When I was a young little hippie, I would create my own fans to take to festivals. My favorite one said, “Love Is Always The Answer,” on it. While I could feel this deep in my body, I didn’t yet know exactly what it meant.
And to some people, this might sound flowery or naive, but unfortunately, that is more a reflection of our society’s understanding of love than what it really is. Like John Lennon once said, “If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.”
I would even say love is the most powerful force in the universe.
However, we’re not taught how to love. Instead, we are taught to fear and crave and treat ourselves and each other like objects. All of these energies get mixed up in our bodies with the love that we naturally possess, so it makes understanding it complicated.
Power, domination, and control are what many of us have been taught instead. Even when we love someone we tend to exert our control over that person. How many of us have experienced someone who has expressed their own ideas of what they think we should do with our lives?
Or maybe a more specific example is the, “Because I said so,” response that so many children receive early on.
I think within these types of responses, there is a seed of love in there. The love motivates us to want the best for the person we care about. But when we express our love through modes of power, domination, fear, and control then we only create more of those energies in the world.
I am thinking about this a lot as world events and personal interactions are unfolding, continuing to show that we need to change our motivations and tactics if we are ever going to see any real peace in the world.
But back to the more personal level. How is love always the answer? What does that even mean? How could it be true?
There’s a quote that I love by Lori Deschene that goes:
“We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.”
When I think of love, I think of what creates the most healthy conditions for ourselves. Love is not endless gifts and praise. Sometimes it can manifest in those ways. But maybe love for yourself can mean being really honest with yourself in a gentle way. You can absolutely look at your life without guilt or shame and see the ways in which you want to change. This is true love.
Or love can look like letting go of the expectations you have of yourself. Perhaps you can drop all the stories and ideas that have been collected within your body-mind over the years and instead just see what naturally wants to arise. Maybe you just need to be.
Love can look like tending to yourself when you aren’t feeling the best — but the kind of tending that looks like care and not like, “You need to get better now!” The alchemical transformation we seek actually lies within nurturing. Maybe nurturing we never really received. It’s hard to trust what you don’t know.
But love requires trust.
We have to trust that when we let go of these expectations and we nurture ourselves in love, we will continue to evolve in beautiful ways. I know we all have been taught to treat ourselves like some sort of object that needs to perform on demand, in the same ways every day and if we don’t then we need to be “whipped into shape.”
But this only perpetuates the cycle of harm. We never really get to know who we are. We never really get to know what we need. We never really get to grow close to others because of the distance that keeps expanding. We never get to experience a world that is loving and free.
Other times love is expressing to someone you care for a boundary you hold so that they can love you better. Sometimes love can look like letting someone know that they have hurt you in some way. This allows a chance for repair. As long as we are operating from a place of communicating to understand, instead of communicating to exert control. If we keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves for fear of what might happen we never open up the possibility for there to be more love. To know love better.
Conflict does not have to mean violence. Yet we have come to equate it as such. Again, more telling of the way we have created our society than the truth of the world. Additionally, I have found that when I face conflict and approach it through a non-violent lens, it allows me to grow closer to those whom I wish to be close to and depart from those whom I do not.
Love is choosing what is genuinely the best for you when the rest of the world is saying to do something else. Love is speaking truth to power even when it feels terrifying. Love is knowing that you are already more than enough, that any additional striving is just wasted effort.
Love allows you to take risks in the direction of your dreams. Love allows you to say the embarrassing thing. Love makes us stronger and allows us to grow.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ― Rumi
Although I know love is always the answer, or maybe better said always illuminates the answer within, it is difficult to believe it is true when there are so many real terrors in our world.
But I know for sure that we won’t find our way out of any mess without love. If you feel like you are struggling with yourself, the answer is to love more of you. And when you love more of yourself, then you will also be able to love more of others. You will want better for all of us. The next right step will become apparent from there.
I know many of us are wondering when things are going to change. Perhaps even thinking when somebody is going to come and save us. Where is our charismatic leader?
A charismatic leader has never saved us though, and if history shows anything it is when groups of people come together collaboratively that we see periods of stability and peace. The change we wish to see really does start within and flows without.
I know it can feel seductive to spiral, scroll, demand, fight, numb out, coerce, or deceive but it’s all a distraction from what we really need to do. Which is sowing the seeds of love within ourselves and within the world.
It hurts to love because it means we are opening our hearts to the pain in the world.
This isn’t the same as love with another person hurting because of that person’s actions. No, that is not love. What I am referring to is what Ram Dass talks about when he says it’s easier to ignore the person on the street, to close your heart down, instead of opening up to them and the painful reality of the situation. Love can hurt because it opens our eyes to more of the world.
It can also hurt to open to love because it means we must grapple with the lack of love that came before. Whether that lack of love was in your childhood or in your culture, it can hurt to realize what should have been there. One of my teachers recently said that opening up to love can feel like walking after your legs have gone to sleep after sitting in meditation. When you get up to stand the rush of life actually feels painful at first.
Opening to love can be like this, but eventually, we will always make it through.
There’s a saying in Buddhism about discerning between what feels good now and feels bad later, what feels bad now and feels good later, what feels good now and feels good later, and what feels bad now and feels bad later. It’s a learning process we are all going through together, and while it’s messy I trust in love to guide us through.
I have been trained to see everything as energy, so I understand that when I see us committing acts of violence, even as “small” as belittling ourselves in our own heads, we are increasing the momentum of that energy to grow.
When you look back into your own life and see where someone shamed you or tried to make you feel bad about your choices, how did that affect you? What kind of changes did take place?
Studies actually show that we are more likely to repeat behaviors if we feel shame about them. So while it may be a prevalent habit pattern of our culture, or even considered some sort of bizarre wisdom for getting people to change, shaming actually does not lead to changed behavior.
I do believe and have seen in my own life, in the power of standing up and saying the difficult thing that needs to be said from a place of love. I have actually seen miracles happen this way. Unexplainable changes in behavior and alternate possibilities are created this way.
Now, it doesn’t always happen this way but if we don’t try it won’t happen at all.
I’m reminded of that little girl sitting on the steps talking to her parents about how they should calm down and speak more nicely to each other. How if everyone started to get mean we would all become monsters and the monsters would eat the children. I think she is describing what is already happening in our world.
It’s hard to convey everything in a short article and I think in the coming weeks I want to talk more about anger. Because it can be righteous and it does show us where a boundary has been crossed but it is also very tricky because it can lure us into thinking we are justified in creating more harm and that our “side” is better than the other.
But there are no sides.
There’s just us on this little planet floating in space. It’s a miracle we are even here at all. Even more a miracle that everything that we need and a lot of what we want is just provided to us for free.
When we fall into the traps of fear, power, domination, and control it doesn’t matter the reason we are doing it for, it will only lead to more of the same. And I am guilty of falling into these traps as well. The trauma that lives in my body and hasn’t found its loving home yet sometimes can’t tell up from down. And it doesn’t always feel safe in the world because the world hasn’t made it feel safe.
But all I can feel deep within me is that I will try with all my heart to make it that safe place that I know it can be. To try and make my body and past selves feel so safe with me and the people I choose to be around. I will work, from a place of love, to make sure that this world is one where everyone can feel safe and loved and cared for. Every time I have a response from fear, it is more motivation to make this earth a nicer place to live in.
It is definitely the more unknown path because it’s not one many of us have ever walked fully in this life. The unknown is one of the scariest places we humans have made up in our minds.
But it’s only in the space of the unknown that something new can be born.