Love 101

08/14/2026

Four years ago, Alexis Busetti asked me a question while wrestling with John 4:

“What kind of Love is that?”

I didn’t know then that her question would become a pilgrimage. 🩵

That question helped birth The Call to Love Experience, deepened my contemplative practice, shaped my scholarship, and continues to transform how I understand love, spiritual companionship, and what it means to become fully human.

Just recently, I returned to the well with the beautiful Awakenings community for a two-part Truth Communication series, Deepening the Well Through Love.

And this Sunday, I get to bring it home. 🥹🙏🏽

I’m returning to grace_cong_church_of_harlem where I first preached this text four years ago, to offer:

Deepening the Well Through Love
Sunday, August 16 | 11 AM

We’ll return to John 4 through Lectio Amoris—listening for Love in the text—and hold two questions together:

What kind of Love is that?

And if that is the kind of Love we have encountered…

What kind of people must we become?

Come to the well. 🫶🏽

ContemplativeSpirituality

08/01/2026

The Awareness and Acceptance of Becoming

Sharing my reflection as Executive Director of Stillpoint : The Center for Christian Spirituality.

This quarter, our Stillpoint community is exploring the theme of Transformation.

The butterfly has long been a symbol of my own journey of becoming—in fact, a trio of butterflies tattooed on my shoulder follows me wherever I go. 🦋

I’d like to invite you into a simple contemplative practice.

Read the poem below slowly three times.

Notice what word, phrase, or image draws your attention.

Resist the urge to analyze it. Simply receive it, and sit with whatever arises.

May the caterpillar’s metamorphosis awaken your own journey of becoming.

Be still. Be Love.

— Jasmine

“Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become…there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

https://stillpointca.org/blog/2026-7-newsletter

07/21/2026

🫶🏽

✨ A dream becoming reality. ✨

I’m honored to share that I’ll be presenting at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2026.

My Professional Development Workshop, Love as Leadership Practice: Integrating Heart and Head for Human and Organizational Flourishing, has been accepted.

A few years ago, this was simply a question I couldn’t stop asking:

What if love isn’t just a value…what if it’s a leadership practice?

That question has led me through years of research, executive leadership, prayer, writing, listening, and countless conversations. It has become the foundation of my dissertation and the heart of The LOVING Leader.

Now I have the privilege of bringing that work into one of the world’s leading gatherings of management scholars.

I believe the future of leadership depends on more than sharper strategies or greater efficiency. It requires integrating heart and head so leaders can move beyond fear and create the conditions for creativity, connection, and human and organizational flourishing.

Deep gratitude to everyone who has encouraged this journey. I’m especially thankful to Gisele Marcus for encouraging me to apply and to my mentor Matt Lee, who will also be presenting at this year’s conference.

See you in Philadelphia.

❤️

07/19/2026

I am deeply honored to offer the Truth Communication at Awakenings, Inc. in a two-part series:

Deepening the Well Through Love and The Practice of Spiritual Companionship.

This feels like a full-circle moment. Four years ago, a beloved friend asked me a simple question while we reflected on John 4:

“What kind of Love is that?”

That question became a pilgrimage—one that has shaped my contemplative practice, scholarship, ministry, and understanding of what it means to accompany others with love.

This series is the fruit of that journey and the fulfillment of a quiet stirring that has been cultivated over the years. I’m grateful to finally share it.

Thank you, Pastor Tia Norman, for your trust and for creating spaces where we can gather at the well together. 🫶🏽🙏🏽🧘🏽

07/13/2026

🫶🏽🧘🏽🙏🏽

Stillpoint Contemplative Gatherings - Register today!

Join us for our next series of virtual Contemplative Gatherings! These communal practices are an invitation to deepen together. We are delighted to welcome a beautiful triad of guest teachers to the Stillpoint community for these sacred moments:

July 19, 2026 - 3pm PT
Rev. Nhien Vuong will be teaching from her book, The Enneagram of the Soul, and sharing how when companioned with Centering Prayer, becomes a powerful tool for integration and transformation.

