The Journey to Love
Love is not pleasure;
Love is not desire.
When there is love there is no image.

To understand what true love is, we must understand our present attitude, thought, and action towards love.
If you truly thought about it you would see that our love is based on possessiveness, and our laws and ethics are founded on this desire to hold and to control.
How can there be deep love when there is this desire to possess, to hold? When the mind is free from possessiveness, then there is that loveliness, the bliss of love.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I came across this quote from Krishnamurti today and the synchronicity of it all brought a smile to my face as just this week I've been exploring my own definition of love and came to the same conclusion about control and possessiveness and how in the past, they created a plethora of emotions which I often associated with love.

We have this confusion in our "love" towards our partners, towards our children, towards our parents, our friends and even our pets. What seems to happen is we project onto others our own expectations of what and who they should be and so long as they keep meeting the criteria we've labelled them with, we experience the bliss of being in what we think is love. What it is instead is yet another way our EGO tries to control life.

Why do we project onto others? It all comes down to our primary love relationship which self love. Through my countless coaching discussions, regular conversation with friends and through my own reflection, I can sense a deep seeded longing for something more. There is a part of us that knows there is more to life than our day to day experiences are leading us to believe but we don't know where to look for it so we try to find it in that new car or house, we try to find it in that next drink and most commonly, we try to fill that void through our relationships with others. What we don't realize is that the moment we enter those relationships, we are not entering them with an intention to love, however real it may seem. We are entering those relationships to use the other person...we are using them because subconsciously we believe they have the secret ingredient that will fill that deep longing that we have burning inside us.

How does this all impact our beloved? Instead of providing unconditional love and support, we provide a conditional pseudo love as long as the person fits into our box of what we deem acceptable in our projection of them. We never really love them, we love the idea of them that we've created in our heads...the idea based on filling the void that exists within ourselves. I call is pseudo love because its base is not love at all, but fear. True love contributes to the freedom of the beloved not constrains it. When this false love takes hold, feelings of jealousy, uneasiness and insecurity creep forward and mix with the elation of being "in love" leading to a potent emotional cocktail that starts up the rollercoaster.

What is the way out of this draining pattern?

Self Love

It sounds clich but it is truly impossible to love someone until self love is realized. Our minds may look at that statement and agree that we are there but is this really true in practice? Be deeply honest with yourself.

Getting to the place of self love requires some time and space to truly connect and fall in love with the person you see in the mirror everyday. As Rumi said so beautifully, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." Watch any young child and you soon realize we are love when we come into this world but circumstances lead us to add all sorts of protective layers which protect us from the outside world but also have the effect of hiding our true selves from us. We forget over time that these layers are even there and that causes the deep longing within us to emerge...it is a longing to connect with our natural state of love. When we realize again that we are love, we no longer seek it from others.

How do we reconnect with our natural state of love? Two ways that I've found to be really helpful in my own journey have been expressing gratitude and meditation.

Expressing gratitude is a great way to get into the energy of self love. Keep a journal next to your bed and every morning write out 5 things you are grateful for and really get into the feeling of being grateful with each point. Notice what happens to your internal state. Rather than looking to the external world to get you going, you will have a self sufficient engine to get you going with the right frame of mind and heart.

Meditation is also a very important way to reconnect with the love within you. How can we truly love this person we see in the mirror everyday if we don't really know who we are seeing at a deeper level?
Meditation is an amazing way to quiet the mind and connect with yourself at that deeper level of awareness. It is at these deeper level s of awareness that you can truly get a handle for how powerful, loving and present you really are. There are enough forms of meditation out there to take away all the objections people have about taking the time for this practice. Try it out for 2 weeks and gauge how you feel.

How does a heightened sense of self love influence relationships?

True love for another involves allowing them the freedom to live out their soul's path with unconditional acceptance. It frees them and you from the burden of expectations and allows their light to shine as it was meant to be. Wouldn't it be amazing to enter into a relationship which allowed you to fully be you and helped you feel even more freedom than you did prior to the relationship? In the current definition of love, freedom and purpose are often sacrificed for the relationship because we think they can't all co-exist.
This way of being frees you from the dramas and emotional rollercoasters of someone constantly not meeting your narrow expectations and it frees your beloved to be as they are with no pressure to conform to anything other than their natural soul's path. This way of being was counterintuitive to me at first because I never associated love with letting go. I had fallen into the trap of trying to hold on to it tightly because it was such an amazing feeling. I realize now that this was a selfish love and by definition was not love at all but addiction to the emotion of being in love.

I write this blog not as an expert by any means in this subject matter. I write this blog as a fellow traveller sharing the insights from my own journey in the hopes that it may help others on their own journeys through life, love and self awareness.