“Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  wrote this quote and posted it up on my hermitage wall by my bed while I was training at the Zen monastery. Every morning, I used it read it to remind myself that the quickest way into the experience of unconditional love and acceptance was to love everything. Because let’s face it, it can be challenging to tap into that love directly. Especially for myself. There are so many barriers. So many firewalls set up to keep it out. The voices scream, “You’re being selfish, this is phony, look at all of your flaws – you don’t deserve love.” And when they’re not screaming, they’re subtly suggesting, “Humble people see what’s wrong with themselves. Loving yourself is egotistical.”

According to the voices, it would be better to remain a self-effacing wretch outside of love so that I’d be motivated to do good. If I was good enough, someday I might deserve love.

It was only after deeply training and inquiring into the nature of the voices that I saw the obvious. The irony. The undeniable question: Was filling myself up with self-hatred going to somehow lead to self-love?

No. All the sages had it right. Only love can beget love.

So how to get love? We learned that love of life is love of self. Projection became a powerful tool for us. If I saw love “out there” it must be “in here” inside of me as well. So why not use the beauty of life to invite love inside?

Have you ever looked at a leaf? I mean really looked at one? How about a ray of light? How about animals and plants?

When I was in art school, I learned to really look. We had models who came in to pose for us in class. As an immature young person, I remember being repulsed by some of the “uglier” models who showed up. When they walked in the room, several of my friends and I would look at each other as if to communicate with our facial expressions “you must be joking!” But a miraculous thing happened every single time. As soon as I started to put my pencil to paper or paint to canvas, I started to fall in love with how beautiful the model was. I got into the contours of their form, the fall of light and shade, and the colors in their skin and hair. It was as if all my preconceived ideas about what should go together was met by the extraordinariness of what was actually so.

I look back on this experience as my initiation into the process of compassion. If I am to suddenly find myself present to the love I’m experiencing for an external, I can’t help but acknowledge the truth: Love isn’t in the other. It’s in me. The source is always me. Because where is that love coming from?

In awareness, I can see that the recognition of love is mirrored from my own heart.