THE TEMPTATION TO LEAVE LOVE
Catalyst & challenge
Rooted in love. Rested in love. Held in love. This is the silent desire that sits at the core of every other desire. It is the unnamed, often unspoken hunger, that we all crave whether or not we are aware of it. To be held, seen, supported and loved just in our being, nothing added and nothing taken away. This is natural. Yet it often seems that this is very far away from our lived experience. We wonder where is this love in a world that seems so disconnected from it. Somehow we know love and yet the outer world doesn’t reflect our inner knowing. It can feel hopeless at times attempting to see and find love through all of the layers of confusion, disconnection and distortion; our own and others. The temptation to leave love is great because the reflection of it is so small. To witness or experience the true unconditionality that is love is almost nonexistent. This makes it easy to want to quit, to give up on the game of awakening and succumb to the collective field of confusion.
It seems that one almost needs to be insane to keep going and see through the veils that dim the light at the core of each of us. What propels us forward when all seems a bit dismal and gloomy? How do we find connection in the dark hallways of our every day world? We can turn a blind eye and deny the darkness, yet that doesn’t make it go anywhere. It sits there quietly, waiting for us to turn towards it. Our denial or resistance can only take us so far before we must face the elephant in the room of life. What moves us to face the darkness rather than avoid, resist or hate it? It’s different for all of us, but there are some themes. Believe it or not, illness or sickness in the body is one of the things that will help us penetrate the layers of the veil if we allow it to. When illness enters the physical body we can’t escape it. It’s intimate. It’s close up. It’s our life. All of our strategies of turning away eventually fail and we are left with, well, ourselves. While we might fall into a pit of despair and endlessly seek a way out of our suffering, that seeking can lead us to the light, and into a love that becomes impossible to leave. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen when we breach our point of surrender and fall out of limitation and constraint and into the field of love.
Any kind of significantly hard challenge can be a catalyst for us. We reach a tipping point where we simply can’t manage or control anything anymore. Our ego has to die a least a little bit, and in that death, some of the light and love that is at the core of our being can shine through. We are less veiled. Less hidden. The layers have crumbled, at least partially, and we (our essence) can’t help but be seen. We speak and our words vibrate with love, not because we are trying, but because they can’t not be what they are. The temptation to leave love loses its grip on us little by little, not by our doing, but by the mere fact that we are revealed.
LOVE NEVER LEAVES
Returning again and again
Until this point of surrender, which we may go through not just once but 100s of times, it seems that love leaves. It feels like it comes and goes. We are connected and then in the next moment disconnected again. One could say that at least there is contrast here, as for some disconnection is the only known state. Yet if we are seekers on the path of the spiritual, we want to stably and permanently reside here. Never leave again. The key point of recognition is that love doesn’t leave you, rather it is you that leave it. This puts you in the position of choice, even when it feels like there isn’t one. This is not easy. To choose the inner choice to remain open, non-defensive, and unguarded when you are triggered as f*ck about something, is not easy. If it was easy we would be living in a very different collective reality.
We have not signed up for an easy task. This human experience of limitation, cloudiness, and confusion, all without a seeming guidance manual of any kind leading the way, can be incredibly disorientating. I think if any of us finds the way through, it is nothing short of a miracle. Yet I am also a firm believer in everyday miracles. They are happening all of the time. Miracles are the way of the heart, and somehow, someway the light of the heart shines through the clouds of the human condition and human conditioning. For it is really the conditioning that creates the conditions. The ways we’ve come to see and perceive are the clouds that sit between the human mind and the human heart. Through a combination of commitment, devotion and grace we are opened into love over and over again. Like anything that you repeatedly open, with more and more openings, the door just stays ajar and becomes harder and harder to close completely.
It turns out that there is a guidance manual, that guidance manual is our heart, but when the door is shut we don’t know our direction. That’s where the lostness and confusion that we experience comes in. Confusion just means “I can’t hear my heart”. Disconnection is the felt sense of this. It’s like there is nothing there. No life. No aliveness. Just the mundane experience of a mind that is devoid of soul, operating as a separate something, and hoping to make it through the duration of this physical body’s lifespan.
The one great thing about leaving love is that you can always come back to it. As tempting as it is to believe our thoughts that entice us down the path of a restricted, righteous and shutdown heart, we can come back to love. We might be gritting our teeth along the way as we transition towards openness once again, reluctantly leaving the stories of our woos behind. Yet as we do we begin to taste the flavor of aliveness again. Connection creeps in, joy ripples across the cells of our body and our muscles relax. The breath returns into the areas we wouldn’t let it go before as we dare to feel good. Love returns as we return to it. Having never gone anywhere, patiently waiting for us to turn towards that which interfered with our vision of it, so that we can now shine our light through the clouds and rest again in the open, spacious field of our heart.
Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Subtle Energy Healing, Boulder, Colorado
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