Their eyes meet across a crowded room. She falls deeply into his fiery gaze…. We all know the rest of the story, although we may travel different roads to journey’s end. The news headlines would read something like this, “The spark of impersonal love turns to hell” or ‘Husband and wife live happily ever after. Or do they?”
So what happens between the promise of true love and the reality of relationship? We meet the potential for love in another. We recognise its potency. We make the commitment. We go through hell to keep love. We lose love. Then we ask “Where did love go?” We blame ourselves, or each other. We look for love anew, or we give up. In spite of ourselves this is the calling that draws us again and again.
The potency of intimate love has a different quality than the love of a friend or family member. It brings the spark of intimate connection into a living reality. This is what we long for - a meeting of the totality of body, mind and emotion that takes us into unknown realms. In intimate partnership lies the potential for a living expression of the deepest connection two human beings may know. This is our yearning – to know ourselves intimately through the love of another.
Intimacy is the gateway to our most vulnerable places – for it opens up the longing to be met completely and also our deepest fears. When we open our hearts and offer our bodies to another, the potential is there to touch our deepest expression. In our loving, the layers of personality, the masks and the roles fall away and we move towards the core of our connectedness. It is an unsafe place yet truly we are on sacred ground, the tender and delicate flowering of love. In the flame of such love the potential is to lose who we are and all sense of ‘other’. In this merging, in the giving and receiving, we do not know where I end and you begin. We disappear into love.
When we enter love’s heart we risk annihilation, abandonment, the disintegration of 'my life'. We enter the unknown. To be in intimate partnership is to open ourselves to everything such a union brings. After the freshness of new love has faded it can be a minefield of highs and lows, reaction and disconnection. In this place we either settle for compromise, we go our separate ways, or we endeavour to navigate our way through the treacherous swamp of his and her differing reactions to life together; to find our way back to the love we know is there. This seems to be a falling out of love, yet love remains, beneath the surface storms and tension. It takes real commitment and courage, tenderness and honesty to step deeper into the fire of being together. When we do, we take the journey to the centre of love’s heart, into the fire of deep transformation.
In this place we need to be vigilant, literally to be the guardian of love. It is easy to forget the spark that drew us together, to play the roles of lovers, to get caught up in the drama of our daily lives, rather than simply being love. We get to know each other, not in the unfolding wonder and joy of growing together as man and woman, but in the habitual. We begin to impose our needs on one another, losing our love in routine and habit. Intimacy disappears when we lose respect for its fragility, its need of nurture and tenderness. We fail to cherish the flower of our union.
It is a rare partnership that does not face this challenge.
For most of us it is easier to get comfortable than to live on the edge. To live in love is definitely on the edge. When love is new we are totally unsafe; we do not know how she will respond to me, or whether he will stay. Our loving is innocent and fresh. We do not take him or her, or love, for granted. Certainly to live on the edge is daunting - but it is alive. It takes courage and honesty, a responsibility not to use or abuse, a commitment to move deeper in our partnership, unfolding in the infinite profundity of love.
To truly evolve as conscious human beings the wake-up call that reveals our laziness and irresponsibility to love must be heard – before it is too late. Whether we are in partnership or not the crossing is to step over the threshold and embrace fully the un-love that comes up for us to transform. The fact that disharmony arises reveals that we are ready to go deeper. It is love’s blessing and shows that we are loving well. For that is the purpose of intimacy – to take us deeply into love and to bring up that which requires transformation.
This is where understanding of intimacy deepens. It is not always sweet and loving. Its real purpose is to transform, to take us into a profound understanding of what this union with another and with love is. Have you noticed that when we make the sweetest love it may be followed by bickering, assertion of independence, or some other separation? When we step into love deeply it brings everything to our door to be loved. Failures, doubt, fear, every place we have not been living love arrives to be transformed. Intimacy can be terrible when we have to face the honesty of another, or the necessary death of the habitual. It takes us into places we cannot go alone.
