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Health & Fitness

Love is _________

Love, the only reality

Love is what’s staring us in the face right now. How often we want to turn from that view when it doesn’t meet out expectations of what we think love is. Ever notice how we are always looking for love, find it, just to ignore it?  The love of the temporary, the love of the next big thing and all the excitement that entails is not love but need. Need is ravenous, always looking for it’s next meal, never sitting with the quiet appreciation of the meal that is before us.  Love is our opportunity writ large. It is our moment to let go of preconceived notions to still our very conditional thoughts.

Someone once said that “unconditionally loving” is very doable.  I thought yes, if your first name is Jesus or Buddha that’s probably true.  A little more reflection however showed me some clarity. What is the most abiding attitude that someone who is termed unconditionally loving look like? To me it looks like letting go of the conditions on what we think love is based.  For instance, we all have preprogrammed responses to what shows up in our lives. These responses are totally conditional.  These programmed responses are only thoughts, some electrical impulses stored in the chemical soup of our brains. And this, my friends, is what we base all of our suffering on.. some electrical soup!  So in this sense we can see that  to be unconditionally loving is to stop sipping from our electrical soup.

Thoughts are like balloons, the only thing tethering them to the ground of you is ones own grasping. Do you remember what it’s like to let go of a balloon and watch it float away into the sky? It’s freeing and since we no longer have to grasp the balloon we can just observe without conditions. It’s beautiful dance as it floats away from us.

Love is existence. Love is the ongoing completion of all that is. Love allows even that which seems it’s opposite to be because as love, there is no opposite. Love goes from perfect to perfect. All of these describe love but descriptions are an intellectual explanation, a mere thought. What’s behind the thought, that’s what’s real, abiding and always clear. Nothing is ambiguous with love. Resistance to love is futile, you’ve already been assimilated by virtue of your own existence, not the temporary existence that we believe ourselves to be. 

Not so oddly enough the only place to find “unconditionally loving” is inside ourselves where conditions arose in the first place.  The Buddha says “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." Find the unconditionally in yourself first and everything else falls into place. That’s your mission, in this, you cannot fail.

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