Love Anyway – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
Join us this Sunday as we explore choosing connection when it would be easier to withdraw. Drawing on spiritual wisdom, we’ll see how presence, respect, and vulnerability keep love alive—especially in hard times. Discover practices to stay open, grounded, and compassionate, even in moments of conflict or disconnection. When love is challenged, we can still choose to show up—fully, bravely, and with an open heart.
SUMMARY
In this talk, Rev. Aimee Daniels explores love and relationships and makes these key points:
– Daniels shares a story about a woman who talks to her shadow as if it is her absent husband, which leads to tragic misunderstandings. This illustrates how easily we can misunderstand in relationships when we are not fully present.
– Daniels discusses how love is a verb, not just an emotion, and that choosing to act from a place of love allows divine love to work through us. She emphasizes the importance of presence and compassion in relationships.
– Daniels introduces four mantras from Thich Nhat Hanh to help cultivate love and presence in relationships: “Darling, I am here for you,” “I know you are there and I am happy,” “Darling, I know you are suffering. That’s why I’m here for you,” and “Darling, I’m suffering. Please help.”
– Daniels encourages the audience to reflect on a relationship where they would like to invite more love and healing, and to practice the mantras as a way to be more present and compassionate.
– The talk emphasizes the spiritual principle of oneness, and how our relationships are opportunities to practice and embody this truth.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
They’re amazing. I was listening to that song on the way in, and actually Hunter and I were laughing about it. That song just gets you so choked up, doesn’t it? So let’s dive in. So Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story in our book of the Month about a woman whose husband’s away at war, and she has a young child that her husband has never met. And every night to kind of deal with how heartbroken she is, she stands in her room at night and she talks to her shadow. And she talks to her shadow as if it’s her husband. And so when the husband finally comes home from war, he says to his little boy, I’m your father. And the little boy says, you’re not my father. He says, my father comes every night and my mother talks to him. So the husband’s shocked by this as we all would be.
And he stops talking to the wife because he assumes the person who comes every night is a person, a physical person. After he isolates her for a while, finally in her despair, she takes her own life and the husband’s heartbroken and he’s sitting talking with his son. And it finally comes out that this little boy thought his father was a shadow. And this is a good story about how easy it is to misunderstand in a relationship, isn’t it? We make up so many things about what things mean. And really he didn’t stop loving her. He just wasn’t present with her. That’s what happened. And it broke her heart.
Ernest Holmes says, love is within us. It cannot be destroyed. It can only be ignored. So our calling is to stop ignoring it, to live love in presence, respect and compassion. As Hunter read to us in the very long reading, I’m sorry.
So Joel Goldsmith teaches us love is the realization of oneness. It’s the recognition that we are not separate. When we’re not present, it can feel or when we’re not feeling the presence, it can feel like love is absent. And I think we’ve all had this experience of feeling separate.
But love is actually a verb. Steven Covey taught that. And I used to not get that right. I used to think like, no love’s an emotion, but we use the word love to talk about so many things, don’t we? Romantic love, I love this, right? And love is also like how we show up over time with people so love’s a verb. And when we choose to act from this place of love, we’re allowing the love, which spiritually we would say the love is the nature of spirit, divine, whatever your word is, we’re allowing that love to work through us.
And when you think about the things that cause us personally to suffer in our lives, feeling separate is at the top of our list, isn’t it? And what is it that makes us feel separate? What is it? It might be our thoughts, it might be our feelings, it might be our idea of how things should be or some story we have playing in our head. Or it could be people who don’t accept us. Quite frankly, we’ve all had that happen too, haven’t we? And what we want to remember, I love this Roger Teel says this, that life is a relationship course. I mean, literally without the mirror of other people, we wouldn’t be having this human experience. And that’s also true about we’re all having this experience together. We’re all part of this oneness. And so the gift of relationship is that it teaches you about yourself.
