A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

If you’re not here to love, you’re not here!!!
The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

I love LOVE! I mean, I REALLY love LOVE!! So I am right at home in the Venus Stream. The Venus Stream is the heart of your Gene Keys Golden Path; it is the centre, the core out of which everything else flows. Your Purpose is here, your Intelligence, Emotional and Spiritual Quotients are here. Your Core Wound is here. All that you Attract is here in this gloriously Yin teaching. And it is all about love. As they said in the opening of the Venus Retreat … “If you’re not here to love, you’re not here!”.

Well, I’m here to love! Like I say … I love love!!!

They say that the Path of Venus is a path of risk, but that doesn’t scare me.

I have taken huge risks for love in the past. I have changed my whole life for love. I’ve moved countries for love. I’ve thrown all caution to the wind and yelled, YES, to love. And I have also let people in because I thought they would love me, but I just ended up burnt, hurt. Those latter risks taught me to put on more and more layers of armour, more and more layers around my heart to protect it. The former risks, well, they taught me how glorious it is to risk all for love, to throw open my heart to love.

The Venus is asking me to take the armour away. The heart needs no armour. The heart is simple.

“If you’re not here to love, you’re not here!!!“

Wow!  That is a truth that cuts straight through all those layers of obfuscation. If I am not here to love, then what is the point?

If I am not here to love, then I am just an empty skin walking around in the world.

My life, my karma, my dharma have all taught me that this is true.

In those years when I said I would never let love in again, because it was safer that way, I was so bereft. I would tell myself I was happier and better off alone, but I ached for love, for connection. But I did the right thing. I went inside. Through years of inner work I came to a place where I had started to take away enough of the layers, to start loving myself. Of course, I couldn’t start calling it that then. I’d tell myself I was content with my life; I was content to be alone.

And then the love of my life appeared (or rather, reappeared, but that’s a long story for another day!). And I let him in. I didn’t tear off all the armour, but I made a big enough chink that our hearts could meet. 

More years of inner work, more years of opening to love and finally, the Gene Keys entered my life and I truly started to dismantle the armour.

Now, I risk all for love, and I am rewarded with even more love.

Our Longing is to BE the Love, to Feel the Love

Of course our longing is to be the love! It always has been! My longing is to be love! It is not about being loved by others, although of course that is amazing. No, of all the things that Richard Rudd said in the opening ceremony of the Purpose sphere, those words, “our longing is to be the love” struck the clearest note and the deepest chord with me.

For of course that is the whole point of living … to be love. To have so much love coursing through your veins that it falls from your eyes like stars; for there to be so much love in your lungs that it sounds like a song when you exhale; and for there to be so much love in your whole body that the heat from your skin is the burning fire of that love.

Love is a living thing, it is not just an emotion, and it is certainly not just a word; it’s a living, breathing entity that is coiled around and inside your being.

I want to be love; I want there to be no way to tell where I end and love begins. Love is in every cell of our being. If we want to be the love, we must let it vibrate at its own unique frequency. We must let it cavort and dance through our bodies, our minds, our very souls.

This is how we heal the planet. This is how we heal everything … with the gentle balm of love. And if we are the love and the love is us, then we cannot help but believe that we are doing this work for the whole. Our small piece of the collective tapestry of life is vital, as is everyone’s piece. The world needs all of us to be the love!

Gentleness is the Way … Awakening is a Series of Softenings

And it begins now, right now, on this day, in this moment.

I choose to soften into this day. I have so much I need to do in the external world, but my body is tired, and I have taken in a lot over the last few weeks. I need to let my body soften into this path of the Venus. I need to let myself soften into this work.

This is my oath to myself as I embark upon this Venus quest … to always soften … to always be gentle … to listen to the love that is always singing and whispering and humming in my body.

This is my oath to myself …

I will be the love I long for.

I will be the love I need and deserve.

I will be the love I was born to be.

Building a Temple of Remembrance

The Venus is a temple of our remembrance, of remembering, of love, of realisation. It inspires the sanctity of sovereign beings of love. Imagine stepping towards a temple, an architecture of love, a space made to honour grace, to honour that we bring our wounds and our wonders to be healed and revealed, to be felt, to be known, to be lifted up and given back to grace.

Elijah Parker

I adore the image Elijah painted of the Venus Sequence as a temple. This is a sacred space that I am opening up for myself. I get to honour myself here. I get to cherish and love myself here. And I love too that this is not just about healing those childhood wounds that I thought had marked me for life; it’s also about revealing the wonders of who I am. It’s about celebrating all the Gifts I have here in the Venus, the heart of my Gene Keys chart … the Precision, the Discrimination, the Imagination, the Freedom, and the Leadership.

This Venus work is about recognising that even as I was going through those painful periods of my childhood, the trauma and the grief, I was also wonderful. I was bright and imaginative; I was a wild, free spirit; I was a nature child who loved trees and rivers and the sea.

And there was love too.

For a long time, I only saw the loss, the grief, the pain, the rejection.

But there WAS love.

What if the universe were conspiring for us, not against us?

What if we are drawing all we need to grow?

This is a truly heart-lifting, heart-opening attitude to take … what if all that has happened to me, what if the circumstances of my life are exactly the ground I need in order to grow as a person?

That changes everything.

That takes life to a whole new level of joy. Because if I can trust that everything is exactly the way it is meant to be for me to grow as a person, then I can stop feeling like a victim to my pain and to my suffering. And when the victimhood is taken out of my internal space, then there is room for so much more joy and happiness.

And there is room for so much more love.

The photographs I used for this essay are of my morning walk through the wildflower meadow and along the bridleway near my Wiltshire home.

You can see more of my photographs on my Flickr page.