Last year at the closing ceremony of my Scent Priestess training we took a vow to walk as love in the world.
At the end of a initiatory journey with the Goddess it’s quite usual to make a vow to the divine, a sacred commitment for what you will stand for going forward.
I’d heard the Walking-as-Love spiel before, and I both loved it and I was sceptical of it.
Walking as love! Doesn’t that just mean being soft and melty and useless all the time? Falling back on new age hippy cliches? Wearing white and never wearing shoes and transcending your personality and leaving behind everything unique and individual about you so you can merge with something “higher?”
At the same time… walking as love is the red thread that pulls me forward in this priestess path. It’s what I connected with in Crete all those years ago on pilgrimage to the Goddess, that pulsing throbbing current of life and blood and beauty that the Priestesses are bound to honour and celebrate.
After many years dancing around this vow, I felt like the time was right. I understood what it was and saw how it’s at the heart of everything I do.
And I also got why I had (and have) such intense resistance to it.
Walking as love is not the cloud-walk we’d think it to be.
We imagine it to be us floating in a world where we only experience total bliss, arms held wide open to help anyone in need, being a ray of positivity and light in the world – nice and pleasant and elevated and above the mess of humanity.
But when we go beyond the spiritual cliches and think with our body for a minute, we know that that floaty ideal does not contain the rawness or fierceness of what love really is in the physical world.
Walking as love means opening your heart and risking love and connection, and that is both a beautiful way to live and a painful way to live.
It means feeling the hurts of the world as well as the beauty.
What could we loose by opening our heart to love fully?
What do we risk by making ourselves that vulnerable?
Fully opening our heart is what almost all of us, myself definitely included, have conditioned ourselves through fear NOT to do.
We have armoured our hearts, keeping them safe from disappointment and the pain that has come in the past when we have loved too much, the conditioned shame that has come from our innocence approach to love and life, the disappointment that has come from trusting others.
I didn’t see until I took this vow how shut down and fortified my heart was.
I know in my heart living as love is the scariest thing I could ever want to do. It pulls on all my fears of not being safe, of loosing who I am, of shame and not enoughness, all my fears of doing and saying the wrong thing, my terror of conflict, and all my fears of other people not being safe.
And I know it’s the path of the priestess that I walk.
And I know that I am wobbly in this place right now. I’m not good at it yet. I am graceless. I want to be it, and I don’t want to do it. I try to muster the courage, and I falter at the last step (…or ten steps before I get there). I’m dazed by the insights I have received about my heart and trying to move through them with acceptance and love, rather than frustration and shame.
But I will keep trying, and failing, and and doubting, and then choose to try again.
Some day I will get this.
Some day I will walk as love in truth.
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