Scents of love

Elon and tonglen: knowing by loving. Can we bring ourselves to this? And earth shattering evidence it's already created so much positivity, transmuting what was broken.

Scent

Article warning PG18 sexual abuse is covered.

Knowing by loving assumes loving first, and coming to know something or someone fully, even in all of its “ugliness”, and then making an informed decision about how to relate to it
Mari

Simon 2025:
My friend Mari blows me out of the water. It’s late on a super challenging day: my 90 yo mum’s just broken her hip. Yet, the 24 hours of personal chaos and travel feels so aligned with our global upheaval and reality deconstruction I join the Kainos group meeting¹. Mari is there too and her piece connects us to love, musk, back across Iraq and we embody our youth…

Mari 2005:
I’m deployed to Iraq, working night shift. Our offices purposely have no windows and breaks are vital to my mental well-being. But our team is so small, only one of us can go out at a time.

Standing alone, looking at the night sky, I think of my mom and how worried she is for me. I look at a star, pretend it is her, and send some love to it. I extend that to my brothers… to my close friends… and then it grows and grows. After some time I try to imagine everyone as a star, even people I don’t “like.”

Simon 2025:
What’s next? Rather than rehash everything that’s upending today—post-truth globally, hip fracture endings locally—what would happen if I simply embrace knowing by loving?

That’s the provocation Mari so delicately, caressingly entwines us in. What does it feel like in my body to trust with full courage, just to be completely cracked open:

• I f***ing love you and the circumstances.

• I don’t know how this will all land.

• Except it is light.

In the Kainos group we’re talking Elon Musk. One of the people I find myself distressed by every day, a hole in my body that can’t connect his abject destructive actions, hurting the majority of humans and species, with an obvious internal outlook he truely believes this is service.

Spark

Mari raises Tonglen.

Mari 2005:
I mix it up, breathe in deeply, imagining I am breathing in the pain of the world like smog, and holding this in my heart in love, then breathing out and wrapping the earth, in growing concentric circles from me, trying to cover the globe: A ‘Heart Spark’ like I spark-transmute the pain.

My practice is already informed from reading: the hardest thing anyone can do in their life is to perfect the Buddha smile. I accept the implicit challenge, and move through the world trying to accept everything as it is, and even love it because of it, not despite it.²

Simon 33 year old:
I eventually focus my tonglen practice on my abuser. It is very personal.

Experience

Simon 13 year old:
To be sexually abused, in sensual inception, is earth shatteringly perverted. For me it is a mortifying long journey.

• Act 1 is 9 months, John Martin is the principal of the school. It is an ever increasing, ever more degrading, sensual cycle.

• Act 2 is an escape. I turn around, disentangling myself from the corpulent hypnotic spell. All 13 years of me tells him this is not right, out of order, not going to happen again. I storm from the room never to return.

• Act 3 is shaking. I’m running to hide, into the abandoned quarter and derelict hidden halls of the school, straight to Hogwart’s room of requirement. Yep definitely exists, serves me well. I’m hiding the abuse. No one must know. I can’t take that. Neither parents. Definitely no friends. Absolutely not the school.

• Act 4 is tonglen. Two decades later it’s beautifully serving a difficult relationship and shifting love by hosting the space for discovery and polarity.

• Act 5 is awakening: Realising I’m still entangled with John I start practicing Tonglen on him, breathing in John’s pain, breathing out compassion to him, across the decades into that room I’d vowed never to set foot in again. Suddenly I’m right there in that room, alongside my young self, with him. Smelling, seeing and being it all, calling young Simon into awareness. Act 5 and Act 2 are now one. That’s where the power is co-created from, to shift 9 months of abuse, 13 and 33 years multiplying into rightness, correctness, extracting us both from that time. And, well forgiveness. I mercy myself. And forgive John.

Forgiveness is not condoning. The behaviour is outrageous and unacceptable, that does not change. What does change is hate, misery, blame. On myself, what’s it like to actually honour the reality that this inception is profound. That does not make it right. Nor him: he comes back to me wanting pardon. Screw you, you’ve multiple others, I know there must be, to go and rectify this with. Go Fix It.

He leaves to undertake it. Over the next months and years many more find some ease and integration.

Peace

Simon 2025
Elon. The actions and advocacy are hurting millions. There’s a critical reality:³ The policy, post-truth and naked destruction of most people’s safety is impermissible. You don’t get to cause deep pain to multitudes as a justifiable cost of change. It’s not.

the birds and the bees
feel the pain
shout about it
open hearts
everyone, sowing the seeds of love
Tears for fears

Can I bring Tonglen to Elon? I know its radically improved outcomes for many.

