Is Love Hurting You?
Hello Everyone,
In honor of the spirit of love this month with Valentine’s Day in our culture, I wish to explore this topic with you a bit in the hopes that we might expand together our horizons of love to include even more than our romantic notions. I would like to explore how empathy can protect us and how boundaries can preserve love.
It is my experience that we are truly here to learn to lead with our hearts, and to lead with love and compassion. Are we able to extend to every person we meet an open heart and a kindness without judgment? Even if we have not met someone before, we may still have a feeling of love with that person when we first see them or the hearing of their voice, or the recollection of some story being told. These emanations travel between us, beyond time and space. And, have you noticed, certainly beyond logic and understanding? Love is in the ethers and the web of light holding us and this Love literally keeps us together as matter. “Love is in the air!”
We are amidst a cutting edge of a new time on earth where we are being asked, I truly believe, to lead, come into and feel with our hearts and let our mind take a backseat. It has been proven in scientific studies that the heart emanates the most frequency and energy in the body even more than the brain. It seems only natural that the mind then properly follows the heart.
Many of us come from a culture which values above all rationality, science and linear thinking. As necessary and valuable as this tool is, still when it overrides the heart, it can cause great detriment to our society and ourselves personally. In this new time, we have a great opportunity to learn a new way so that we can live in more harmony with ourselves and each other, and with those whom we have never met, a stranger. When we can look for some commonality or something that we appreciate about another the smallest or the greatest, then we have a chance of not feeling like they are foreign or our enemy.
How Empathy Can Be Our Protection
It is the same with our intimate ones where we can look and seek the common thread and remember that we are on the same team and often times working for the same goal. It is so easy in moments of distress or conflict to think that the other person is out to get us or trying to do something different than we are. When we can pause for a moment, take a deep breath and get curious about what they are trying to do, perhaps by even asking questions and getting more information, and finding out what is driving them in the moment. Then, we really have a chance to meet someone on peaceful ground and in the middle path.
We can imagine the question “what’s it like to be you?”
We can make that more of an inquiry inside of ourselves about another person and then reflect on their history, personality, and family lineage, etc. This creates space inside of us for more possibilities and new ways of thinking and openness. Then we’re not locked in to our own one-sided perception. The window has two sides.
DEEPER QUESTIONS ON LOVE FOR REFLECTION:
IS LOVE HURTING YOU?
Is there a way that you love too much or overlook important red flags with another that might be harming you or a detriment to your well-being and even to your relationship?
Do you go into denial and put up with things that are harmful to you because you are afraid to lose love?
Do you push, manipulate, sexualize, objectify, violate - all in the name of love?
Do you believe if you have boundaries that you’re not being loving?
Most of us from our youth have many different imprints, myths, and patterns from our family and role models about what it means or feels like to be loved. Those are not always healthy ones and until we wake up to what those are, we end up, playing them out in our life often creating more suffering for ourselves and others.
How lovely it is to be in a world where many of us are looking into these very issues with the intention of creating more intimacy, connection and safety for ourselves, and all other beings.
Most of all, remember your source with the one Divine, and with yourself can be the greatest love affair of all. Remember to nurture this connection with meditation, stillness, reflection, and soothing comfort. You are so important, and you are worth it. Even though the Divine may not seem like a warm body snuggling you in your bed.
It is the One emanating through your beloved. So snuggle up with the Divine. It is the One and All carrying you through every moment and beyond of this life.
All my love,
Isa Lara Marié