How Do You Love?

“If you love someone…. set them free. Free…free…set them free.”

How Do You “Love?” Ways to Share Our Human Experience

Love: Challenging word to live by. And what does it really mean? If we love, don’t we want to hold on for dear life? How can we let someone or something go?

From the moment we are born, we seek love, approval, and acceptance. We search to replace Divine Love we erroneously believe we have been separated from. Even though the loving arms of our parents embrace us and guide us throughout our formative years, we feel alone surrounded by others who are searching for the same thing.

All desire love, acceptance and happiness. We even see this in our pets. They will do all they can to receive our approval and love. It is this craving that can lead to our imperfections.

Love. What should be the most natural state of becoming the most complicated? It can become a source of suffering when we desperately hold on to the belief that we will heal our brokenness through our partners, children, or even our material possessions. We need something to make us feel whole, a misunderstanding that what we seek is always there. Love for ourselves.

Our human experiences lived through others’ brokenness can create a cycle of even more suffering that we, in turn, pass on to those we enter a relationship with. Feelings of abandonment, rejection or lack of love we may have felt in our childhood become sources for control, manipulation, passive-aggressive behavior, jealousy and possessiveness in our adulthood leading to unstable relationships. And on and on it can go.

The first time we hold our children in our arms, our hearts are flooded with the most powerful and intense love ever felt. This love defines us and our actions for the rest of our lives. There is nothing we wouldn’t sacrifice for their well-being. It is as if we have been reborn and our purpose shifts.

This same overwhelming love can become a source of conflict in our relationships with our children. We don’t want to let go! This is, after all, OUR love that no one can take away. All our feelings of abandonment, rejection, isolation, and desire for love are all so neatly packaged in this bundle of joy and bliss.

We will never be alone again, and so we cling! Feelings of guilt get projected onto our children when we mistakenly view their decisions for their own lives as lack of love for us or a rejection of our love for them. They are leaving. They must not love us. We believe we’ve done something wrong. And then enters the need to control.

The same thing can happen in our relationships with our partners. We demand that they live up to what our expectations of what a perfect relationship should be, which more than likely stems from internal wounds and patterns of our own. If we elicit certain actions, then it must mean we are loved.

Or work…how many times do we hear people profess love for their work? Is it the work that is loved or this easy, noncommittal way to satisfy a need for approval and acceptance bringing a false sense of love? Love for work results from love for ourselves and a feeling of wholeness. So how do we let go? How do we come from a place of true, unconditional love?

Trust. Trust you are loved, irrespective of internal conditioning. Trust the universe is working for your better good and is providing all that is needed, whether you view it as good or bad. Trust that “all is well.” Trust—probably the most difficult thing humans can do. What, trust?? But then we can’t control what happens to us. We can’t control how we are loved. We can’t hold on!

“Always remember that you belong to no one, and no one belongs to you. Reflect that someday you will suddenly have to leave everything in this world – so make the acquaintanceship of God now.” (Lahiri Mahasaya)

If we trust, if we set love free, if we let go, maybe, just maybe the return is greater than we imagined. The love we seek is not found in others. It is within us. What has reflected us when we consider the mirror of our relationships is what we are projecting. What are you projecting?

Reawakening and cultivating Divine love within, which never left us, to begin with, through our daily rituals and practices, whether it be meditation, yoga, gardening, is one way to develop trust and unconditional love.

The question to ask then becomes is love coming from a place of brokenness, pain, abandonment, fear? Or is love coming from a place of trust, faith, and respect for individual freedoms? Let go of control. Trust in your own inner beauty and allow love to flow in and through you!