Love Is All Around
By Anne McCormack
I once read a book by Iyanla Vanzant called, “In The Meantime” which referred to “spiritual cleansers” to assist in allowing you to find yourself and the love you desire in your life.
The book had quite a profound effect on my perception of how I treated myself and how I treated others around me. At the time I wondered what magical techniques I could glean from this source to bring into my life the love of my dreams. However, the words that kept appearing in front of my eyes were “patience”, “trust”, “acceptance”, “willingness”, “compassion”, and “unconditional love”.
My adventures in the land of Love thus far have been varied. My progress in discovering what love and being in love is about has been a slow and confusing journey. A journey from a place where I was looking outside of myself to find love and acceptance, to the tranquil land of inner me, where a rich and flowing source of love and acceptance resides. In this article, I share with you some of the lessons I have learnt thus far, and how the above-mentioned ‘Spiritual Cleansers’ have strengthened and nurtured my understanding of others and myself.
Getting Hooked On The Love Drug!
As a child I learnt that if I wasn’t a good girl I would get hurt, or something bad would happen. Every time I acted against my parent’s judgement it felt like I lost a piece of their love and acceptance, the rewards for being a good person. As I grew into an adult I learnt that love is bestowed upon us by family and friends if we do what makes them happy and remain in accordance with their boundary of acceptance. I found that when I stepped outside this boundary, I experienced a sense of isolation, aloneness, remorse and guilt.
Love is like a drug. We desire that warm glow of appreciation, that acceptance, that oneness. Where can we get our next fix? What do we need to relinquish in order to fill our souls with it? Our personal beliefs? Our feelings and thoughts? Our experiences? All of those things that make us the human beings we are? Do we really need to seek love externally and compromise our very soul to experience it?
As we grow into adults, we observe the relationship between our parents and our parents’ relationship with us. This is where we acquire our understanding of love and relationships, and how our patterns of behaviour towards love and relationships are influenced.
The mass media feeds us with the idea that certain dysfunctional modes of behaviour are what being in love is all about. Lust is placed upon the pedestal and all who aspire to great love relationships who are influenced by the mass media identify a successful love relationship with an intense sex life.
Likewise religion has had a strong impact on love and relationships. Emotional and physical monogamy has been enforced by the doctrines of the church, and in order to ensure that society abides the guidelines for social interaction, acceptance and the freedom of choice is replaced by fear.
The mass media and religion have over time warped society’s view of “normality” by negating the acceptance of individuality. We are encouraged to look outside of ourselves and compare our behaviour with others. As a consequence, we are taught not to trust what feels right inside our hearts.
For most people, our lives are geared towards finding that utopian love experience that seems so tangible and yet unattainable. This is because most of us perceive that it is not nestled within us. Our experience with trying to find it within other people is draining and often soul-crushing. We also often end up judging others against our “selection criteria” in our endeavour to not make the same “mistake” twice, and do not see those people for the beautiful souls they are.
We write the scripts and project our own inner movies.
When we seek something that is outside of us, we place value judgements and expectation on outcomes… and people. Within relationships based upon fulfilling emotional and physical needs, there is the tendency to project those needs on to other people, in the hope that they will be able to fulfil them for you.
Whilst influenced by this mind-set, many believe they understand completely how their partner is feeling and thinking – and they convince themselves they are in sync with their partner’s modes of thought. They do not notice the warnings that arise within them to indicate their perception of the nature of things is false.
A little while ago, whilst involved with someone I believed I was ‘in love’ with, I dreamt my father kept asking me to question what I was feeling and to look at it for what it was. At the time, to believe that this love relationship was not real was preposterous. They were the strongest feelings I had felt for anyone to date, and it made me feel more special than I had felt in any relationship previously. I was convinced that we would be together for a long time.
Once I moved in with this man (I will refer to him as Mr. A), the relationship changed, and another side to him emerged which I had not recognised earlier. I could no longer deny that this fantasy-perfect relationship was all between my ears and not based in reality.
In retrospect, if I had trusted and listened to what I was being shown in my dreams, and had not projected my desires so strongly onto this other person, I would have realised the mistake I was about to make a lot earlier. I had not only been in love with the prospect of being in love, I was also acting in accordance with what I was brought up to believe love relationships were about.
Throughout my childhood life, I learnt from my parents that sacrifice and compromise is necessary within a love relationship. Although as they are getting older, both Mum and Dad are relishing their newfound acceptance of their individuality, when they were younger they both turned their backs on their desires, relinquishing that part of themselves because it did not fit in with what the other person wanted.
Everything you attract into your life comes from within you.
