Lead with Love

She whispered again . . . 

. . . "lead with love."

I was walking the Labyrinth for the umpteenth time that winter. Looking down and watching my steps on the path, I couldn't help but notice that as I rounded each twist of the way out, my chest and heart turned before my feet did.

My body was echoing the message I was receiving from the Labyrinth.

Again.

I've been carrying this image with me for over three years.

Several times over the past couple of months, I've been reminded of that winter and the recurring message I received to "lead with love."

As I've been thinking about what it means to lead with love, I've realized that it means different things in different situations.

Regardless of the situation though, to lead with love requires us to get out of our heads and into our hearts.

That's not easy when most of us are used to living in our heads, in the realm of thinking and judging, rationalizing and problem-solving and completing tasks. This is where our fears and anxieties dwell and sometimes grow into overwhelm and disconnection.

From our heads, from our fears and anxieties, from our overwhelm and disconnection, we react to the world around us.

From our hearts, from a place of love and connectedness, we respond.

Our hearts are where we feel, where we connect with other people, with nature and with the Divine. Because of the potential to experience big feelings of ALL kinds, especially those we experience BECAUSE we love, living from here can feel super-risky.

Before we can lead from the heart, we have to learn how to live from the heart.

It's not an either/or choice; we need to be able to access both our head space and our heart space.

Spiritual practices are activities we engage in which help us deepen our relationships with the world around us and with the Divine; they help us notice and connect with the sacredness of ordinary, everyday life.

Meditation, mindfulness, prayer, yoga and nature walks are a few well-known spiritual practices that many of us have experienced.

In my work as a Spiritual Director, my clients and I often talk about spiritual practices and how things they already do can become spiritual practices by simply shifting their focus from task to process to experience (that shift is a simple one, but not usually an easy one):

Cooking dinner  becomes a spiritual practice when you engage all of your senses: noticing how the veins stand out on the back of a mint leaf, listening to the sound the knife makes as it slices through each layer of an onion, breathing in the aroma of fresh basil, feeling a stray drop of lime juice land on the back of your hand as you squeeze the juice into a bowl, and of course, taking a moment to taste how all the flavors come together.

Taking a 20-minute walk after dinner becomes a spiritual practice when you notice that the sun is setting in the west and the full moon is rising in the east and you pause for a few minutes to really take it in and allow yourself to be moved by the experience.

By bringing our awareness and intentionality into the present moment (and out of the past or future), we practice making the journey from our heads to our hearts.

It can feel like a long journey at first, it really can.

Creating a spiritual practice of living from our hearts, of living from a place of love, eventually creates a way of being.

And from there, we find ourselves leading with love.

My wish for you, and for all of us, during this New Moon in Virgo, is that we live in love and lead with love a little more today than we did yesterday, and a little more tomorrow than we did today.