In this place of real intimacy we are both catalyst and a doorway for each other. For he or she is the mirror of both the profundity of love within myself and my lack of love. When transformation knocks on our door, if we are wise, we recognize what is really happening – that emotion or separation may be triggered by a current event but the energy in it comes from the past. Past dressed up as old lovers, family, and conditioning deep within the human psyche. Being in love is to be responsible for love, not to hold on to what is arising but to be love. Being love means to be present, to be tender and to express with honesty and vulnerability. This is intimacy with un-love. This is living love. When we live as love we close the gap between past and present. The gap is our separation from self, and the reflection of that as separation from another and from love.
It is in complete abandonment to the deepest loving that the pain of separation arises. It is inevitable; for in giving our all to love, we call up the deepest unconsciousness. This is the place intimacy beckons; the place where we would rather hide than be vulnerable, where we want to control, where we doubt and judge, where we do not trust. This is the darkness of past experience and conditioning. Love asks that we bring this darkness into its heart - to be as intimate with anger as with passion, to be tender with fear and doubt, to be honest to love. For here lies the promise of intimacy; it is in the embrace of our darkness that we will realise the true profundity of love.
Article printed in Rainbow News, December 2007 issue
Happy ever After? the myth & reality of relationship
In every human heart there is a deep longing for love.We experience it as one of the deepest impulses of our humanness. Primarily we know this longing as the call to relationship.
Intimate partnership is one of the greatest love experiments a human being can undertake. To know love with another is an attraction and motivation arising in adolescence that directs our adult lives both consciously and instinctively.From the primal urge to mate to the deep longing to experience a union beyond our limited selves, we follow love’s call.Intimacy beckons and we are drawn by its magnetism.
Beneath the surface attraction to love lays the teeming whirlpool of legend, myth and fairy tale that have informed the human psyche for centuries.Our pull to relationship, although seemingly arising from a conscious motivation to find love, is deeply influenced not only by our personal experience but by this vast reservoir of unconscious symbolism within the human psyche. When it comes to love the ‘happy ever after’ theme is one that definitely informs our relationships – whether knowingly or not. Despite our often painful experience of loving another and in the triumph of hope over memory, when it comes to love we believe in ‘happy ever after’. Somewhere deep within us we recognise the potential for an everlasting love, one that will not leave our dreams wrecked and our hearts broken.We are aware of a potential for love that we have not reached yet; one that holds a promise of redemption and ultimate union.
So where is this elusive love that we discern but struggle to attain?The love that we touch sometimes in our attraction to man or woman.Is it out there somewhere, in some body?And if it is, is the search for love doomed to end in heartbreak, or in the dullness of security and familiarity?
The modern myth
Our modern culture has brought us to a place of endless searching.The promise of fulfillment dangled like a carrot before the donkey’s nose – buy this, earn that, entertain yourself here, escape there.Everywhere the promise of happiness is flaunted through something we can have, strive for or attain.Even the spiritual path has taken on the search for some elusive mystical experience or enlightenment that will bring completion. Fortunately many of us are recognising this modern myth of fulfillment through success, materialism or gain for the individual.Yet when it comes to love we fall again and again into the same trap. Somewhere within ourselves we close our eyes to the obvious truth - that nothing external can truly fulfill us.
Our search for love is a fool’s errand. Yet isn’t this what we have been taught?That all happiness, i.e. love, or the good in life, is the result of an exterior event or object (objects including people). Yet it only takes a moment to recognize that in truth anything good, including love, is experienced within.This is where we know it.The catalyst for love may seem to be external (a man or woman, my child, my new car, a beautiful sunset) yet the only place we know love is inside. It is not that we cannot experience love with or from another, but to recognise where the source of that love is. Another can reflect the love we are and share its expression but they cannot fill our inner emptiness – for inevitably, they will leave or fail us.Hence our cry of “You don’t love me” when they act in a way that does not conform to how we think love should look; hence the potential that we are deeply loved by another, yet may not feel it.
Reclaiming responsibility
So what is the answer to this inner/outer dilemma?
Many of us are aware that we have lost the heartfelt knowing of being in touch with our deepest essence. Yet still we seek to fill our emptiness from the transient nature of external experience rather than from the inner well that is always available to us. When our primary fantasy is that love is here to fill us, to meet ‘my’ needs, wants and desires, or the alternative (but the same) to fulfill the needs of another, we will always fall short of knowing authentic love.For authentic love is beyond the person or the personal.