The people we attract into our lives often reflect that which we believe about ourselves. If we believe we are not worth the time, love and energy, often the partnerships we attract into our personal vibration resonates with that. The irony is that although we may experience relationships which are hurtful or abusive, opportunities for personal healing are always present.
The experiences in my dysfunctional relationships were healing for me – although being hurtful, the relationships were not entirely a mistake.
The experience with Mr. A had reminded me how much I didn’t trust my intuition, and made me mindful of that which is important to me. I realised that what I wanted to experience in my relationships was genuine love based upon understanding and respect, where the people involved hold each other in high esteem. Being involved with someone with diametrically opposed values and principles, who negated my personal values and feelings by making derogatory comments, made me even more determined to cherish what I believe in.
The experience was also a shove to re-program myself to allow for a healthier experience in relationships - an experience where I do not have to sacrifice who I am for the sake of maintaining a relationship. The maintenance of my individuality is non-negotiable.
I also became more attuned to my weak points and vulnerabilities, providing scope for more conscious growth and healing.
There is often much confusion with regard to the energy experienced when two people meet. Often the strong energy between two people is mistaken for being the energy of “being in love”.
Often two people are drawn together by the feeling that they have known each other all their lives, despite knowing each other for a short time, yet they are unable to pinpoint exactly where they have met before. Sometimes this facilitates unsolicited animosity between people, whilst at other times it appears to foster a heartfelt connection.
Here we introduce the concept of past lives. Lifetime after lifetime, before we are incarnated into our physical form, our soul chooses to meet with other souls who have agreed to help us learn unresolved lessons from previous experiences on the earth plane. All unresolved issues carry through to the next lifetime where it is hoped that resolution will occur.
There needs to be that intense attraction in order to facilitate the learning of the lesson, and resolve karmic ties to that soul with whom you have engaged in a pattern of behaviour with for many lifetimes previous.
As Narcissus admired his reflection, so too are we drawn to people who mirror our interests, habits and life patterns. Often with meeting our twin flame, it feels as if we are finally complete. That missing part of ourselves has been found! We no longer have to explain or justify who we are. It seems like we have found acceptance.
Our twin souls not only reflect all of our positive qualities, but also all of our negative qualities as well (many of which we deny exist in ourselves). For this reason, twin soul relationships can be the most testing, and can often burn out quickly. It takes very self-aware, strong and accepting souls to be successful at sustaining a healthy twin flame relationship.
Soul mate relationships are very different from Karmic and Twin Soul relationships as soul mates are not necessarily drawn together through past life bonds or through sameness.
Instead the soul mate bond is nurtured through unconditional loving and acceptance of another person. The paths these people walk is a parallel one which eventually intersects, often with corresponding issues, beliefs and values (not necessarily borne out of the same circumstances). A soul mate relationship is nurtured when both parties assist the other to understand who they are without compromise, judgement or unrest.
We can have many soul mates within our lives, depending on the stages we are going through, and many of these relationships may be platonic as well as with family members.
A Bottomless Source
A couple of years ago whilst studying Metaphysics and Parapsychology, wonderful teachers continuously instilled in me the value of tapping into an exquisite unconditional source of love which was readily accessible to me at all times, no matter what the circumstances.
I accessed this pool of unconditional love, a beautiful pale pink light through meditation. I imagined my heart and being filling with its warmth and in turn I learnt to send that pink warmth to all of those around me. I began to feel full of love and wanted to share it with everyone. I began to feel complete – like the part that had been missing had been found again.
Being in touch with my unconditional source of love has taught me that people are not trying to hurt me. They are having their own experience of life and its lessons, and they too are dealing with it the best way they know how.
It is strange but I no longer dissolve into a mindset of pain and anxiety (unless of course I revisit that inner child who sometimes still believes she is not a beautiful soul).
In experimenting with heart energy and “what happens” when I send my bottomless source of love out to others, I was in fact working with the energy matrix by which we are all affected. This energy grid is effective in conjunction with our primary chakra system – it allows us to sense the environment around us for potential dangers and opportunities. By altering my personal vibration from one that was focussed on the negative, to one that was more positive, open-hearted and loving, I was able to alter the type of experiences I was attracting into my auric field.
Donald Neale Walsch talks about this in “Conversations With God: an uncommon dialogue – Book 3”. He terms it the “tommary matrix”. This phenomena deals with our ability to attract into our lives that which reflects what is going on in our inner environment. For example, if you are dealing with commitment issues, you are more likely to consistently encounter others with corresponding issues – so that you may learn and move on. Likewise if you are endeavouring to understand love consciously, you will attract into your life others who are also seeking answers to the same questions.