Sometimes it teaches us what we haven’t healed in ourselves yet. I know it does for me, but it helps you to know yourself more completely. Our most important relationship actually is our relationship with oneness, which is the deeper spiritual reality. And sometimes it’s hard to get present to that in life and this human experience we’re having, sometimes it’s pretty hard to experience oneness, but that’s the truth. We’re all different expressions of it. But we’re all part of this universal life that’s expressing and living and breathing our bodies, living and breathing, animals, plants, all of it. It’s all the same life energy. And so we’re one, but we each have a unique expression of this oneness. So I’m not the same as each of you, right? We each bring in this oneness and we have our unique expression of it.
And Ken Wilbur, who’s an amazing thinker on consciousness, if you’re not familiar with him, consciousness, new science, psychology, he’s pretty smart guy. He says that apparently solid boundaries that we believe in and live by are actually invented, which is fascinating. I think about how much I’ve worked on setting my own boundaries in my life about what I’ll accept and not accepting. Rich is sitting in the front row of my husband and he knows all about my relationship with boundaries. But boundaries are things we’ve made up. We make them up to be in our human relations. So I just want to talk to you spiritually for a second, because spiritually there are no boundaries. We are all part of this one as we’re part of this energy. That’s why when someone else feels emotional, we might feel it too if we’re close to them. And when we feel really connected to someone, we might feel whatever they’re feeling.
So Ken Wilber says The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusion products not of reality, but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it’s fine to map out our territory, it’s fatal to confuse the two. All the battles in our experience and our conflicts, our anxieties, our sufferings, our despairs are created by the boundaries we misguidedly throw around our experience. Each boundary we construct results in a limitation of our consciousness, which I think is pretty profound if you just sit with that. When we construct a boundary, it’s a limitation in our consciousness. It’s kind of creating them in us, and it can create a fragmentation or a conflict or a battle. And we certainly see that in the world right now. But one of our biggest boundaries is that we’re separate. And I know this is a little bit of a brain stretch. You have to get your head around it because we’re so related to boundaries, the way we talk about them in psychology now, and we’ve all been told we need to have them. So we want to lean into what Joel Goldsmith is saying and also anchor this idea also by Roger Teal. Our relationships are oneness. It’s our opportunity to practice oneness. And so when we choose to be present, we’re practicing oneness and we’re embodying love.
So we’ve talked about the consciousness based part of the oneness, but I want to talk about how do we support ourselves in our lives? We live with people? Could be your partner, could be your family, could be friends, could be people you work with, but how can we support ourselves in practicing oneness in day-to-day life? And I want to invite you for a second to think about someone in your life where a relationship where you would like to feel more love or where you would like to invite some healing. So just think, do you have a relationship in your life where you’d like to feel more love or you’d like to bring in some healing? So I am going to ask you to bring this person to mind again later. So does everybody have some? By the way, it can be yourself. Sometimes we don’t treat ourselves as well as we treat other people.
So sometimes the person we need to bring to mind for healing as ourself, we need to heal our self critical voice or whatever’s going on in our head. We need to treat ourselves with the same love we would offer to other people. So in his book, the Book of Forgiveness, this is by Desmond Tutu and his daughter, mofo, I’m probably butchering her name, but he says we don’t heal in isolation. Connecting with others is how we develop compassion for others and ourselves. And he practiced this. I think it’s a South African philosophy of Ubuntu. I think a lot of the healing that happened after apartheid, this Ubuntu principle was very present because the people in South Africa, they chose the path of forgiveness. Nelson Mandela, they didn’t have to do that, but Nelson Mandela said, if we don’t do this, we’re just going to keep fighting. So Ubuntu says, I am because we are. Everybody say it with me. I am because we are. And Desmond Tutu also said, I’m human because I belong. I participate and I share because a person is a person through other persons. Otherwise we’d just be a spirit floating around. But we’re persons through each other. That’s kind of a cool thought. So let’s talk about Tik Han that Hunter read to us. He has these four mantras, and what I like about these are they’re gentle.
