WHAT IS LOVE?

Happy Valentine's Beloved Soul Friends!

Today is the day set aside to honor love. We send flowers and chocolates to celebrate life's most important value. We immortalize romance and maybe even check our love scales asking how are we doing in the love department? Are we being given enough love? Most of us hope to be showered with the stuff and maybe feel a bit sad if no one bothers. Yet part of the benefit of traipsing through hell last year was beginning to question what love is.

Now for years, O.K., my whole life I assumed love is something you get and give. I am happy if I get more or about the same as I give and a bit pissed off/upset if I get less. Then I share my needs and you better meet them if we are in a loving relationship or else. Of course, a lot of my needs aren't crucial so now, being so mature, I can let those go. But what feel like core needs, that you show me you love me and it better be the way I say it should look, no way Jose am I letting those go without a fight. Well, I can't help but notice it ain't going all that great even on those key needs. Because I can't help but witness that sometimes someone else can meet them and sometimes they might just not feel like it. And I notice I can sometimes meet the needs of others with joy and grace and sometimes I can't. So what's the deal? Now I am left without? That's no fun.

So we've heard it over and over, love is who we are, the treasure is within. Don't look where you can't find it. Yet our whole culture celebrates the romantic view of love. Give it to me or I am empty. Take it from me and I must grieve if I really love you. Hum. What I notice is then I am back in puppet-land  victimville. At any moment my Beloved can jerk my chain and put me in pain. Hum? Doesn't sound very liberating.

My Beloved better never be in a bad mood. My offspring better never be mercurial because it might hurt my feelings. Hum? How do I love and get out of this pickle?

I read something the other day that blew me out of the water. I tried to re-find  the quote and was frightened when I couldn't locate it as it had created a mind-quake. Found it, get ready. Lester Levenson says in the Ultimate Truth, “You will discover that happiness-your happiness, equates to you capacity to love, and conversely, all your miseries equate to your need to be loved.” What????? I thought that was the name of the game. If I am truly honest, haven’t I often been playing the tit for tat game; you give me some love and then I’ll give you some but don’t you dare yank your love or I’ll dump you like a hot potato. I love you but if you are mean or cruel to me, I hate you. I can’t help but recognize that doesn’t feel very loving. But this blows the lid on what I thought love was; no more romance and flowers as the foundation of love? If I had read that quote a year ago, I would either just have been confused or I would have skipped over it. But this last year has made me humble and hungry. I am ready for the real thing. Since I know intellectually it is within me and I can’t be separated from it, apparently it is time to walk my talk. So that means when my Beloved doesn’t want to meet my needs, I don’t even feel sad. I accept it out of the fullness of my being and move on, meet my own need, opps, don’t even have any needs, ideally, that I expect someone else to meet. Not to have needs is not to be human.  Obviously I am not there yet but now I get the game. The game is to meet my own need for love by always adoring myself and let the love spill over, creating a love wave that always returns to me. Now I can’t help but see I keep lifting the bar on love. Just do this one thing with me and I’ll feel loved. Well, now I am use to that, so just one more thing. I recognize I only do that in what the Course in Miracles calls my “special relationship," the one I put all my eggs in, the one that makes me feel safe and loved. The rest of you I can give more breathing room.

Yes, this is my central issue, the one I was born to heal. Each of us comes in with our own special flavor of believing something outside of ourselves is causing us to suffer. I am ready to let them all go. So that means when Beloved chooses not to meet my needs, I feel my stomach drop out, tears come to my eyes and I allow that!! No story, no hatred, no judgment, no fire energy directed to them. Just allow, grieve how deeply I have believed I am not loved, give compassion to myself. I tell the truth about what I am feeling. And then I am free! I am not miserable. No one can yank my chain because I don’t have one. Yippee! Until then, I allow, allow, allow. 

I wrote in my first blog in November “Where’s the keys?” about my lived experience of KNOWING what I am writing about, KNOWING love as the ground of my being. I knew it for a few hours. The longest I have known it, with all my being, was about three days. I must accept that the KNOWING  comes and goes. I must accept that I still feel separation, a distance between me and love. I must love myself even though I can’t fully love. I guess that is what love is for me now, as they say, a journey without distance. I am glad I am not walking it alone.

The whole thing seems to be a giant paradox. What motivates us on the way is our need to be loved, our bottomless yearning. It prods and pokes us not to give up. Apparently at some point we really get it and feel whole, love flows and we no longer need it. Like is attracted to like and then we  are showered with love. It is my experience that the more I follow this way, the more that laughter, joy, connection, yes, even love is showing up in my life. Of course, I don’t stay in relationships where the other person is not interested in my needs and preferences, is unwilling to give or care for me. But I do not make another my Source. So I will use that carrot to keep me moving, knowing that when I finally get there, that which I have sought sometimes so desperately will be something I no longer need, rather something I am. Go figure. Like I always say, let’s ride the wave and enjoy it.