I’m experimenting....with love

October 11, 2026

When I die and dissolve back into the ethers from where I came, love won’t end. Love is what remains. In the meantime, life is an experiment with love. And the way to experience it is with this body.

Two approaches, one path.

There is a process I’ve been practicing. I will share it with you below but first some context. When I give myself the few minutes it takes, I feel better—spacious, calm, clean. Like that cold shower at the end of a hot day, fresh laundry, or the tinge of clairvoyance when the call or text is reciprocated with an, I was just thinking about you. How did I know?

It’s a blend of two methods that serve both sides of my heart, the vesica piscis of nature. One approach comes from The HeartMath Solution (© 1999). A brilliant book, I’ve mentioned in past letters dense with research and data from its namesake Institute, that showcases how the heart, not the brain, is the body’s primary cognitive and emotional center. Utterly humbling and inspirational, it reveals how crippling and harmful stress is to whole-body health.

Obvious right? My heart knows this. But how I keep on keeping on. I’ll catch myself running on auto-pilot. Hence the self-compassion, the self-awareness, the process, the therapy, the friendships, the letting.

The second is from The House of Mary Magdalene, a virtual gathering or container for an in-depth study of the Gospel of Mary led by theologian Meggan Watterson. More precisely it’s from Meggan Watterson herself because she also describes the process in her book Mary Magdalene Revealed (© 2019). I’m not going to document it verbatim. But it’s worth mentioning this: you can visualize yourself at the center of vesica piscis. These two interconnected spheres represent a whole reality, that of being both fully human and fully divine. At its center, where the two truths overlap, is what it means to be human. Fully human.

vescica piscis by Sevi Klein

Both are practices to collapse the gap between heart and head. Both are meditative, if you consider being quiet, breathing, and exploring physical, psychic, and spiritual sensations meditating. Both support the dissolution of stress. Both are about dropping into the heart and listening (with curiosity and generosity) to the sensations within in order to know, as in gnosis, love.

Love levels. Love is spacious and not sticky. Love refuses to see one another as separate. Love exists in and with one another, with being the key word here. Love takes us into parallel worlds and changes us, even if it's just a little at a time like poet ​Denise Levertov​ writes so beautifully here:

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.

The following is a recipe distilled from the above resources, which surprisingly are quite similar. Like any recipe, it is a tool. Knowing when or if to use it is what’s relevant. May it become your own if you so choose.

• Close your eyes

• With your next breath, visualize breathing into your heart instead of your lungs. (Putting your hand on top of your heart to feel it move may help.)

• Imagine it expanding like a balloon being filled with air.

• Continue breathing and imagine your heart softening and expanding.

• Stay within your heart (use your imagination, whatever may work for you to go deep within)

• While here, think of something/someone (anything) you appreciate. (For me it was a day when I was hiking through a Washington old-growth forest on the way to some very rustic hot springs. I remember feeling welcomed, safe, and utterly in awe. It was one of the most beautiful and magical places I’ve ever been. I was so appreciative to be witness. I was happy.) For me there is something about hooking to sensations of appreciation, peace, and gratitude that really help.

• This is how I know and feel love. From here I can imagine it expanding in all directions.

• Expand a little more.

—With love and in light, Erin

illustration by my niece Isabella S.