February 14th 2011 - Love is Everywhere

On the occasion of Valentine's Day, I want to share my beliefs about love. I think that the entire Universe and everything in it is actually made of love. How could that be, with all of the misery and suffering in the world? Because the true nature of love is concealed from us. Why is it concealed from us? Because we are afraid of love. We are afraid to express love fully. We are afraid that love will leave us. We are afraid that love won't be there when we need it. I believe that because we have so much fear around love, we cannot know its' true nature. We cannot feel it or see it, because we fear it. It is hiding behind a veil of illusion. How can something that is present everywhere be in hiding? Your body is made of a bunch of atoms. If it weren't for science telling us that, would you ever realize that the true nature of your body is billions of microscopic atoms flying around? That's all you really are, but it is concealed from your awareness. Similarly, we cannot see that everything is really love.

We fear expressing love fully because we fear that we will either be ridiculed or that it will not be reciprocated. We have these fears because of low self image and because of what we have been taught about expressing love. For example, if we are men, we are taught to be fearful of expressing love because it is weak or feminine to express love fully and openly. If we are women, we may have been taught that if we fully express love to a man, he will be smothered and leave us.

One thing that really gets me is the popularity of Ed Hardy, and all of the clothing that says stuff like “Love Kills Slowly.” Stuff like that just creates more fear of love.

We also have a lot of misunderstandings about love. There are a lot of things that people think are love, that are not, and a lot of things that people think are not love, that are. For example, if someone tries to limit the independence of his partner because he is afraid that the partner may stray from him, he may think he is doing it out of love, but he is doing it out of fear. If he truly loved the partner, he would want the partner to be free to do as she wishes, even if it meant leaving him. On the other hand, if someone bluntly tells her partner that she doesn't think he should do something that may harm him, the partner may get angry and think that she is trying to limit his independence, when in fact she is trying to help him out of love.

One of the biggest misconceptions we have about love, and the most important in my opinion, is that we need to seek it from outside of us. From my experience, it is the love inside of us that is the most powerful. When we go beyond our fear and express love fully, the love inside of us intensifies and shows itself. It comes out of hiding. The more we exercise this, the more we realize that love is everywhere. It is our fear and low self image that causes us to be needy of the love of others. We become starved for attention and praise when our self image is low. What we need to realize is that there is an infinite storehouse of love inside of us that does not need to be activated by another. When we realize this, we can still enjoy the love of others without feeling needy for it.

Because we have experienced so much fear and most of us are not completely secure in ourselves, it takes a lot of work to unearth that infinite storehouse of love within. It takes a lot of work to release the need to constantly receive the attention and praise of others. It's well worth it. I'm still working on it. I've had a lot of recent trials that showed me some of my own self image issues and some of the places where fear of love still constrains me in life.

True courage is being able to love fully, without fear of the repercussions. Exercise that and you will find true freedom.

Happy Valentine's Day,

Alan