Love with your whole heart, soul, mind, and body.

Coalesce is a contemplative experience. Through scripture, music, prayer, and lament we join in giving voice to living in relational wholeness, to Interbeing, to LOVE. The path of conscious Love.

When you coalesce, you are living in conscious connection. When you coalesce with this Loving Inner Presence, you are in your True Self. God is forever united to this love within you and as you; it is your soul, your essence, your True Self, hidden with Christ in God. God “cannot disown God’s own self.” God always sees God in you.

Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence. Love exists inside of you, and is also greater than you; within you and beyond you. This creates an abundance, a sense of more-than-enoughness, and a deep peace. You know you’ve found a wellspring inside of you welling up into limitless life leading toward union of the soul with God.

Love goes far beyond infatuation and invites our full participation and surrender. Love is an infinite, inclusive flow of giving and receiving. God is an event of communion. God is relationality itself. Love is a dynamic, a process.

Jesus’ teaching and way of life is “the path of conscious love.” This phrase emphasizes the life-affirming and implicitly relational nature of the path. The word “conscious” makes clear that the touchstone here is transformation, not simply romance. Conscious love is “love in the service of inner transformation”—or if you prefer, “inner transformation in the service of love.” Either way, this is exactly what Jesus modeled and taught.

“Conscious love” is a definition for our life’s purpose and the goal of all spirituality. When we’re conscious, we will always do the loving thing, the connecting thing, the intimate thing, the communion thing, the aware thing. We will be our True Selves. The first requirement of conscious love is that it has to be anchored in a quality of our presence deeper than simply egoic selfhood. It is unitive, or nondual, awareness.

A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are. Instead of looking to a relationship for shelter we welcome its power to wake us up in areas of life where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life. This approach puts us on a path. It commits us to movement and change, providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow. Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice: learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further, to connect more deeply, not just with a partner, but with our own aliveness as well.

The Gaze of Love