I giggled this morning as I had a recollection of the little pastel candy hearts that were popular during the Valentines Day’s of my youth. They were embossed with one or two words little messages such as “Be Mine,” and were composed of nothing more than pure processed sugar. The thought of eating one today is totally unappealing, yet they remain a sweet memory of an innocent time before the adult complications surrounding romantic love cast a pawl around this romance-centered holiday. While I am happily married today I have indeed spent many a Valentines Day uncommitted yet admittedly unavailable. In a world filled with Hallmark images and conceptual renderings of what the perfect loving companionship looks like there are a great number of people starved for love both inside and outside of relationships. The “what I will get from being loved” paradigm is still in dominion, and the false notion that someone outside of us is going to mend our broken heart and leave us feeling complete is a fallacy that leads to enormous amounts of suffering and vengeful separations. Love is indeed first an inside job. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a part of us that needs the love of other people. We do. It is for me dissociative to say that if we love ourselves enough we won’t need the love of others around us. We are each at Essence the unconditional Love of Source. That is who and what we are, individually and collectively. We are designed in such a way that our greatest joy in life will come from living in an inner atmosphere of that Sourced Divine love, choose to extend easily and freely love to all those around us, and then also to be open enough to always receive love with an open and willing heart. In my counseling practice I am frequently in the presence of people who say they want nothing more than to be in a committed loving relationship, yet they are unconsciously unable to be vulnerable and defenseless enough to actually let that love in.
What we think love is it isn’t. This is because you cannot think love. It is not a concept in the mind. It is a Reality of the heart. The images we hold of what the perfect relationship will look like are much like those little candy hearts. Conceptual love is sugary and seductive and gives us a fast and furious artificial high. We as a race are in love with the idea of being in love. Our lonely and hurting hearts think that by getting a sugar-high romance from joining with someone who is very likely as lonely as we are we will finally get the love we believe we have never really received. There may indeed be an initial high from being in love with love but then the sugar wears off and we crash into the reality that this person is inept at meeting our needs and assuaging our deep and pervasive woundedness. Eating sugar isn’t nourishing. Too much of it wreaks havoc on our blood sugar levels and creates emotional chaos and energetic hangovers. Surface infatuation has much the same effect. Conceptual love doesn’t nourish. It isn’t a reality that connects us to the deepest level of who we are. It is seeking to get something you perceive you do not have. Mature love is all about seeking to give. It isn’t about trying to find the perfect person to love you. It is about loving the imperfect in you and in the other perfectly. Love isn’t a high. It is an unshakeable context that contains and embraces the totality of being. You don’t love, become disillusioned, and then leave. You love and you choose to stay. Whatever arises you choose to stay. You continue to love because love is what you are. Being love it is naturally and organically what you do. You love whether the other is being loveable in the moment or not. It isn’t a white sugar love that leaves you feeling empty, exhausted, and spent. Real love is deep and abiding and essential. It is nourishing because you are literally giving and partaking of what you are at depth. You are living in the love you are choosing to give, and you are giving because it is what you are.
And so this Valentines Day there will be no sugary hearts for me to eat. There will be no experience of white-sugar love with its inevitable crash. There is only a deep and abiding love In which I live and from which I give. This is my reality. This is my joy and my fulfillment and my purpose. I am choosing to love the imperfect perfectly by keeping my heart open and letting myself live, give, and receive the depths of unconditional love. It isn’t always easy. Love can be daunting. It can be confrontive. It will expose you. And it is ultimately the Source of all that is and the reason for our very Being. Aligning in the One Source Love and giving way vibrationally and actively to that love makes everyday Valentines Day. And from that there is no fall.
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