Being Loved Requires Being, Feeling Loved Requires Loving

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1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor , and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

4 Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5 doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; 6 rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; 7 beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8 Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away. 9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; 10 but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. 13 But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13

When I was a very young child I noticed how unhappy everyone in my family was. I then began to notice that there was so much of the same unhappiness all around me. I watched it, but I also shared it. Everyone felt unloved. At least, I know that is what we believed we felt. It is as though we are all standing in line facing and focusing all of our effort on receiving the love we need from the person standing in front of us, whose back we are facing. If we could all just turn around and give exactly what we are seeking to the person behind us, seeking the same love and approval, we would all, in turn, receive what stands between wholeness and ourselves.

I believed that if someone married me, I would feel loved; I would be happy. Then I believed that if I had a child of my own, THEN I would feel loved and be happy. When my only hopes for happiness left me still feeling worthless, I entered therapy. I went to the Alfred Adler clinic in New York City. On the intake questionnaire they asked: If you died, what would you want written on your gravestone. My response was, “Denise was WELL LOVED”. I believed that if by the time I died, my legacy was having been loved by many then I would know that somewhere along my journey on this earth I had found the happiness that I was seeking. All I thought I ever wanted was to feel loved. But what feeling loved really meant to me had nothing to do with another person loving me, but having some person convince me that I was worthy of loving.

I think about that gravestone often, and at various points in my life I have revisited the inscription considering what I would want written at each of those points in my life. At one point, about ten years ago, I arrived at my final revision of that stone. I realized that I would know that my life was all that I could have asked of it, if my gravestone says, “Denise LOVED WELL”. The reality is that the only way that the void of love within remains constantly filled is if it is constantly poured out to others. Here is a story that I read somewhere:

“With an angel for his guide, the visitor is first ushered through the gates of Hell, which, he is surprised to find, are made of finely wrought gold. The gates, in fact, are incomparably lovely, as is the verdant land¬scape that lies beyond them. All this is quite astonishing to the visitor, who turns to his angelic guide in disbelief. “It’s all so beautiful,” the man says. “The sight of the meadows and mountains . . . the sounds of the birds singing in the trees … the scent of thousands of flowers. . . .” And then another scent catches his attention: the aroma of food being prepared.
The angel leads the visitor toward an immense banquet table laden with every sort of delicacy. However, something is terribly wrong. Hundreds of people are seated around the table, but they all appear to be starving. Their emaciated condition is painful to see in the midst of such bounty, but even worse is the frustration and anger they are obviously experiencing. Each person at the table has a long-handled spoon chained to his wrist. The handles are so long that no one can place food in his mouth. But that does not prevent the condemned souls from trying. For all eternity, they are struggling to feed themselves a meal that is right before them, but that might as well be a hundred miles away. Taken aback by the tragic spectacle, the visitor is now more than ready to visit Paradise, and the angel immediately complies. At once they pass through an¬other set of golden gates, alike in every detail to the gates of hell. In fact, a great deal about the two locales seems to be identical, including the banquet table and the diners chained to their utensils. But the people around this table are well fed and happy, despite the fact that their circumstances are identical to those of the damned. The difference is not in the physical situation, but in how they respond to it. As you might have guessed by now, instead of trying to feed themselves, each of the souls at this table feeds the one across the table.”

Remembering that the ego through which we incarnate in each lifetime is little more than an accumulation of experiences and beliefs of our past lives. Change – growth and the merging of the ego and higher self are instigated by the soul. Each life is the next chapter in the evolution of the soul. This plotline of this life carries with it a repetition of situations from prior lives that were not resolved, not balanced. It also contains new areas experiences and challenges for further growth, and the fruit of lessons that we have mastered from past lives to share with others in this one. All souls who are late young, mature or old have lived through lifetimes of conditioning as beings stained at birth by original sin. Few adults living today were not there at the birth of this age, which is drawing to a close, and this age was born with the imprint of original sin.

The majority of people on earth, or at least in the western countries feel in some way inferior to almost everyone else alive. I have admired to so many people who I believed were confident, and self-assured only to find out that the singular difference between them and me was that they were better at pretending. Some assuage their feelings of inadequacy by telling themselves that they are superior to others. The more they immerse themselves in their superiority the less they have to acknowledge their feelings of inferiority. Some make a great show of telling everyone how great they are, while others find a skill, talent, or physique that they use to draw a constant flow of accolades. Then of course, there are embellishments such as wealth, fame and power to make one look superior.

