What is Love?
“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
Perhaps the greatest lie ever told is that of the nature of love itself, along with the conditioned belief that we must seek outside of ourselves to “find love”. We’re programmed from childhood to believe that ‘love’ is a whole lot of things that it isn’t: a warm and fuzzy feeling, something conditional that can be given or taken away when someone hurts or upsets you, or an offering given to us by God, while later taught we’ll be punished if we aren’t obedient to God.
Such is the nature life, in its perfect design, that I’ve found that many of us had to experience what love isn’t, in order to finally understand the truth of what love actually IS. As children, many of us had endure unloving actions, like physical punishment, silent treatment, and abandonment, because “we love you”, they said. Many of us were told God loves us unconditionally, while simultaneously being told if we don’t accept God in our hearts, and don’t believe in Jesus as the only Son of God who was crucified to cleanse us of our sins, that same God would then banish us to burn in hell for eternity. As if actions that mirror literal ABUSE were excusable in the name of what I now understand to be man-made, false god created for the purpose of generating fear, and controlling the masses through gaslighting and manipulation tactics. Those same children often grow up into adults that accept “love” as conditional from the relationships in their lives, often in romantic partnerships. They become people pleasers that pour into others, hoping for a trickle of love in return, longing to be accepted, cherished, and valued by the people they care about.
But the truth is, love isn’t most of what we’ve been taught. And true love is everywhere, in every living creation, the spirit of Our Creator, our Source of existence. Love is in you, and in me. Love can be found in delicate flower petals, in the sunset’s colors painting the sky above the ocean. Love is in the bolts of lightning, the thunder’s resonant boom, and the rainbow’s brilliant arc after a thunderstorm. It’s present in the bee gathering pollen, the tiny sprout breaking through the soil. Love exists in the birds chirping a morning song through vibrational notes that when you listen carefully enough, sound like a carefully orchestrated musical number. It’s in the tree that stands tall, branches outstretched to the sky seeking the light of the sun. Love expresses itself through the sweet nectary scent of lilacs and honeysuckle that waft to your nose on the spring breeze. Love is the invisible expression of divinity that exists as the fabric of reality, an energy that just IS. It doesn’t perform, ask to be chosen, nor cling tightly in attachment to people or material things.
So what then, are the barriers to truly understanding love, and recognizing love both within ourselves, as well as within every other living creation we have the gift of experiencing?
Speaking from my own personal experience, the barriers to me recognizing and embodying love began from a very young age, before I even had a conscious memory. They were embedded in my psyche before I even had a chance to know myself or understand the truth of love. I grew up in what I now see as cult-like religious home, in a family of six children. My father was a deacon in the Faith Baptist Church that we attended. I recall very little of attending church, and truth be told, I recall very little of the events of my entire childhood, a trauma response born from living in a perpetual state of nervous system dysregulation. But I do remember the abuse, justified by religious dogma, and the way it made me feel about myself: like a wretched sinner that needed to be rescued by something or someone outside of myself, always striving to “do better”. I remember always feeling like a failure, that no matter how hard I tried, I was astronomically failing the very people I loved: my parents. My own mother beat me with a wooden spoon or yardstick and told that God commands children to obey their parents.