If you have something in your life that you’re working on, whoever the person is, you called to mind, the person I called to mind was someone from my family. And sometimes we’re just not in a place. We’re just not willing, I guess is a good way to say it. We’re just not willing to kind let go to whatever we’re holding onto. And maybe our woundings up here, or maybe sometimes I feel like I’m a little three-year-old who just wants to cross my hands and say, no, I’m not going to do that. Right? But I like these mantras because it helps us to let go of being resentful. It helps. They help us to choose not to live in whatever it is, the grievance, the wounding, the resentment. And I asked Greg and Paige to sing the song anyway, because for me, it’s really a great reminder that my job in all the relationships of my life is to love anyway.
That’s really my job. And sometimes that’s a hard job. Sometimes it’s hard, right? That’s just life. Being a human. Sometimes it’s hard. But I like to ask myself, what’s my commitment? Am I willing? But am I committed to being in relationship? And if you don’t like the word commitment, then use the word intention. My intention is my intention to be in relationship, and I know to be in relationship for myself, I need to do my work. If I got something going on in my head, I need to go do my own work. Half the time it’s really about me. It’s not about them. Anyway, Roger Teal, actually in his book, you have to be old enough to remember this, but remember when some of us growing up, our parents might’ve had those little slides that they would put in and you had the little clicker and the slides would move along, and that’s how you saw pictures at that time.
He uses this analogy. Sometimes there’s a slide that represents something that’s still a wounding for us that we haven’t let go of. And if we’ve gotten over something, the slide comes out of the projector. But if we haven’t, we just keep clicking around to the same slide. And I think I find that helpful. It’s like, oh, do I want to keep clicking on that slide or not? So what I want to say to you is also is it can be perfectly okay to not stay in a relationship. So I’m not saying you have to be committed, you have to intend to stay in it. Sometimes the right path for us is not that. But if you’ve decided that you want to be committed in the relationship, these mantras can help. And it can also help to let something go, right? Sometimes we need to bless people and honor them on their journey, but it’s not going to be with us anymore.
So the first practice that he teaches is really to recognize love. And his mantra is, darling, I’m here for you. And imagine the power of saying that to your partner, to your kids, to a friend, to someone in your family. I’m here for you because when you’re fully present, really you’re offering someone else a gift when you are fully present, because new thought teaches us what we focus on, expands and attention and intention are a spiritual practice. So I want you to bring the person to your mind that you thought of earlier, someone else or yourself. And I just want to have you close your eyes for a second, and I want to have you say the mantra, visualizing the person in your mind’s eyes, say the mantra to yourself, darling, I am here for you. Say it to yourself a couple more times, darling, I am here for you, darling. I am here for you.
Just allow that energy to pass between the two of you because you don’t have to say it out loud. You can say it in your mind’s eye. And then just take a breath. And then I’m going to have you say this one out loud. Love is here. Now repeat it after me. Love is here. Now when you’re ready, you can open your eyes. And this reminds me a lot of ho ao, if you know that. It reminds me of a lot of it, like you’re saying, an affirmation that’s meant to bring healing to a relationship. So this is the first mantra. The second practice is love as respect. Ernest Holmes says, we must sense the divine in each other. Respect is a sacred recognition, and it’s kind of a stay, right? I see the divine in you. We see the divine in each other. That’s how I think of it. So the second mantra is, I know you are there and I am happy. And as Hunter read to us in the Vietnamese tradition, they believe that romantic passion, which I think is tin or I don’t know how to say it, even whatever it is, romantic passion, mature, is into naia, which is a faithful, enduring love, born of respect.
And he tells the story in the book about a couple who was married for 40 years and they had this practice that they would do today every day together. When they would sit down to dinner, they would just join hands for about 30 seconds or a minute, and they would simply look at each other. And I love that. And most of us don’t do that. I don’t know about you, but really sitting, staring in someone’s eyes, we don’t do that that much. So beautiful practice. But I want you to imagine now I want you to bring your person to mind again. You can close your eyes again if you want, and bring your person to mind and say, I know you’re there and I am happy. Just say it a few more times to yourself. I know you’re there and I am happy.