Here is where we meet the paradox of love. For authentic love can be known through the personal. When we recognize our innate accountability for love as individuals - that no-one else is going to do it for us - we open the door to living love. It becomes our personal living experience of life. The key is in the acknowledgment that we are responsible for bringing love to this earth through word and action – not as some soft, emotional experience but in the living of our deepest knowing of truth.Truth that serves the whole of life and not personal gain.It is simple really – for we all know when there is something in it for ourselves. And when there is, does that deeply satisfy or nourish us? Whereas in making the commitment to live as love, love becomes our living experience. It turns up in the most unlikely places. And when love appears to have left us, we are held by the knowing that it is always there – hidden beneath the current experience, within the transformation of our self-centeredness.
In the recognition of our collective delusions about love can we move on to a more real experience of what it is to love and be loved? This is our current evolution.When we are prepared to take the perilous journey into the heart of love, despite its bringing us to the door of disillusionment again and again, a different knowing of love opens. This is a love beyond ‘you’ and ‘me’, a love that takes us beyond what we know.It is the love that is our very essence, hidden beneath the many ideas, beliefs and concepts we have about its nature.To open this love requires our willingness to live love.
The paradox is this – whilst we search for love in another, or for personal gratification, we will never know ‘happy ever after’.When we recognize that love is our very essence, the potential for ‘happy ever after’ is real.Not as an exterior love or a happy experience (for both inevitably will change or die) but as heartfelt connection, a vibrant, living participation in life.
Article published in Soulseeker magazine April/May 2008
Growing in Authentic Love
It is easy to see that we are at crisis point in many aspects of modern life.Relationship is probably more challenging now than it has ever been. With both the genuine calling to live our fullest potential as individuals and the many distractions away from love and being loved, many of us are struggling to maintain relationship.No matter how hard we try love eludes us, or at best it is a temporary state.Do we even know what love is?
We have come to use the word ‘love’ to mean anything we feel good about. Love is pleasure, love is what we fall into, love is giving, love is receiving, what he needs, what she wants; our notions of love are endless.We mistake it for sex, comfort, security and emotion. How do we even know that we love?Or how much we love?Can we measure it?We may try to but what is the gauge?We profess to love another but are we mistaken when we proclaim “I love you”?Should we really be saying “I need you?” Do we believe that love just happens?Or is it something we make, or work at?
If we look at love purely in term of relationship, we see that even in intimacy love is variable to our highs and lows, circumstances and the actions of others. We play the shallow games of co-dependence or we kill love with lack of true care, sentimentality and emotion.Many of us are recognizing this and trying to fix our relationships, but without one vital recognition; life is asking us to find a completely new way of loving.
When we look at the core of how we love today we will see that despite our greater awareness often we relate from a place of needing or wanting something from another.This is where life is asking us to move on. Whilst we look for the love of another to fill our sense of inner lack we will never be truly fulfilled.For how can two lacks make a whole? We may think that our lack is compensated by another’s qualities (the two of us making one whole) but that is the illusion.For we have the capacity to be living our fullest potential as individuals; to become whole ourselves. And to see that reflected in our love of each other. To encourage each other in the best we can be, to challenge each other with real honesty, to love each other deeply for the vulnerability inherent in our humanness. It’s not that we have to be perfect; it is to embrace greater honesty rather than defense in our failure to love; it is to bring compassion to our humanness.
Life is asking us to be conscious in our lives.To ask ourselves questions such as “Where am I coming from in this communication?” “Am I relating from a position of being right?” “Am I truly open to hearing what is being said?” We know when we are being selfish, judgmental or indifferent.It is back to good old-fashioned responsibility but from a new perspective.Response-ability.Surely we would rather settle our differences in a response-able place of genuine honesty and communication rather than through conflict, blame, resentment and all those other worn-out emotional reactions?If we’re honest most of us know we have outgrown them. We just don’t know what else to do.
