my own vulnerable parts, taking the burden off you to be my everything and trusting that I have within me the love I seek from you. I offer you full access to all of my heart, not just my tender, gushing, ecstatic, open heart, but my guarded, traumatized, scared heart too. I promise to do my best to keep showing up and taking responsibility for my inner work when my traumas separate me from the field of love and the inevitable triggers arise. As an act of love that will protect our union, I also promise to call you out gently when I see your blind spots come into the light, exposing themselves so they can be healed and transformed. When our personalities collide, as they are sure to do, my commitment is to lean in when I might be tempted to run away, to disagree when I must and negotiate when it’s needed, to stand firm when this is what love does, and to let go and flow when love demands flexibility. When I feel tempted to withdraw, I commit to diving in and staying in the heat of love’s crucible, surrendering to the field of love as it transforms us. I intend to buffer these intense times by offering you softness, comfort, and reassurance when love needs to get this fierce and we both feel scared and insecure. I commit to diving into full intimacy with you, not just the intimacy they write love songs about, but the messy intimacy, the hardcore kind that doesn’t bypass, the kind that builds trust and requires almost impossible courage. I embark upon this mysterious journey with you, knowing that there is so much we cannot know and praying that we have what it takes to let life’s joys and struggles alchemize into an endless deepening of a love we cannot even imagine with the limitations of our primitive human minds. I have faith that we can handle whatever arises, as long as we make it our priority to both trust and be trustworthy. I enter this marriage, knowing that, by coming together with full devotion in the field of love, our sacred union is creating The Beloved, a third Being that is greater than you plus me, one that will be our greatest guru, should we be brave enough to bow in full surrender before it. I vow neither to abandon myself in service to our connection, nor to abandon our connection in service to myself. I promise to honor my sovereignty—and yours—as unique expressions of the Divine, but I also commit to moving beyond our separate selves and allowing this Beloved guru to guide us. I know we cannot promise each other forever, because the future is so uncertain and we have lost the innocence of pretending we can know what tomorrow holds. Let us commit to the unwavering field of love, while also staying humble in the face of love’s changing forms, which shift like nature. Let us resist pretending that we can know the form our love will take, but let’s dare to promise to stay in the field of love forever, even when our bodies fade and the drops of water we once were become the ocean once more. If we are honest, we do not know if we will choose each other for one today or 100 todays or tens of thousands of todays. What I know for sure is that I choose you today with a heart full of outrageous wishes and also the most delicate, quivering fears. It is my wish that every day, I will have what it takes to show up as someone you will want to keep choosing, today after today. It is my wish that you will do the same for me. I crave being fully met by you in true partnership. I dare to wish that my craving will be fully satisfied and that we will look back at the end of our lives with tears in our eyes and whisper, in awe, “We did it!” Yet I feel tender with my wild wishes. Hold me gently in the vulnerability of my wishing, my love. To wish is to risk disappointment and failure—again, after so many heartbreaks. To dare to love you fully means opening myself to a vulnerability that could wreck me. The more I love you, the more I have to lose and more losing you would hurt. But I will not guard against the possibility of pain, for to do so means armoring up, and how will we ever fulfill our dreams of intimacy if we armor up? Instead, I give you permission to break my heart, and I feel pregnant with the hope that you won’t. My darling, I stand before you now, vulnerable in my shy longing that you will be my husband until death leaves us grieving but united forever in the field of love. I wish I could know if my longing will be fulfilled and promise as if it will. But let me not grasp at an unknowable future. Let me surrender to Divine Will all of my wild, passionate dreams that we will choose each other for ten thousand todays. Let that be enough. My heart bursts with the ecstasy of choosing you today and feeling the wonder and awe of having this opportunity to be witnessed by all of you in our tribe that we trust to help hold us through this journey into the Great Mystery. May our union be blessed. May our love be a blessing to all we touch. May we humble ourselves before the field of love and trust that we will always have the strength to let love win. Love, 6/20/2018 Acceptance is being who we are...Acceptance is being who we are, in each succession of present moments, swayed neither by avoiding what we fear nor by clinging to what we think we can’t live without. In the absence of acceptance, there can be no forward movement. The hidden patterns that create clinging attachment and fearful aversion take over, repeating themselves in our minds, feelings, behaviours and relationships. We grow older, and the external circumstances of our lives change, but inside it’s as The Talking Heads put it, “the same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” 6/20/2018 Anger can feel liberating..."Anger can feel liberating, but its only resolution is a liberation." 6/20/2018 If you are angry, then be angry"If you are angry, then be angry – and don’t judge that it is good or bad... 6/18/2018 Anger in relationships"We should get angry when the occasion fairly demands it; we, the overly meak and cowed ones, should experience how good and necessary it feels to dare to let go and vent our annoyance and irritation without the usual huge (and valuable) inhibitions. We should not be overly scared of the odd loud argument, we should form our irritations into some beautifully creative insults; it is not a sign that everything is coming to an end and love has died, it’s a sign that our relationship still has a lot of kindness, sincerity and tolerance left within it." - The Book of Life 6/12/2018 HAVE PATIENCE"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. The point is, to live everything. Love the questions now. Perhaps, someday, you will gradually, without even noticing it, love your way into the answer." 6/12/2018 THERE IS NO DIFFICULTYThere is no difficulty that enough love cannot conquer: No disease that enough love will not heal: No door that enough love will not open…It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble; how hopeless the outlook; how muddled the tangle; how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.” 6/12/2018 OnE CREATOR TO ANOTHER..."The best way to show someone we value them is look at them as one Creator to another and to give them our undivided attention." 6/12/2018 before you speak...Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence? – Sai Baba |