And when you’re ready, bring your attention back into the room. And something you could do this week, which is a challenge for all of us, is to be at least one conversation where you’re fully present. Put your phone away, no interruptions, no distractions. Simply be present with another person. It makes an incredible difference. His third practice is what he calls grounded love. And that’s really about recognizing when a loved one is suffering and simply giving them the gift of your presence. So the third mantra is, darling, I know you’re suffering. That’s why I’m here for you. And when we show up this way, we’re showing up not to fix. We’re showing up simply to be with. And I know for myself, there’s been a few times in my life where I lost someone that I loved, and I had friends who just said, we’re coming over.
We’re just going to sit with you. And it was so incredibly helpful, we didn’t even talk because when you’ve just been through something, you just don’t want to talk, right? And Parker Palmer talks about this in one of his books about a bout of depression that he went through and he’s like, I had a friend. He would just come sit with me every week because I really wasn’t ready to talk. I was so depressed, but he would just sit with me. And it made a big difference. And one hospice nurse shared that one of the biggest gifts at the end of someone’s life, the thing that they seem to most love to hear is not I love you, which you would think that was, but it’s, I’m with you. I’m here with you. It’s a real gift. So again, I want you to bring close your eyes, bring your person into your mind, and I want you to just say, in your mind’s eye, darling, I know you are suffering. That’s why I’m here for you.
I darling, I know you are suffering. That’s why I’m here for you. When you’re ready, you can bring your attention back to the room. And I love that one because I notice I’ve been using these with my person I need to heal with who’s a member of my family, as I said before. And when I start to see that person that way, then it softens my heart about what happened just to realize just two human beings colliding with our humanness. And so that’s what I like about these mantras. Love it’s darling, I’m suffering. Please help. And I don’t know about anyone else. I have a hard time asking for help. Does anyone else relate to that? I’m improving. But asking for help requires both some vulnerability, and it also, it’s a little bit of humility. I need help right now. We all think we’re supposed to be self-sufficient.
I don’t know where that got put in our heads, but Brene Brown teaches that vulnerability is the birthplace of love. Ernest Holmes reminds us, no one can live alone in the universe. The law of life is cooperation. So to ask for help is actually an act of love because when you allow someone else to help you, you’re offering them a gift. We don’t think about it that way, but think about when you’ve contributed to someone else, even if it’s as simple as you help them move or you help someone make dinner or do the dishes. It’s like, don’t you feel good that you got to help someone? And so I really want to also speak to our own suffering because sometimes we are suffering and sometimes there might not be anybody around when we’re suffering. I had one of my clients say to me this week, he goes like, man, I wake up in the middle of the night all the time. He runs a small company. He goes, I wake up all the time and the stuff that is going on in my head, he’s like, he’s like, why am I doing this to myself? And I’m like, I think we all do that to ourselves sometimes, don’t we? And so sometimes we’re the one that’s suffering.
I think sometimes the memories of the past take hold of us or some story we’re running. It takes hold of us. But I think for me, simply asking spirit to lead me through it, for me personally, that’s the most helpful thing. It’s like I’m probably not capable of doing a massive affirmative prayer in that moment just to be real. But just to say, Hey, spirit, help me to know what is mine to do right now? And sometimes we need to pick up the phone and ask for prayer, but we all really need to offer grace to ourselves wherever we are because we can think that we’re supposed to be up all the time. One of my friends told me last week, who remembers Winnie the Pooh? Did anybody know that? Those were all supposed to be psychological characters? I never knew that before. So Tigger my personal favorite, he’s bouncy, right?