In this is great power – for as individuals learning what it is to love authentically we can make a real difference to life. In fact it is only the individual that makes the difference.We know that whilst we all wait for someone else to do it, nothing happens. This is not a gradual evolution but a leap into the new. It is to discover a way of living love that will resolve every issue, familial, social and environmental. For when we resolve the core issue of our relationships with one another everything else will come into its right place.What do we have to do?It is simple – love ourselves and love each other from a place of real honesty. Then quite naturally we will care for our fellow human beings; we will care for our environment. For we will recognize no man is an island, that what happens to one is only a heartbeat away from another. Then it won’t take a tsunami to wake us up; our awakening to a new way of love will be a natural evolution of our desire to grow as human beings.
Published in Soul Quisine June 08
For the Love of Self ~ A Quest Worth Making?
In my offering in last month’s Soul Quisine entitled ‘Growing in Authentic Love’, I wrote about the evolution of the individual’s capacity to love. I shared how I see the foundation for loving another is clearly love of oneself, for if we are unable to love ourselves how can we really love anyone else?In this current article I would like to explore with you what loving oneself might be.Published in Soul Quisine July 08
For years many of us have been hearing that old truism “You need to love yourself more”, but what does it mean actually to love oneself?We have many ideas, just as we have ideas about what it is to love another, but are they realistic; do they actually make a difference to who we are or to our relationship with others?
If we look to our history for guidance, the past of personal experience, we may believe that to love ourselves is to meet every want or need that arises; to move on from being a child and become our own parent. This is certainly part of the quest for love.The inability to take care of ourselves, to motivate, inspire and encourage is a poor foundation for love.The conditioning we have taken on in our innocence has to be transformed if we are to mature. Our modern way of life paves the way for this maturing process, for it gives us the opportunity for fulfillment of our physical needs and the potential for intellectual and emotional well-being.If love means having what we need or want, in theory our modern lives should be happy; we should feel love or loved. Yet if anything we are searching more deeply for love now than ever before.
So we turn our desire for love to the search for relationship, the partner who will on some level complete us.We fall into love; we get what we want or need (to a greater or lesser degree), the feel-good of receiving another’s love; there is a period of fulfillment and then it is gone.This is the next phase of our growth. We are coming to know that love (or more truly, what we think of as love) is a temporary state. Many of us are recognizing that even with material satisfaction, creative fulfillment, or love of another we are still searching for that vital yet elusive ‘something’ that will answer our prayers and fulfill us eternally. The recognition of this quest is our current point of evolution. We are discovering the futility of thinking love is anything external - that which constantly changes or leaves.
If love exists only briefly through fulfillment on a material, emotional or creative level; if it is only fleeting through relationship with another, where is it? This is the current phase of exploration for us as human beings. It is to turn our search for love inside out, literally; it is to take the plunge deeply into our inner realms.
Looking within – if we dare - what is our experience right now?Is it a well of nourishment, of love for ourselves and our fellow beings, or is it mostly ups and downs, periods of feeling good when life is stable and going our way; irritable, tense and moody when it’s not?Is love here, in the changeability of mental states and emotions?And is it possible to find a deeper knowing of self and love beyond these ever-moving states? This is the journey on which many of us are now embarking. Leaving behind the search for love outside ourselves and turning within. It is certainly an exploration of learning to follow the call of inspiration rather than duty, living with passion and greater openness to life’s magic. Discovering what fills our well and allows us to overflow to others. Yet to stop here is a fool’s paradise for unless we keep moving deeper inevitably inspiration grows stale, passion for life dries up and the well runs dry.Life’s call leaves no stone unturned when it comes to love.
Going deeper still reveals the love that opens our self-mastery; the mastery of mental conditioning and emotional indulgence that no longer serves our growth as evolving beings.This is the potential opening to us now. The opportunity to put our former ignorance behind us, to leave it alone because we see what it does in our lives, causing conflict, separation and pain. We discover how to put our former un-love in its rightful place - not through judgment but through honesty and compassion. What do I mean by un-love? It is judgment, competition, envy and all those energies within us that separate us from our own centre and one from another. And where is its rightful place?It is to put those energies behind us; to recognize we’ve outgrown them. We transform through a balance of acceptance and awareness, seeing where we’re stuck in habits and patterns of behavior that no longer serve our growth into love and letting them go with true compassion and forgiveness. They have served our quest well and now it is time for them to go.