Giving Loneliness The Boot
Over the past couple of years, from one romantic disaster to another, I have discovered that when I keep my heart open, I tend to be more gentle with myself, and I do not sink into the hurt so easily. My resolve to dust myself off and get back out there is also resilient. When the heart is open the eyes are open – and it is like I can see into the minds and lives of those people around me. My degree of patience seems to be ever-increasing and my acceptance of where others are at emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically has also increased one-hundred-fold.
I know deep within that they are experiencing energy just like I am. A feeling of oneness is nurtured. A sense of relatedness is heightened. The details are insignificant. The feelings, the emotions, the thought patterns and the dynamics are what matters most. When we get caught up in the details, and begin comparing the exactitude of what has taken place, we begin living in the head and not in the heart!
Trusting that you are not alone in the world and being willing to “open up” and share what you are experiencing takes away the loneliness. You are left feeling content, complete and in a state of love.
Why does love hurt so much?
Love and unconditional acceptance are around us all of the time. We do not always sense this as our hearts are not always open and receptive to it.
Our heart chakra is really at the very centre of our being. It sits right smack in the middle, nestled between our three primary physical chakras and our three primary spiritual chakras. The manner in which we deal with potentially painful situations within our lives, and the way in which we perceive their effect on our being depends very much on whether our heart is open or closed.
When we don’t trust, and feel threatened and anxious, we tend to retreat into ourselves, repelling others away so that they may not hurt us. Many people reveal their “porcupine spikes” (reminders for others to tread lightly) or self-sabotage mode kicks in. Words that come from our mouths when our heart chakras are constricted are often not about our personal feelings and vulnerabilities, but are used as weapons of defence against perceived enemies.
When we project our inner perceptions on to another person, it is easy to hand over all responsibility to them, and blame them for hurting us, when it is really we that are hurting ourselves. If we took responsibility for our own well-being, the emotional pain would not be so bitter to swallow.
Despite my relationship with Mr. A ending, I chose to remain living within the same flat until the end of the lease. Whilst the discomfort and emotional hurt resurfaced from time to time, by being mindful of my own emotional baggage I have been able to develop a level of second attention which allows me to observe myself and Mr. A to see what we both contribute towards the situation. I have realised that my personal experience of emotional pain with the relationship is not the same experience for Mr. A. I am pained by the lack of emotional support, whilst he may be pained by the incompatibility with regard to material goals.
As I have gradually said goodbye to that dysfunctional relationship, I have been making the conscious effort to honour myself by surrounding myself with what nurtures me. I have been engaging in activities and interests that bring a sparkle to my eyes, and surrounding myself with people who respect and cherish me for who I am (the good and the bad bits!).
In accordance with Iyanla Vanzant’s book, during my “meantime” I have been applying spiritual cleansers to my life, in order to look at myself and take responsibility for what I see. This in turn has impacted on how I perceive those around me, enabling me to step beyond the inner child’s tendency of believing that other people consciously hurt me with their actions. The adult within me now realises that those people are dealing with their personal pain the best way that they know how. Whilst there is still some anger about the actions that past lovers have taken which have hurt me, I now sense their confusion and pain, and in understanding this, I acquire freedom from the bitterness.
I am now learning to live as an adult who abides what feels right. As a result I am learning to:
· Leave behind judgements;
· Leave behind expectations of outcomes;
· Go with the flow and live in the present;
· Focus on keeping the heart open;
· Tell my family and friends how much I love them and appreciate them for who they are;
· Look in the mirror and say ‘I love you’;
· Honour my values and opinions;
· Take responsibility for who I am and how I love; and
· Let Be!
A successful love relationship is something that is worked upon with an open heart. It is not something that just magically appears in fullness before you. It is something that grows when nurtured with care. Love is not something which is rushed, it evolves with growing trust.
As we take responsibility for our lives, so too do we take responsibility for the types of relationships we experience. Successful love relationships do not just drop from a great height and hit you on the head. Opportunities for successful relationships are all around you. It just depends on the compatibility of your emotional baggage and whether you feel that you can overcome any emotional hurdles that arise with love, compassion, respect and acceptance.
It has taken me my whole life to get to this point where I am able to see past my own emotional self, into the hearts of others. Through every experience I have had, I have learnt a great deal about who I am and what I am capable of. I know from my last romantic experience, I am much stronger than I had previously given myself credit for.
I am now at the point where I am aware of what I do not want to experience in a relationship, and am experienced enough to value freedom, acceptance, respect, and trust within a relationship.
Most love relationships are not designed to last forever, however, to open ourselves up fully and consciously is vital to our evolvement. Things do not remain stagnant. Things change with time. Growth happens at varying capacities which can not be predicted as they depend on a person’s willingness to move forward and accept. To deny ourselves the energy of love relationships for fear they will not last is to stunt any growth that can potentially evolve from the relationship.