True Love begins with you

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We do unto others what we do unto ourselves

Do you make new year resolutions?

I do, at the end of December each year, after reviewing the resolutions I made the year before. For 2021, one of my resolutions is to bring love back to the mainstream discourse.

Do you think the world needs more love in our time?

I do. I notice love has mostly disappeared from popular culture in every media: music, books, movies, TV, and even on social media. We seem to have lost our collective ability, wisdom, and trust in love. We are afraid to love, to be loved, or to talk about love. We are confused on this subject while silently feeling the void in our life and our relationships, as Oscar Wilde aptly put it, “the pain that dares not speak its name.”

During the pandemic lockdown, along with the rest of the world, I moved my social life online, mostly in discussion groups. I started a social experiment to “spread the words on love,” I have observed people’s carrying this yearning, and are in need of a way to put into words to tell the world about this longing that is alive in their heart. On one occasion, during a meetup event about the law of attraction and money, the host surveyed everyone’s experience of abundance, I had an epiphany: “I experience abundance when my heart is filled with love.” That rings true with reverberations in my mind, and seemed to strike a chord in everyone’s heart at that meeting. 

My journey started a while ago, after a five-year relationship ended. I came to the realization that I was clueless about love and relationship. I didn’t have a role model, or knew someone who seemed to have sound wisdom on this subject. I decided to embarked on a personal quest: "to crack the code of love." Like many of my contemporaries who embarked on their personal journey in search for answers to a burning question, I hit the libraries and bookstores to read voraciously every single title remotely related to the subject of love and relationship. Years went by....

What did I find? A land scape of fragmented theories, ideas, advices, and personal experiences, each touches on a specific aspect of love, bundled together they become a background of white noise. My journey was filled with excitements, hopes, confusions, disappointments, dead-ends, and despair that lead to the resignation that I failed to find an answer. 

Until ...

An accidental encounter with spirituality literature introduced me to the concept of "Unconditional Love," and I stumbled on a surprising revelation on romantic relationship hidden in a classic novel, “Far from the madding crowd” written by Thomas Hardy I learned that at several major world religions and many Indian yogis' teachings are founded on the premise that “Love is the answer.”

I will leave my thoughts on “Far from the madding crowd” for another article. First, I would like to share the lessons I learned on “unconditional love” from the following authors: 

Michael Singer, “The untethered soul”

Marshall Rosenberg, “Nonviolent communication”

Elif Safak, “The forty rules of love”

Louise Hay, “The power is within you”

What is love?

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers and psychoanalysts since the dawn of civilization on the definition of love. Michael Singer offers a simple definition that seems to work well for me: Love is a state of being when your heart is open to someone or something.

Why love is the answer?

Because "the absence of love is fear"

Your heart knows

French philosopher Descartes is famous for having said: "I think therefore I am," and he also said, “The heart has reasons, Reason knows not of.” For thousands of years spiritual teachers have explained that the mind is a marvellous instrument designed for reasoning about the physical world. It is, however, incapable to understand the working of love, or relationship, or wisdom, which are domains of the heart.

Meditation

is commonly taught by spiritual teachers as an effective method to quiet the noisy mind in order to hear the whispers of the heart, and connect with one’s own truth.

One love

There is one way to love, and many different relationships with different people. In another word, love is the same across all relationships while each relationship is unique in its own right.

Love yourself unconditionally

Unconditional love is a broad and complex topic. For a starting point, I love the simplicity and practicality of Louise Hay’s teaching. She spent her entire career helping people to love themself unconditionally, and heal their life emotionally and physically in the process. Louise believed everyone is responsible to love themself unconditionally, it is essential to their well-being and personal growth. Some of her suggestions to make oneself feel loved are: 

- Stop criticizing, judging, or blaming yourself

- Take care of your health: nutrition, sleep, exercise, supportive relationships

- Accept yourself as you are, with all your qualities and flaws

- Be kind and cherish yourself

- Be patient with yourself

- Forgive yourself for all the mistakes you made

- Stop scaring yourself with worries about the future

- Find support from your close relationships when you need help

- Practice meditation to connect with your true self

I invite you to come back later to listen to Louise in this heart-warming talk for inspiration and guidance: 

Why love oneself?

I find the practice of loving oneself unconditionally to be an immensely valuable way of life. I have started in my training during the pandemic lockdown. Becoming expert at loving oneself has the potential to change the world. It is a path toward world peace. On a personal level, this skill and practice will turn everyone into an expert on love, for whom the common puzzling questions on love and relationship of our time, are trivial common knowledge. Some of these questions are:

Is this love? Does he/she love me? Is he/she right for me? Do I love her/him? Am I in love? Am I in a healthy relationship? Am I in a co-dependent relationship? Do I stay or leave?...

When someone does a good job at loving themself, they will have a first-hand experience of receiving love, while at the same time, honing their skills in giving love. They will subsequently bring these skills into their close relationships, and will likely to succeed in making their close ones feel loved. With this process, everyone has the power to spread love all over the world, lifting civilization out of fear and power, into love and peace.

Loving oneself unconditionally is a super power to transcend fear, guilt, shame, social coercion, that are responsible for much of the suffering in life. As a wise person once said: “Pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional”

My "Jedi" training

Those are all great ideas. How about the work? 

Here is an example, as part of my self-love training, I have been practising this simple heart-warming routine several times a day, ... each time, ... I will pause, ... focus on my voice, ... and say out loud three times:

I love you!

I love you!

I love you!

Now, you try it …

Pss! Pss!... wanna hear a secret? ...

"I love therefore I am"

And don't ever forget,

"The absence of love is feeeeaaaarrr...."

I love you!