August 16, 2026 - 3pm PT
Pastor and Spiritual Director Tia Norman, of Awakenings Inc and The Black Contemplative Prayer Summit, will teach on Thomas Keating's Program for Happiness, Divine Therapy, and Welcoming Practice

September 13, 2026 - 3pm PT
Lisa Colon DeLay, author and Spiritual Director, will teach from her books The Way of the Desert Elders & Wild Land Within.

Registration is open. Join us for one gathering, $25 donation, or all three $60 donation. Proceeds from your generous donation supports our scholarship program for those interested in exploring the contemplative life and spiritual direction.

https://stillpointca.org/contemplative-gatherings

07/06/2026

Hitting the ground running would be an understatement.

These first four months leading Stillpoint have been full, fast, and deeply formative.

I stepped into a season already in motion—grant writing, board formation, program leadership, retreats, coaching, dissertation work, and the ongoing sacred rhythm of holding a living spiritual formation ecosystem.

A friend called it “special and intense.”
That feels true.

And still—there has been grace.

⸻

What I’m learning again:

Contemplative leadership is not the absence of pressure.
It is the practice of presence within it.

It does not remove us from complexity.
It roots us inside it—through practices that return us again and again to Love as source and center.

⸻

This past week in Los Angeles felt like a threshold moment.

We hosted a 160-person retreat with Fr. Gregory Boyle and Homeboy Industries—centered on cherished belonging and the healing power of love.

We also held our first Board Formation Retreat with Dr. Leonard McMahon and Dr. Yulee Lee—learning how to stay in truth, difference, and discernment without losing one another.

This is sacred work.

⸻

Deep gratitude to our staff, faculty, board (past, present, and new), consultants Kymberly Graves and Deserea Jackson, Fuller Seminary’s Center for Spiritual Formation, and all who are shaping this work with us.

And personally—gratitude for what is being asked of me, and what is being formed in me.

Leadership is not certainty.
It is fidelity.

To what is emerging.
To what Love is asking.
To what is becoming.

⸻

Four months in.

We have come far, fast.

And we are only just beginning.

🙏🏽

07/02/2026

I know every word to be true even more so now 🙌🏽🫶🏽🙏🏽

Love Letter #16: Spiritual Love

“The Scriptures tell us, “The first man, Adam, became a living person.” But the last Adam—that is, Christ—is a life-giving Spirit.” 1 Corinthians‬ ‭15:45‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Since Jesus is Spirit, Love is spiritual; the work of the Divine. Spiritual love is transcendent, an awakening that opens us to God's transformational and redemptive power and connects us to the soul of our beloved. God is relational and uses people as instruments of Love in our lives. “We are not meant to live our lives in a feeling of separation but in a feeling of unity and oneness...To love is to call forth our best selves in something that is very akin to worship.“ (Josh Gressel Ph.D.)

Here are 5 things I know to be true about Spiritual Love from the incomparable :

1. We need intimate relationships in order to go further with our inner work.
2. Relationships are laboratories of the spirit. They are hospitals of the soul.
3. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become channels for the flow of God’s love.
4. What love does, if it is allowed to, is to combine people’s energies in ways that lift their lives to a mode of divine right order, where new ideas, new possibilities, and new opportunities for growth emanate directly from the heart of God.
5. Two souls genuinely combining spiritual forces generate-quite literally-the power of God.

God who is Love:

Thank You for Spiritual Love. Deep calls to deep (Psalm‬ ‭42:7‬). Give us the courage to go beyond the superficial to discover Your divine purpose in relationships so together we might bring healing to Your people as we become our truest selves.

06/21/2026

🫶🏽🙏🏽

06/19/2026

Juneteenth. Love itself is a practice of freedom. 🖤♥️💚

Galveston 2023 📸 credit: Jasmine Bellamy