• All abused

• Myself

• John Martin

But can I actually drop into love, just completely love Elon in all that he is? Breathe in the suffering that this is, the actual reality of what all of this is creating?⁴

I think so. It’s 2.45 am now. Maybe I’m brave enough to try it soon. You? Guided audio Tonglen to try it:

Mari 2025:
I can feel the depth and pain of the situation Simon is in; tonglen (I call my practice Heart Spark) to be used as a practice to “cleanse” the wounding and dispiritedness of a place where violation and abuse took place *toward him* over significant time. This is no small task. I feel called to breathe into this space with Simon, even as I know the hurt isn’t mine. And I also know I’ve breathed into spaces of sexual violence, for acts committed against me, acts committed against loved one, and acts committed to unspeakable numbers of people. I know all of these spaces are all of our spaces.

And I know the hardest place to breathe into was my own heart.

I also have a deep metta-like practice; I call mine “Love Pushing” and that’s viscerally what it feels like I’m doing—pushing waves of love to [people, places, water, ideas…]. I’ve seen different variations of metta. The first one I stumbled upon, many years after developing my Love Pushing practice, involved the following phrases:

May you be happy.
May you be well.
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful and at ease.

In the first round, the “you” is someone you love; the second is someone who is neutral to you; the third is someone you dislike or have an active conflict with. This was similar to my practice, and I continued my version, feeling validated in a morphic resonance sort of way.

Then I saw a version that started with “I” and it stumped me. I’d get hung up on the phrases, I’d have a hard time pushing love to myself. Over the course of a couple of years, as I dug into it, I saw one area that needed attention was self-forgiveness. While I had forgiven those who had aggressed upon me, I hadn’t forgiven myself for “putting myself into those situations.”

But as with every previous situation in which I had done Love Pushing and Heart Spark, I knew: If not my heart, then whose? If I can’t do this, who can? Not that I’m some badass superhuman. Precisely the opposite. I’m exactly human, and I believe humans have immense capacity given the opportunity. And being human, I want to contribute to the morphic resonance field of the possibility for healing, renewal, forgiveness.

And I want to offload the weight I carry of condescension, of contempt, of guilt, of shame, of pain. That’s not exactly true. I want to do more than that. I don’t want to just offload it and leave it there for others to stumble upon. I want to bring those icky feelings into my heart and love them as what’s happening, what has happened, and transmute it into internal compassion, care, and grace.

Transmuting

Simon Mari 2025 Kainos+72 hours

Desire is a banquet on which we feed
Because the night belongs to lovers
With love we sleep
With doubt the vicious circle
Turns and burns
Because the night Patti Smith

Pain, grace, difficult and delicate fragrances are always with us. They’re our human condition, aliveness in our individual manifestations, part of our collective oneness.

However we get to drive the car, trusting we’ve forgiven ourselves sufficiently to have icky along for the ride as awareness and strength. Tonglen and love take us beyond:

• broken hips

• broken world

• broken power

Into being energised by this, radically embracing the not knowing. There is far more agency here than in hate, misery and blame.

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Most are in and around the Cheonggyecheon, Seoul. It was a natural stream that was paved over and became a freeway. It is now restored back to watercourse.

1. Kainos invokes the new, the different in nature.

Alexander Beiner

’s Kainos is first exploring “Where do we go from here? It’s a question at the heart of the first Kainos documentary, Crossroads, which will premiere on March 14th.” Mari and I (Simon) are foundation members.

2. Mari: When I learned of how John Vervaeke talks about knowing by loving it gave more words to my practices. Loving by knowing is conditional – *if* I “know” you/it/the situation, then I can love you/it/the situation. But that’s exhausting, to constantly be deciding if I love you based on your actions and words and…

Knowing by loving assumes loving first, and coming to know something/someone fully, even in all of its “ugliness”, and then making an informed decision about how to relate to it—which might be to take a stand against, change the relating, walk away, inquire more… it might be holding onto hurt, anger, resentment for a little longer, and it might be loosening and even letting go.

3. Critical; as in existential. And critical as in Critical Realism; there are real unobservables including mechanisms behind events and this underlies achieving our potentials—embracing this is conducive to enabling human well being. More: Roy Bhaskar, Critical realism and the ontology of persons.

4. I originally practiced from Pema Chödrön’s Opening the Heart. The audio is based on her guided practice.