People insist that their religion is the only religion acceptable to God out of a need to feel superior. It is the need to feel superior that causes people to insist that their choice of worship is the only true choice of worship. Jealousy is a sign of insecurity – God could not be jealous unless He was insecure about all of the other gods being worshiped. However, if there is only one God then that one God is not jealous, not wrathful, and not angry because all of those are symptoms of insecurity. Regardless of how superior we appear, and how content we may be with that appearance, within ourselves there are no props that can change how we feel. So, we look to intimate relationships to give us that feeling of adequacy by showering us with love. The problem is that the material world or rather the external world is impermanent. Whatever fills us up today will be insufficient to the task tomorrow. Someone will always come along smarter, prettier, wealthier, more powerful, more famous, more creative, more talented, younger etc. Everything external that matters today will not matter tomorrow, next week, next year, or whenever. Whatever exists in the external world has a shelf life. If that is where we seek our value, or sense of lovability, then we must acknowledge the expiration date.

Our past lives of belief in original sin have convinced us that we are defective. Now is the time to understand and to instill in the young children born at the dawn of this new age that we are each created so perfectly, so flawlessly, that there will never be more than one of each of us. We are each so perfect that we cannot be duplicated. We are each original signed creations of our Source, and there is not now, and will never be an artist superior to our creator, nor will there ever be materials superior to those from which we are made because we are made from the Creator. It is the uniqueness of our design that makes us each so great. And we are each here to add that unique color, that unique quality that is each of us to the great work of art that is in a constant state of becoming, entitled “Life”.

Love is. It does not exist because of what we do, or who we are. Love is unconditional. Many people have found through regressions that they suffer from debilitating illnesses in this life so that they have the opportunity to be taken care of, and to feel love from others who receive nothing in return. It is the only way that their souls can guarantee the experience. If someone loves us and we push them away because the love does not come wrapped in the package that we are expecting, although may they move away – they do not stop loving us.

All of this concern over being loved and being lovable dissolves into itself when we stop worrying about being loved and strive to be love itself. No amount of love, adoration, worship or praise can change how we feel about ourselves when the lights go dim. Most people I know who do not feel loved are really not very loving. Whatever they give to others or do for others has some form of string attached, even if it is a required amount of expressed appreciation. They may not feel that they are measuring, but they can give an extremely accurate account of their expressions of love – for people who are not keeping track. Whatever experiences have closed them down do not matter.

I once thought that we were given love in proportion to the love that we give.  This is not true.  Many people who are too fearful to love are themselves loved unconditionally.  They are given this love so that if at any time they choose to understand what true loving is, they have it available to learn from.  However, it does not matter to these people that they are truly loved, because being loved is not the same as feeling loved.  So, until we are willing to open ourselves to give love – even if the whole world loved us – we would still feel unloved.  Feeling the love that is sometimes all around us is only possible when we give it.

If we want to feel loved we must take the risk of loving unconditionally. And what happens when we do this, is that we forget about what we are not getting because we are overwhelmed with the joy of what we are giving. Then suddenly, out of the blue, we look around and are astounded by the amount of love that is coming to us.

Do You Have To Love Yourself To Love Others?

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
you position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.

Tao te Ching

My friend, Paul Crockett,  posed a question that I thought to be profound.  He asked, “If one does not love one’s self, can one love others?”.  He said that he believed that one can, but my first thought was, “How”? This led me to the realization that we all love ourselves.  Even when I believed that I did not love myself, I treated myself lovingly.  If I was stressed, I would buy myself a drink.  If I was sad I would treat myself to something sweet.  Sometimes, I would allow myself to separate from my sense of obligation to others, I would remove myself to be alone and lick my wounds.  Other times when I felt neglected I would take myself shopping to spend money that I did not have on something that I did not need.  I see everyone around me doing the same.  So I have never met anyone who did not love themselves.  If we did not love ourselves, then we would not become defensive when criticized or treated without respect.  We accept ourselves, warts and all, but we do so because we have no choice.

What I believe is that we are all capable of loving others, ‘conditionally’.  More than anything else, the soul incarnates time and again in order to attain the characteristic of unconditional love.  Unconditional love understands, embraces, forgives, it is without judgment.  We love ourselves, but we judge ourselves, we do not forgive ourselves, and we do not see our perfection.  We have been told that only God is perfect.  If we believe that we are parts of, born of, created by God, then we are perfect.

