The fire that burns, also keeps me warm. So too on the inside. So too with the structure of love. The discipline is in the way we manage the elements. It is not the fire, it's how we use it. not the love, it's how we use it. What it ignites and heats - sometimes good feeling - sometimes frightening - sometimes damaging. What we allow to be touched by it's heat - sometimes manageable energy - sometimes out of control.
Yesterday, the person that invited me into the deepest feelings of hurt in my life, articulates for me an idea that frees me.
Our notion of romantic love is itself the cause of so much of our suffering. The role of love is not to find the one person that can give us access to bliss or ease, although a person can help us feel that, but what is coming through that 'love' is the connection to feeling connected, the goodness of being seen, accepted, held - y'know all the good stuff in this life. But it will shift. Because love isn't a drug. So the greater the love, the greater the pain/discomfort/conditioning that will get shaken up. The greater the connection, the greater the pressure on the blocks to that accepting of deeper connection that emerge. But the love is always there. Running under you. It's the truth of being held as your shit comes up. So if you can have the strength to accept the discomfort as the chance to do your work on yourself, the quicker you shake your conditioned self and the limits you were born into the faster you are back into the connection with love itself - through a person or a tree or it all.
And in mapping it out for me as he did - a new context for the feelings that rubbed and arose between us. The pain of feeling burned by the one I loved. And suddenly the years it has taken to to get to that conversation were as deep as the wounded truth and real love we had just uncovered.
So here is my thing. let love through you. Let it find the places your wiring got broken. Where the flow is clogged or the connection is frayed or something never attached. That faulty wiring is not your fault, it's not even you. It's just the result of your upbringing, formative experiences, or what you carry from another life - however you understand the notion of the unconscious doesn't matter as much as that there is one. And you get strong enough to no know that those uncomfortable feelings of anger and rage and sadness and pain are not you. They are just markers for what you have to do.
And this, the writing, the posting, it's for me mostly. Because I will forget this knowing. I will feel disconnected. I will feel abandoned and violated and I will rage again. I will also try to blame someone for those feelings. That wounded wiring and pathways will feel more true than the flow and I will be sad and angry again. So I write this to mark this good feeling of knowing and accepting love not through a single person but just as it is. so that I can remember when i get back in. because the forgetting is inevitable. it's part of the design so that you can keep doing the work of fixing the broken wires and channels. to keep getting stronger not with anyone or with yourself but with the larger flow.
So go, fall in love. Connect through someone with everything, and try to remember. They are not everything anymore than you are. And the love just is. It's everything good that flows in the universe. And when the block comes, greet it with open arms. Ask it what it is showing you. Let it in. The fire to heat and cook, not burn and destroy. And whatever you do, hold on to the love that is you, and fight to get back there with all you got. Cause that good loving feeling you feel...that's you.