Unblocking: The Debris Between Me and Love

This morning’s meditation arrived at the right time. I went into it looking for stillness and came out holding something I didn’t expect — a reframe on love that I’m still sitting with hours later. The premise was simple but the weight of it took a moment to settle: we are not the source of love. We are its vessels.

We are all, at our core, the essence of pure love. That love does not originate with us. It flows through us — from God, from something larger than any one person or relationship or season of life. Our work is not to generate it. Our work is to stay open enough to channel it.

And that distinction — between creating and channeling — is where things got quietly uncomfortable for me. Because the implication is that when love is not flowing, the obstruction is internal. Our preferences, biases, expectations, hopes, and desires can all become debris in the pipeline. They are not inherently bad. But they take up space, and space is not neutral when you’re trying to channel something.

I thought about how many of my relationships carry the weight of expectation — the version of a friendship I want to exist, the version of a family member I’m still hoping will show up, the version of myself I think I should be by now. Each of those is a held position. A closed fist. And a closed fist, however well-intentioned, cannot hold water.

The work I’m committing to is intentional debris removal. Not suppressing desires or pretending I don’t have preferences — but examining what I’m gripping tightly enough that it’s restricting flow. Challenging my expectations of friends, family, and myself is how I open back up. That’s the practice. Not arriving at some expectation-free state of spiritual perfection, but noticing the blockages and loosening my grip around them, one at a time.

The meditation ended in prayer. I prayed to sow seeds of love everywhere I go — not as performance, not as transaction, but as a natural consequence of staying open. If love flows freely through me, it will land somewhere. In a conversation I didn’t expect to matter. In a moment of patience I might have otherwise withheld. In how I receive someone else who is also doing their best to stay open.

The call is to love others as extensions of myself — and as extensions of the love I feel from God. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because the conditions are right. But because that is what we are, underneath everything else we’ve accumulated.