The spiritual path is not traveled by the soul, it is guided by the soul.  It is traveled by the ego, and the spiritual goal of the ego is to become one with its own soul.  For the soul, oneness with All-that-Is, is the goal.  The tool of the soul is the ego.  The soul is love, it is beauty, it is one with all that emanates from Spirit.  The journey, the task of the soul, through each trial and each lifetime of experiences is to tear away at the illusions held by the ego of separateness from the soul, from Spirit, and from all life everywhere.  We come to learn that we are all parts of One Whole, and the Whole is the sum of its parts.  I may be stomach cell, someone else may be a liver cell, another is a heart cell and on and on but we are all perfect in that the whole would not exist without us.

When we attain to this knowledge – when we live our lives from the foundation of this understanding, we no longer judge ourselves.  The transient scales of society which condition our judgment – fat, thin, tall, short, ugly, pretty, smart, stupid, Black, White, rich, poor, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Jew, all lose their ownership of our lives because we hold only the belief that we are, and all life is a perfect reflection of and vital part of the Spirit that dwells within us.

When we speak of the material world we usually think we are referring to the underlying reality — the world that we are perceiving “out there”. In fact we are only describing our image of reality. The materiality we experience, the solidness we feel, the whole of the “real world” that we know are all aspects of the image created in the mind; they are part of our interpretation of reality. Paradoxical as it may sound, matter is something created in the mind. Peter Russell “From Science To God”

Let us  ourselves as Our Creator sees us.  That we are good.  That the nameless One  The Perfect Source of our existence, would not create an image of itself that was flawed.  And if it did, the flaw itself could be nothing but a new level of perfection.  Living from this reality we not only love ourselves unconditionally, but the love that rises from our being and is felt by those around us is void of judgment, or condition.  There is an understanding that the universe is economic.  No one and no thing is created by Spirit that is unnecessary to the perfection that is All-That-Is.

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Tao Te Ching

Every person in our lives is a loving participant on our journey.  Some teach us forgiveness because we must forgive them.  Some teach us patience – because we need it to deal with them.  Some teach us unconditional love because they do things that are hurtful, sometimes without awareness of the effect that they have on us and sometimes fully aware.  And very often they act as mirrors – reflecting back at ourselves the things that we have been unable to love in ourselves.  If we can see each person and experience as a vital part of growth that we came into this life to attain, we will see only beauty, and be able to only love.

This is the path to loving ourselves and all whom we meet unconditionally; it is the path to union with the soul, and The Creator.  This is our purpose for the earthly experience; this is the awakening to the only real truth.  Until we are able to know ourselves only as the Spirit we imagine ourselves separate from, the love that we give and the love that we feel for ourselves will continue to make us feel like a starving man who can see but can never reach the food.

Instructions For Assembling and Maintaining a Loving Relationship

I was watching a cooking show the other day called, “The Barefoot Contessa”, and Ina, the chef in the show, said that she and her husband were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary.   She said that they were as happy after forty years of marriage as they were the day that they met.  She said that she didn’t believe in working on a relationship, their recipe for happiness in marriage was simple, she wanted to make him happy and he wanted to make her happy.  Work can make a relationship last, but work is not enjoyable.  So, should it really be work?  No, it really shouldn’t.

Our entire growth experiences as human beings is based upon relationships.  The world in which we live exists through relationship.  It is made up of the relationship of one thing to another, of one state of being to another, of one belief system to another and of one person to another.  We understand up because we understand down, we understand dark because we understand light.  Without the two opposite points, we would not have a path to journey upon.  Every human relationship that we have aids us in discovering ourselves, our needs, and what we need to fulfill our lives.

Each thing in our lives that we pursue, we pursue because we are attracted to it.  We are attracted to a food, to a style of dress, to a path of study, a belief system, a career, a friend and a partner.  With each thing that we are attracted to, we taste, we test out, we try on, we investigate, we study.  We do this with everything except our emotional relationships.  In that one, most important area, we just close our eyes and jump.  I believe that it has a great deal to do with society, our families and our peers convincing us that there is a deadline to meet.  If we are not in a relationship by a certain age, it is too late.  It is like musical chairs, if we are not seated when the music stops – we are out.  We are out in the cold, all alone, left to starve.

There is a painful cellular, or past life memory of the deadly consequences, especially for women, of being alone.  There was a time when it was a death sentence.  But that was then and this is now, at least in the west.  We are wired spiritually, genetically, to be attracted to the path that we are meant to travel.   That is the law of attraction.  We are magnetized to our journeys – to our lessons.  So, an example would be that one is attracted to art, then to painting, then to decorative painting.  Through decorative painting one becomes attracted to interior design, and from interior design one finally arrives at a passion and perfect fit with architecture.  Had that person remained in decorative painting after she was drawn to interior design – she would have been unhappy and unfulfilled.  However, it was decorative painting that not only opened her up and prepared her for interior design, but it was what led her to interior design.  It was also her initial attraction to art, then to painting that began the journey.