Tigger’s actually kind of manic. I think it’s funny. What does that say about me? That’s my favorite car. And we won’t go there. But then there’s ior. What was Ior story? He was down. He was down and bore me. I’m a victim, whatever. And then there was pig piglet. Piglet was anxious. But I think the truth is all these things live in all of us sometimes, and they’re not wrong. They’re just parts of us. And we want to not push ’em down because if we push ’em down, they’re going to keep coming back up. We just want to bring ’em into the light of spirit to heal them because we know that it shifts things. So this last mantra, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes again, but this time I want you to do it for yourself. I want you to picture yourself, and I want you to maybe to mind an area where you feel like you’re suffering a little bit. And just say to yourself, darling, I’m suffering. Please help. Or you can say, spirit, I’m suffering. Please help.
And just breathe into that for a minute. And when you’re ready, bring your attention back to the room. So when love is easy, presence flows, doesn’t it? But when love is hard, when there’s conflict or when our pride is in the way, love is more like practice. We have to practice it. We have to treat it as a verb. Joe Golden Smith says, love is expressed in silence, in stillness, in the realization of God’s presence where another appears to be, isn’t that beautiful? The realization of God’s presence where another appears to be, I love that. And there can be times when we have a hard time connecting with that presence. It’s just we’re simply not feeling it for whatever reason. And I know for myself, it helps me to ask myself some questions. So one of my favorite questions is, what would love do if I am in this relationship with my family member?
Instead of being like, what’s the right thing to do? Or whatever, what would love do? Not what does my human self think I should do, but what would love do? Rumi reminds us there’s a field between right and wrong. I will meet you there. And I know for myself, what causes me not to love anyway is when I think I’m right or when I think the other person hasn’t considered me or they’ve mistreated me. But when we want to love anyway, when we intend or choose whatever words you want to move, we’re meeting in the field of right or wrong. We cannot be in relationship and be polarized. And my family member that I’ve been talking about, I have to say I wasn’t really willing until recently to even entertain having a conversation. And you’d be like, what? But this person has a grievance against me that they haven’t shared with me. They shared it with my sister and has never told me. And it’s been more than one year. It’s been maybe five years. And it’s a big long story I’m not going to get into. But I have to say, doing these mantras has helped me to become more willing and just open the door a little bit at a time.
So real love is presence. It’s being with someone and feeling free to be who you are and feeling free to let them be who they are. That’s such a gift to offer to another human being. And so we get to choose to love anyway. And so as we get ready to turn within in prayer, just this week, I want to remind you to practice the four mantras. And one thing you can do at the end of the day to just reinforce this is just to ask yourself as you’re getting ready for bed. I don’t know if you say prayers or anything. Just ask myself, where did I practice love today? And if you’re really brave, you can ask yourself, where did I not? Where could I have practiced more love today? Where could I have been more compassionate, more kind, more loving?
And ask yourself the question, what would love do? And so I’m going to take us into prayer now, and I’m going to begin the prayer with asking you to affirm with me. I choose to show up with love. Repeat it after me. I choose to show up with love. Let’s do it two more times. And how about a little more strongly? This time I choose to show up with love. One more time. I choose to show up with love. And as we affirm this love, I know that this love is always and everywhere present. It is the truth of our being. It is the truth of this nature of reality. This love, which always and everywhere is creating all things. It is the oneness of love life in its many expressions. And I know that in this love, there is harmony, there is peace, there is connection, there is presence.
So knowing that we are all one with this presence and power, this love which is forever expressing in as in through us, I speak my word for each of us that this week we choose to show up in love. We choose to love anyway. Any place in our life where healing is needed, where we want to call forth more love, I just know and affirm that each of us makes that choice. And I know that whatever we say yes to, spirit says yes to us. So I just know that as we extend ourselves in love, that love comes back to us. And I know that we are all raised up, and I offer this of love to the world. I just know that a higher level of love in this world is possible. And I know and affirm that that is what’s happening now, that each person who chooses to show up in love magnifies this vibration of love on the planet. So this is what I am saying yes to, and I just trust that this higher presence and power already has this. I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful to know that God’s got this prayer, is fulfilled and grateful for the healing, the love, all that is coming forth through this prayer. And I’m grateful to know this prayer is done and together we say, and so it.