Thoughts on Love:

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." ~Rumi

I find it interesting that the more aware I become, the more I recognize that nothing we attempt to accomplish in this lifetime can ever be accomplished without love. Love is the actual creative force of the universe. Love allows everything else to happen -- only love allows us to see who we really are and what our true capabilities are. The mind, or ego, only lets us see our self in terms of how the world sees us. Without love, what we project to the world through our ego is self-limiting and, therefore, it's the most we can ever expect from others.

Without love, we have nothing: no creative energy, no compassion, no forgiveness, and certainly no trust -- we have literally no way to contribute anything valuable to anyone, least of all ourselves. Life becomes a void, something to stumble through each day.

When we open our self up to love, there are no guarantees we'll find the love of our life, but we will experience life in a whole new way. Our true self, the loving self will emerge -- this is who we were meant to be. This is the energy, the life, the very essence of the universe, flowing through us and it brings us back to where we began.

What is a key to opening our hearts to love? Between two people in a relationship, it's allowing ourselves to trust the other person's love of us enough to be open and honest (vulnerable) with them in the relationship. What separates one from the other are a series of walls between them. What builds those walls? Fear, ego, lack of trust, a fear of intimacy, and a fear of being totally vulnerable all contribute to walls. They're ego-based and for self-protection. We can't love through or from behind walls.

When two people love each other, they have to trust enough in their love to open their hearts and show their vulnerability. Everyone has a dark side. We all have things we bury deep, things we've shared with no one. We don't want to bring them out into the light because they're painful and we fear being judged. In a relationship, we even fear our partner may condemn us for these things and leave. Again, this is the ego trying to enslave us.

To love the way the universe intends, the ego must be put aside. One by one, the walls have to come down over time for growth to occur in a relationship. Holding back is only our ego covering for our own fears -- the fear of being totally honest, and the fear of rejection. Love is a lot stronger than we give it credit for -- love grows, (no, thrives!) in the intimacy of open hearts. That's what we humans call unconditional love. Mutual respect grows by knowing your partner's faults, granting forgiveness, and feeling their pain. It gives a renewed closeness -- with the freedom to give our understanding and compassion, we can also forgive ourselves and as a result, it cleanses us and deepens love. As a secondary gift, as a result of mutual acceptance and deeper love, it brings renewed self-love to us.

There is an old saying that mama used to say a lot when I was growing up: "To thine own self be true." It wasn't until recently that I really understood what she meant. I believe another key to opening our heart to love is self-acceptance. We have to first be honest with ourselves, but no matter where we are at any particular moment, it's right for us at that time.