It takes courage, willingness and passion to keep unfolding into a new way of being. Painful as it is, often the known is more comfortable than the unknown.Yet if we truly desire to know love it is time to jump. We have the capacity to be so much more than our current experience of ourselves.In fact we already are so much more than what we know ourselves to be; it’s just that we keep giving energy to the old identities - the ‘poor me’, the child who hasn’t grown up, the victim who wants to make everyone else responsible - instead of allowing the new to open within us and express in our lives.
Only when we forgive ourselves, when we embrace our un-love from a place of radical honesty (recognizing this aspect no longer serves growing love) and compassion (without judgment for what we have been or done) can we make the difference. Our maturing process needs an expanded dynamic. We grow physically but are we growing fully within?We need to see that trying to wear the shoes of our childhood or of our adolescent pain, does not work, for they no longer fit.Yet we try to squeeze them on anyway and it is this very contraction into our former smallness that causes us pain.
When it comes to deep-seated emotional habits we do have awareness but maybe we resist moving on, or we keep trying to change or heal them. Our quest for love encourages us to keep uprooting the past, opening, letting go, unfolding, growing and thriving. Everything in life grows into new form or stagnates, expanding itself or dying – this is the natural movement of life. We are no different.
So what is the key to self-love? It is the willingness to look within, to accept responsibility for everything we experience, to let go and move on. This is maturity. It is simple; to recognize where we need deeper honesty and greater compassion for what we’ve done and where we’ve been, to forgive our ignorance and most vital, to make the commitment not to live from it. Ignorance lies in our lack of self-worth, competition and conflict – all those places we feel we are incomplete. They are like ruts in the road that we keep falling into. We’ve played those games; we know they don’t work. It’s time to pull ourselves out of the rut and move on.The question is, do we want to?
If we do, the way of self-love is clear. Evolving through experience, we learn what works in our lives and what doesn’t. We surrender or discard the old ways of being to make for the new.And how does the new look?That is the mystery; for we cannot know, until it arrives. Then, like falling in love, it opens in the least expected way. This is the thrill of being alive that we truly love.It requires our letting go of the known and falling into the unknown, which is love.For let’s face it, isn’t love the unknown?Isn’t love a mystery?We can’t know it but we can be it, for ourselves and maybe for others. Perhaps that’s why we are here; to discover the self-mastery that lives as love. Now that’s a quest worth making.
Published in Soul Quisine July 08
Looking for love?
There is an ancient saying that says “If you would be loved, then first love”.
Similarly to enjoy real friendship we have to be a friend. We know this and act in our friendships accordingly. So why is it when it comes to partnership we are still looking for ‘the one’ who can love us? Despite all the fairy-tales we know in our hearts that we will not find love until we are willing to love.
To be willing to love is to action love in our lives. Whether in partnership or not because our conscious focus is to love, it becomes our experience. Then when he or she comes to share it our love is mirrored back to us; love grows. And when it’s not reflected, we still have the ability to know it within our lives.
Where do we start? Right where we are… and right now. Thinking about being loving doesn’t work. It’s a bit like the diet we never start. Putting off until tomorrow what we can start right now we miss the mark. We fail ourselves in the very place we have power for real change. We forego the power of deep-seated transformation through indifference or laziness, preferring the cycle of intention, self-judgment and guilt, than the power of real participation in life and love.
Full participation in life requires our radical action. The two qualities that will bring us the love we seek are acceptance and the willingness to stretch ourselves beyond our perceived limitations. Acceptance of all the places we fail to be our fullest potential and where we see another apparently fail us, and the willingness to forego those old ways of being. The balance of compassion and purpose in our lives provides us with the principles for being love for ourselves. It’s like a mother and father with a child – holding and supporting, guiding and challenging. We bring ourselves into maturity, where the potential of a truly loving partnership beyond dependence arises. Then we stop looking for love because we know where to find it.
'If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,' Nikka - age 6
It takes courage, willingness and passion to keep unfolding into a new way of being. Painful as it is, often the known is more comfortable than the unknown.