Some people come into life to name that tune in one note, others come in to name that tune in ten notes.  Human beings are not standardized, our journeys are not standardized, so we cannot standardize the lives that we live.  Success in life is not measured by how many steps it took to get there, but that we ultimately got there.  This is equally valid in our relationships.  Sometimes it takes more than one relationship to find out who we are, what we need, and what we have to give.  Sometimes what we find out about ourselves in one relationship leads us to another.  I read once, that some people enter our lives for a season, some for a reason, and some for a lifetime.  We will not know which is which based upon when they enter.  We will not know which is which based upon the power of the energy that draws us to them or by the passion that we feel around them.  We will only know by the inner sense of fulfillment, of peace and of completion that we feel because they are in our lives.  Each one of us has our own, individual first and last.  And until we reach the last – we are not meant to know in advance which it is.  So armed with patience and our eyes open, we can move on to what that lifetime relationship requires to be fulfilling.

The first thing that is needed is respect.  However high those pheromones are flying, if we don’t respect the person that we are with, those pheromones are not just going to land, they are going to crash.  It is just not possible to continue to treat someone with respect who we really don’t feel respect for.  And if we do not treat our partner with respect, eventually they are going to leave.

We have to have shared values.  If not initially, we have to be at least open to understanding enough to personally value the values of the other.  There must be common ground.  For example, I am very spiritual, and I have a lot of beliefs that everyone does not share.  The person I am with does not have to share my beliefs, but, he has to share my values.  He has to be caring, compassionate, and value others.  He does not have to be spiritual if his sense of humanity is strong.  Who we are, who we believe ourselves to be rests, for better or for worse on our values.  Our values are what we consider to be valuable – they are a reflection of what our souls have accomplished up to this point.  Regardless of the emotions that we feel for another person if our values clash, our sense of being valued will deteriorate.  So much of what we do, of how we react to life comes from our core values that if we are not compatible at that level, the level of our personal foundations, then the foundation of the relationship is not sound enough to withstand the pressures of everyday life.

We need to have developed, within ourselves, the ability to trust.  This is important because we will always find what we are looking for.  If we are unable to trust, we will find reasons to justify our mistrust.   Once we find or imagine those reasons, we are stuck there and the relationship is neglected.

Those are the ingredients that we need to build the foundation of a good and lasting relationship.  They are not what we need to do.  Each person in a relationship must enter it thinking not of what he or she wants to get out of it, or get from the other person, but what he or she wants to give.  Each partner must want, above all, to make the other partner happy.  It is important that this is not a job.  It is important that it is not work.  If I am going to spend most of my time focused on making my partner happy – that in itself must give me some happiness.  If it is a chore, if it feels too much like a sacrifice, then I should not be in that relationship.  If each partner is focused on the happiness and wellbeing of the other partner – then both partners will be happy.

No one outgrows a relationship with these ingredients.   That is because it grows and expands with the needs of each partner because both partners are concerned about the other’s needs.  Life is hard work; a relationship should make it easier to overcome the hard times in life.  It should never create them.  No two people are always going to agree about everything, but if you are both on the same floor, you will eventually find each other, find a way to come together.  Outside of the bedroom, every issue begins with our values.  When two people come together to form a relationship, each places on the table in front of the other, their dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and most of all, self value.  All of these together represent the love that each seeks to share.  Each one shares this love by entrusting the other with these precious parts of who he or she is.  Unless each partner takes those dreams, hopes, fears, desire, etc. of the other and places it before their own,  both partners end up focused only on themselves.  In doing this, the other’s happiness is neglected.  Each feels unloved, alone, and betrayed.  No one feels loved because no one loved.

When you find two people who, after forty, fifty, sixty years still look at each other with love, reach for the other’s hand you know some important things.  You know first, that each can love.  You know that each can trust.  You know that each can give.  Most of all, you know that it is possible to have that kind of love.  It doesn’t take work, but it does take risk.  It is a risk to give your heart in trust to another person.  It is a risk to put another person’s happiness ahead of your own.  Sometimes it feels like the greatest risk is to walk away when your heart says it is so right, but a voice inside of your head says it is so wrong.  Follow your heart to the door, but make sure that you walk in with both.

Each relationship that we have is as destined to be as any other.  The difference is only the purpose that they serve.   None are mistakes, none are failures.  There is no time frame within which love can be found.  The only schedule that we need to follow is the one within our souls.  We are always on time.