LOVE
Perceived & perceiver
Love. We are all trying to find love, get love, give love, be love. As the New Year arises and people set their intentions it is clearly evident that every intention is simply a call, cry, or plea for love. For love to be felt and lived. For love to be seen, experienced, rested into and breathed moment to moment. For the heart to be flung open, consuming all that is inside of it. The hunger for lived love is palpable, more palpable than ever before on this planet.
How do we fall so fully into love? How do we let love consume us completely? How do we vow and unshakably commit to remain in love no matter what? Love is the natural state. It is the truth. It is pure, it is free and it is contentless. Everything that appears is what we put on top of love. Labels, definitions, stories, worldly desires, rules, ideas, constructs, people, relationships, etc are all made out of love, yet these things can cloud our vision if we lose sight of the substance from which they are made. When we get caught in the appearance and forget the essence we feel disconnected from love. When we feel disconnected it’s not that love has gone anywhere, its simply that we’ve shifted our focus from love to an assumed object or thing instead.
To stay acutely focused on the nature of a perceived thing or object rather than to focus on the object itself is the gateway into seeing, knowing, remembering and resting into Love. At times some of the appearances that arise inside of our human experience do not feel or seem to be made out of love. They seem to be made out of some other substance because we wonder how something that hurts, looks ugly, smells bad or is clearly unkind could be made out Love. There is however no other substance in the universe for anything to be made up out of so how could anything be other than this primordial essence that we call love.
Rather than the thing/appearance itself not being love it is instead the observer, judger or subject that deems it so, meaning it is you that deems it so. You as the decider of what you see decide what you see. It is a worthwhile self-investigation to thoroughly assess what you include and what you un-include as love. That which you view as made up of something other than love is where the jewels of healing wait for you. It is in the seeing of what you keep outside, different or other than love that gives you the answer to the question of how to remain in love no matter what. Acceptance of all, even that which we do not understand brings us deeper and deeper into love’s all encompassing embrace.
EVER PRESENT LOVE
Seeing what already is
When you’ve lost connection to the heart re-connecting can be instantaneous or it can be a long drawn out process. It simply depends on how long you want to insist that a particular flavor or experience is something other than love. Sometimes that flavor which we resist to include in love is our own self. Perhaps its something about our body or the way we look, what value we feel we contribute or not, or a personality trait we have or don’t have. Whatever it is, we view its presence or lack therefore, as an indicator of something that is not love.
As you move deeper into acceptance, and in particular self-acceptance, you can’t not begin to see the perfected everything of allness. All of your own and others idiosynchronicities, behaviors, thoughts and perspectives seem to matter less and less and the illuminated background of them comes more into view. This is a purification process where the distilled compound that remains is the natural essence that was always there, but simply covered from view by you.
See situations can stay the same, sensations can be as they are, thoughts can keep their limited view and yet you can come to see beyond them. Rather than the incessant impulse to change them you can’t but help to fall in love with them just as they are. The inner battle quiets down as the clarity of the power of love to recognize itself becomes evident. When love wakes up to love, meaning when you realize your nature as love, when you see the truth, then nothing is left out and nothing needs or could be different than it is.
Love is always here, always accessible, even in the darkest of places in our minds. Its not a matter of creating love, generating love, or becoming more love because all of those things are actually impossible. You couldn’t be more love than you are right now. There couldn’t be more love in the world than there is now. Creation is love itself. We can’t put love into creation, we can only see that it is already there and end the delusion in our minds that it is not.
Anytime we hope for something we push it away because we fail to see that it’s already here. This goes for love. Anytime we hope that we will feel more love or that the world will be a more loving place we push away that reality. The only real “change” naturally takes place through the seeing of what already is here, not by attempting to make it different. Difference occurs, change happens, through recognition of the essence of all being love, not through force or power over. We must wake up to see love now in every situation, thought, feeling, sensation, image, idea, concept, word, person, dynamic and the entirety of creation. It is through this recognition, this seeing of Self, that the natural harmonious interplay of all the dancing pieces and parts can be seen. When one sees itself, remembers itself, then everything moves in the seamless, perfected, orchestrated magic and nothing operates separate from anything else.
Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado