Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Whatever Arises, Love That
To meet every inner experience — pain, fear, anger, numbness, even resistance itself — not by fixing or banishing it but by offering it love, typically by silently or aloud saying ‘I love you’ to oneself / to the feeling, often with a hand on the heart, until the charge softens.
Whatever Arises, Love That in 5 lines: (1) Notice whatever you’re feeling right now — even resistance.
(2) Drop the plan to fix it.
(3) Hand on heart, say “I love you” to yourself / the feeling.
(4) Repeat, meeting each layer (including disbelief) the same way.
(5) Let that be enough — you’re loving the feeling, not evicting it. Mechanically it’s self-compassion + acceptance; the metaphysics is unproven.
What it is
“Whatever arises, love that” is Matt Kahn’s central teaching and practice: instead of trying to get rid of an unwanted inner experience — anxiety, grief, anger, shame, boredom, even your resistance to the practice itself — you turn toward it and love it.
In practice this usually means offering yourself the words “I love you” in response to whatever you’re feeling, often with a hand on the heart. The premise is that what we habitually do with pain (suppress it, fight it, analyse it, judge ourselves for it) keeps it stuck, and that love is the one response that lets a feeling be fully felt and move through. It is a practice of radical self-acceptance reframed as self-love.
The Method
- Notice what’s arising. Turn attention to whatever is actually present right now — an emotion, a sensation, a thought, a mood. You don’t pick a “good” target; you take whatever is here, including unpleasant or “spiritual-fail” states like irritation or apathy.
- Drop the agenda to fix it. Don’t try to dissolve, transform, or get rid of the feeling. The instruction is explicitly not to use love as a technique to make the feeling leave — that’s still rejection.
- Offer love directly. Say, silently or aloud, “I love you” — addressed to yourself / to the part of you that is feeling this. Kahn often has people place a hand on the heart and repeat it. The phrase is the simplest form; he also teaches crafting a personal love statement (your own worded affirmation of love) to anchor you in hard moments.
- Repeat and stay. Keep offering “I love you” to whatever is there, including to the resistance (“I notice I don’t believe this — I love you”). You meet each layer with the same response.
- Let it be enough. You’re not waiting for the feeling to go. If it softens, fine; if it stays, you’ve still given it the loving attention that, in Kahn’s view, it was asking for. He frames it as a daily orientation — meeting all of life this way — not only a crisis tool. (Faithful summary of the core practice; the wording “I love you” / “Whatever arises, love that” is Kahn’s. Short phrases only, not a reproduction of the book.)
Source & Lineage
Matt Kahn is a spiritual teacher and self-described empath/intuitive with a large YouTube following. He says he received the phrase “Whatever arises, love that” intuitively and tested it by walking his neighbourhood silently blessing everything he saw with love; he later built his book Whatever Arises, Love That (Sounds True, 2016) and an accompanying course around it.
The practice sits in a long devotional and contemplative lineage of meeting suffering with love rather than resistance, and it converges closely with secular self-compassion (Kristin Neff) and the acceptance/allowing stance in RAIN and mindfulness — see cross-links.
Common refinements
Using “I love you” to make the feeling leave. That’s covert rejection. Offer it because the feeling is here, not to evict it.
- Forcing sincerity. If “I love you” feels fake, say that and love the part that can’t feel it. Honesty beats performance.
- Spiritual bypass. Don’t love-over anger that’s giving real information (e.g. “this relationship harms me”). Feel it and act on what it tells you.
- Expecting a fix. It’s an orientation, not a result-producing technique; judging it by whether the feeling vanished misses the point.
- Going it alone with severe pain. For trauma, abuse, or clinical depression, this is at most an adjunct — get real support.