Learning from our suffering

I have been in love and I have fallen out of love. I have had my heart broken and I am sure I have broken one or two hearts, although not intentionally.

The deepest pain caused by fear and rejection leaves a lasting mark on our hearts. We suffer, sometimes in silence and sometimes screaming, but we suffer. Sometimes we make the choice to open our heart and share all of the love and passion with someone who is not ready, someone not in the same space, or perhaps someone unable to love with equal fervor. We take this as rejection and we suffer again.

I believe this is a selfish love because we have an expectation of how we think that person should love. We are taking responsibility or their choices or limitations. We are trying to project our desire and our wants onto them, to control their behavior. I do not believe most of us come from a place of negative intention we are trying to level the field, to reduce our risk of injury.

We employ many tricks to win over the focus of our affection. We pretend to be who we think they need or want, we bully, cry, plead, control, ingratiate; All of these tactics are just manipulative tools even if we are not aware of using them at the time.

True affection works best when there is no effort, when we apply the least amount of energy and the coming together of two hearts seem simple and natural. We have been lying to ourselves for many generations when we say, “relationships are hard, they take work”. This is not true.

Think of your easiest relationship. How much effort did it take for you to come together? Did you know you were missing this person until they showed up and now you don’t know what you would do without them? Many days may pass and you do not speak but you do not feel fear or anxiety because you KNOW that you are still connected and you will come back together when the timing is just right.

The more effort you put into “making it work” the further away you move from your path and your authentic self. God, the Universe, whatever you call your creative force wants you to live as closely to its energy as possible. When you are in the flow of creative life energy all you have to do is coast. Your choices become automatic because you trust yourself, your intuition.

There’s no such thing as loving the “wrong” people because any time you can give the energy of your heart freely you increase the amount of love going into the world. This LOVE energy has the ability to heal and to change. Love has the ability to soften the hardest of hearts and fill in the widest cracks in a person’s Spirit. Our individual responsibility is to explore the depths of the heart, to expand the heart’s ability to share unjustified love. The willingness of the other person to love you in return is none of your concern, really, because that is their journey.

When we approach loving someone from the perspective of freedom and non-attachment we are exercising our “god given” gift of humanity. I can’t pretend that I don’t desire unrequited love because I do. I still yearn for the love of a man that is not on my path and I am not on his. I find myself easily moved to tears when I think of the pain and suffering that he is experiencing. My comfort is loving him harder, with an open hand and an open heart.

The philosophy of non-attachment can seem glib and dismissive initially. We may want to use this practice like a shield to protect ourselves from getting too close and therefore prevent pain and suffering. However, non-attachment does not mean avoiding deep affection and emotion. Non-attachment means we accept the outcome of our love and devotion even when we have no control over the other person. We do not turn away from the potential pain but welcome it into our hearts with the same respect that we welcomed that new love. You see, through feeling and being open to our own suffering we better understand the suffering of others. When we see that we all suffer we can find compassion for their experience. The anger and fear that we were trying to avoid becomes our teacher, our friend. In the process we have opened our hearts even wider than we had first imagined.

Bob Marley asked us if we “could be loved and be love”, well, can you?

Namaste