How To Love
Many people have no idea How to Love. They do their best but get nowhere. Either they themselves have no idea how to love, or the one whom they are attempting to love does not know how to accept being loved. Or, does not know how to love you back. So people’s attempts to love and be loved are often futile. Here are some words of wisdom that will give you a better idea of what it takes to love and be loved.
The Lies
“I can’t live without you”.
“You complete me”.
“Without you I’m nothing”.
“Never leave me”.
They sold you a beautiful lie about love.
And in your innocence, you bought the lie, took it as truth. Because everyone around you was doing the same, and you wanted to fit in, and you were so frightened of being alone, since you’d never plunged into the oceanic joy of your own aloneness and found safety there.
Nobody is coming to save you, you see. There’s no Prince on horseback and no Juliet. Nor is there a surrogate mother or “One Special Person”. There’s no messiah who will take away your pain, your feelings of emptiness, that sense of separation and abandonment that’s been with you since you were young. Nobody will be able to feel and metabolise your feelings for you, and nobody can live and die for you. There’s no one who has the power to permanently distract you. Nobody can own you or be owned.
Go Within
Your other half, your completion, is not outside of you, you see, but deep within you. It lives as your very own presence, burns like the Sun within.
So many people are looking for love. Or they are trying to hold onto a love that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Or they feel they have lost love, and they are trying to get love back, running from uncomfortable feelings of withdrawal, numbing themselves with more dreams, running further and further from themselves, in pursuit of something they will never reach, still dreaming of their “One Special Person” who will complete them, provide them with a lifetime of psychological security, be the perfect mother or father they never had on Earth.
Of course, that is not love. That’s fear, an urgent flight from aloneness.
It’s Not Love
If you can find or lose it, if you can be ‘in’ it or ‘out’ of it. Or, if it can be given to you or taken away. Also, if you have to fight for it, beg for it, manipulate yourself or others to get it. Or, if you feel you have to become worthy of it or if it hurts, then it’s the mind’s version of love. It is the lie. For if you love, you are present. That’s it.
If you love someone, you are present with them. As present with them as you are with yourself. As present as the Sun in the sky, despite the clouds, the storms, the ever-changing weather.
What Love Is Not
Do not confuse love with desire, then. Desire comes and goes. It burns brightly, or the flame extinguishes. But desire is not consistent, like love.
Do not confuse love with attraction. Attraction is beautiful, but it ebbs and flows, rises and falls like the ocean waves. It changes with the seasons, days, hours, moments. It is not ever-present, like love.
Do not confuse love with warm, pleasant feelings, even limerent feelings of being “in love”. Pleasurable feelings turn to painful ones so quickly. Love is not pleasure nor pain, it is not ecstasy nor hurt; it is the field that endures, even as the bliss fades into despair.
Do not confuse love with the urgency to possess someone or be possessed. Love is not infatuation. It is not obsessive nor compulsive. Love does not cling, and does not own anything; it is weightless, formless. It does not say “I need you for my happiness, my contentment, my life”. No, love is synonymous with freedom, with a wide-open heart, with the willingness to feel every feeling, think every thought.
First Find Love Inside
The most dangerous myth is that another person can ‘make’ you happy. No, no. Happiness, true happiness, the kind of happiness that cannot be bought or sold or neatly packaged, is identical with your own presence, which nobody can give to you, and nobody can take away.
If you look to another for happiness, you will always depend on them, always be afraid of losing them, and fear and resentment will rumble underneath your ‘love’. You’ll adapt yourself to please them, numb your thoughts and feelings, close your eyes to the truth and live in fantasy and hope. You will make yourself unhappy in order to win their love, keep them, control them. You’ll make yourself unhappy trying to make them happy… or forcing yourself to be happy. That is not love, it is an addiction to a person. It is fear masquerading as ‘romance’. It is the lie.
Beneath the Addiction
But underneath every addiction is the longing for home, for Mother in the deepest sense of the word. Find the deepest sense of home within yourself, then. Make your body your home, your breath, your belly as it rises and falls in the present moment. Find your ground in the sense of being alive. And in that place of presence, spend time with others who nourish you, who help you feel alive, who empathise with you and can validate your precious feelings. When you are not trying to win love, when you are not running from your own uncomfortable feelings, you can afford to truly love and be loved.
You are The One
Invite others into your love field; let them stay, let them leave, bow to their path, and walk your own with courage. But do not for a moment buy into the lie that salvation lies anywhere except at the very heart of your exquisite presence, the place where there’s nobody to be saved. The place where you touch life and are touched in return, moment by moment…
For you are The One, your own greatest lover, partner, friend, guru, and Mother.
And so you can say to yourself:
“I can’t live without you”.
“You complete me”.
“Without you I’m nothing”.
“Never leave me”.
~ Jeff Foster
Thanks for reading,
Psychic Madeline Rose
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To read more articles that will help you to develop your skills at taking part in a relationship, please click here. You’ll be taken to the blog for the foundation that I have begun which helps women to leave violent relationships.
You’ll find articles there that will teach you how to discern the right partner for you. Also how to maintain the relationship, or how to leave should he or she be treating you badly.
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Here’s a site where you’ll find my writings.
The Bravehearts of Belgrave High is now published. I have completed the first in a series of novels that I wrote for teens. It is the courageous story of a young girl growing up in a home filled with domestic violence. She also has to endure a school and neighbourhood full of bullies. We read how she manoeuvres her way through such a difficult situation. Plus, how she grows because of it, among other themes in the novel.
The desired outcome for young readers is that they will be inspired to treasure their unique differences. If they don’t fit in with the system or with those around them, then they should realise that it’s quite okay not to fit in.
Click here if you’d like to be taken to the site where you can purchase this novel. If you cannot see the site, use a browser other than Chrome.
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