Amor fati

I love this Latin term amor fati – ‘love of fate’. Instead of bemoaning your fate – and sometimes our fates are terrible – we love our fate. Amor fati. It’s a way of being grateful. I’m going to love what happened to me because I trust it’s here to remove a veil. I’m going to search what’s happening to me in this time so I can take away yet another misconception.

Elizabeth Lesser

I also love amor fati. Love your fate. 

It’s pragmatic. When we fight against our existence and life, we create suffering for ourselves, and it distracts us from making good use of what’s here. When we find love for our fate, we open our mind and heart to possibilities. We are more open to make the best out of it. To make it into something beautiful, both in how we see it and in what we make out of it in our life. So finding love for our fate makes pragmatic sense. 

We can also see our fate as an invitation to heal and wake up. Whatever happens, and especially what we don’t like, shows us what’s left. It shows us where our attitudes are out of alignment with reality (with life, the divine). It shows us what’s left to heal of wounds and trauma. It shows us what we still haven’t seen or the clarity we still haven’t brought into our life. 

In a more general sense, we can say that what happens is an invitation to trust the divine, to look for the genuine gifts in it, to surrender to what’s here, and to say yes to life. 

So how do we do it? It requires a reorientation to ourselves and life. It requires looking for the genuine gifts in our life and situation. It requires realness and honesty with ourselves. It may require temporary support from a range of different practices including all-inclusive gratitude practices, heart-practices (tonglen, ho’oponopono), natural rest or basic meditation, different forms of inquiry (The Work, Living Inquiries), or energy work (Vortex Healing). It will also be made easier as we heal from our wounds and traumas in whatever ways best work for us (all of the above and TRE).  

An important part of this is to acknowledge the parts of us definitely not loving what happened and what is happening. To notice, allow, see it’s very natural and understandable. See that these parts of us are here to protect this apparently separate self. They come from (sometimes slightly misguided) kindness and love. They want to be seen, felt, respected, understood, met with kindness and patience. 

There is a bigger picture here. The way human life and this universe is set up, as long as our conscious view and our conditioning is out of alignment with reality, we’ll experience friction, discomfort, and pain. We are motivated to find a solution. And the only solution is to heal and awaken, and to keep healing and awakening and living from this healing and awakening.

The divine created this universe to explore, express, and experience itself in always new ways. We can say that it wanted to explore itself, get to know itself, get to know what was possible. We can also say that the infinite wanted to experience itself as finite. Or that love wanted to experience itself as (apparently) not love. Or that wisdom wanted to experience itself as (apparently) lack of wisdom. So it created this universe, and a possibility for itself to temporarily and locally take itself to be separate, a separate being, and – in our case – separate human beings. 

There is a profound beauty in all of this. It’s the play of the divine. A play for the divine, by the divine, with the divine as all actors, the set and stage, the audience, the director, the writer, and the stories played. (And it’s being written as it’s being played.) It’s a tragedy and a comedy and neither. 

Of course, when the divine does take itself – here and now – as separate, it may not seem beautiful at all. It may seem like a tragedy and only as that. And that’s part of the play as well.

The invitation here is to take a small step. How would it be to try to love my fate? If even just a little at first. Perhaps as acceptance of what’s here, and a curiosity about what I can make out of it. These are the ingredients, what meal can I make out of it? What happens if I engage in an all-inclusive gratitude practice for a few weeks? What happens if I try ho’o or tonglen? What do I find through inquiry? How does my life and the world appear to me as I find more healing for my wounds and traumas? 

…..
…..
…..

Initial notes….

• amor fati 
  • love your fate
    
  • several aspects 
    • pragmatic 
      • embrace, see what can make out of it
      • instead, struggle = pain, unable to make well use of it
      • makes sense, pragmatic, when notice the effect of each approach  
    • invitation to heal and wake up, and live awakening 
      • opportunity to look at attitudes out of alignment with reality – beliefs, hangups, wounds, trauma etc. (anything that makes us out of alignment with reality, life, the divine) 
        
    • invitation to….
      • trust the divine, lila 
      • surrender to life, the divine 
      • say yes to life 
    • how
      • in general – reorient, find genuine gifts, heart-centered practices, find healing for wounds and traumas, find what’s more true than initial beliefs, see through identifications etc. 
      • e.g.  
        • notice when there is resistance, identify beliefs, wounds, hangups, trauma, find healing for 
        • all-inclusive gratitude practice
        • any heart practice – ho’o, metta, heart prayer etc. 
        • notice the genuine gifts in our experiences and situations, both the ones our personality / conditioning likes and the ones it doesn’t like 
  • …..

…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_fati