THE BEGINNING OF LOVE

THE BEGINNING OF LOVE

IS
THE WILL
TO LET THOSE WE LOVE
BE PERFECTLY THEMSELVES,

THE RESOLUTION
NOT TO TWIST THEM TO FIT
OUR OWN IMAGE.

IF IN LOVING THEM
WE DO NOT LOVE WHAT THEY ARE,
BUT ONLY THEIR POTENTIAL LIKENESS TO OURSELVES,

     THE WE DO NOT LOVE THEM:

WE LOVE ONLY THE REFLECTION
OF OURSELVES WE FIND IN THEM.

THOMAS MERTON- NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

Have you ever asked yourself  What is love, what does it look like, how does it feel?

 

Several years ago, my friend and teacher said "I have never met a person I didn't love". At the time I thought to myself,  'wow, I can't say that!!  I have met some- quite a few in fact that I didn't love'.  Through time and even more life changing teachings and experiences I have come to realize that for me I, in fact,  had created 2 different experiences of love.

The first, the most common/ familiar  one to me, is what I call 3D love.   The love that experiences, loss, grief, jealousy, envy and self comparison thoughts, such as I am not as.....,  qualifying thoughts such as "If you loved me you would......", "if you knew me, truly knew me you wouldn't love me", "I don't deserve...   This form of love requires constant affirmation, signs that you truly love me, or that you love me as much as I love you. It also requires constant demonstration from me, that in fact I love the other, let me show you how much: by my gifts, my thoughtfulness, by doing and being whatever pleases the other.

The 2nd experience of love, came to me late in life= when, during a particularly self induced time of unhappiness where the manifestations of 3D love were not what I desired I asked myself a question "What would love do?"  In resting within that question; letting the unhappiness rise and then flow through me, the  answer was so  clear:  loving the other, truly for who they are - in the world, to their families and friends, to me- was not dependent upon what they did for me.  Truly it just was.  It exists- independent of what the other does or doesn't do.  I experienced this profound sense of expansiveness and lightness.  As if I was floating, immersed in a vast and limitless sea of unqualified love.

Now when I I think of what my friend/teacher said " I have never met a person I didn't love", I  have a different response, a different awareness.  This awareness changed my life and my experiences with others.  It has led me to choose: to be even more discerning, to be even more un-entangled, to have even more awareness of being in the present with no agenda for how others should be.  The more I reside there with conscious awareness, the more true for me the statement becomes:

                                                             

"I have never met a person I didn't love"

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