It may seem strange, given my childhood, that I would be teaching about love or as some say “embodying love”. But it is so. I was born on Valentines Day ironically to a woman who could not love me. Three days after I was born, my mother left me in a New York hospital and fled to Europe. Not knowing what to do with an abandoned baby, the hospital eventually contacted my grandparents and they took me in.
This may not seem like the most auspicious beginning for a spiritual teacher that teaches about and through love. But it actually is. Because I couldn’t find love on the outside in those who were supposed to love me, I was forced to find it within. And I did. Even as a very young child when I was alone I often felt filled with a powerful love I couldn’t understand. When I first heard the word God, I came to think of this experience as the “presence of God”.
I didn’t feel this inner love all the time. Often, especially in my early childhood, my life was filled with terror, neglect and abuse. But the deep experience of this inner love pointed me in a direction that eventually blossomed as an awakening to my True Unlimited Self. And you might say this True Unlimited Self is love itself.
What is completely obvious to me, is not so obvious to most people. Most people continue to search for love outside in relationships with other people. And this is both entirely understandable and beautiful. There is a limited aspect of this deep inner love that is reflected in our loving relationships. Even a limited aspect of this love is wonderful and worth pursuing. And if followed with awareness, this limited love can actually lead you to the infinite love that is always here. It can lead you to awakening. Just as it did for me.
For the love you experience with others to lead you to awakening, you must realize where this love is coming from. You must understand that this experience of love is happening in you. When you turn your attention inward to the true source of this love, you will discover that it is always here. It was here before you met your beloved. And it will be here after your beloved is gone. It is always here. You have simply been distracted by your conditioned thinking. It is as if you have gone through life wearing blinders that prevent you from seeing what is the most obvious thing in the world. You ARE love itself. When you meet your beloved and fall in love, a small piece of these blinders have been temporarily removed and you can see life more clearly than you did before. That is why everyone and everything now looks like love. You might say when you fall in love you fall into reality, at least a limited version of it.
As we all know there is a honeymoon phase to falling in love. After the honeymoon phase things are not quite so beautiful. This isn’t because reality reasserts itself. This is because the blinders have come back on. Life itself really is as beautiful as it feels when you first fall in love. And much more so. That is the awakened consciousness. When you fall in love, you get a brief, limited, temporary view of life. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Well, that’s what life is really like. Only way more so.
The experience of falling in love can bring us to this realization as long as we don’t get distracted and disoriented, which we always do. This should be obvious when, after a relationships ends, we often feel despondent because we believe this love we feel is somehow outside us in our partner and when they leave us so does the love. And, because of this belief, this great loss of love is what we experience. How tragic. How painful. And still, even this great suffering can lead us back to awakening and this inner love if we begin looking in the right direction. I have been teaching people to do this for years now.
The deep truth that this inner love reveals is that there is no separation and never has been. True unconditional love is simply the direct experience of this lack of all separation. The limited experience of love that we find in relationships is usually conditional love. When conditions are met, there is love. When these conditions are not met, love is gone. This is why we often experience love in relationships as having ups and downs, good days and bad days. Unconditional love is not like this. There are no conditions. Unconditional love, this deep inner love, simply is. There are no ups and downs, no good days and bad days. It is always here. It is always fully here.
When we bring this deep, unconditional inner love to a relationship it is miraculous. It is deeply healing. It heals everyone and everything that get close to it. And it has a magnetic attraction. But what we love in the other person is not so much the other person, their individuality, their ego, but this love itself. You might say we don’t fall in love with a person; we fall in love with love itself. This experience of lack of separation includes egos to be sure, but it is much, much more than this. It is always aware of the whole, of the entirety. And that is love.
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