April Week One: Spiritual Aging Study Guide
Why is it so Hard to Love Unconditionally?
Welcome to this week’s study guide. For more about our study and support group and the Spiritual Aging Study Guide, click HERE.
This Week’s Reflection
“This week, as you review your life, you will not only find one or two examples of when you were overflowing with love, but many of them. Dig deep enough, and you will know in your heart that love is love—universal, even archetypal. You'll also realize that all you've ever wanted is more love in the world. So why is it that sometimes you become envious that other people seem to have the love that you think you deserve but lack, as if love comes in a finite pot? Pause to consider another possibility. What if we all have access to the same abundant wellspring of love as one another, which is something to be celebrated? …
For most of us it takes a lifetime of spiritual practice to get to the other side of one of the final character flaws to go down: jealousy. But what if rather than envy what others have and you thought was rightfully yours, you were to aim to have as clean a filter possible, regardless of your upbringing? What freedom to tender love to others graciously, whether reciprocated or not. What an aspiration worthy of you to view what others have through the lens of hard-won maturity, individuation and generosity rather than distorted by competing, judging and all the forms of ego manipulation that jealousy spawns?”
—Excerpt “First Week of April, Year One”, Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life