What if LOVE?????
What if LOVE...
I have often pondered how powerful the emotion of LOVE is in our lives. Without love, an infant will quickly lose interest in life - in an environment without LOVE an elderly person will withdraw into the safe space inside to protect themselves from a world devoid of LOVE. As a young child, we begin to equate approval to LOVE and as a teenager we begin to look outside of our family for love and we very quickly realize what a vulnerable space LOVE really is. The definition of LOVE may evolve for us, and with us as we expand, but the need for it NEVER goes away.
Life is made up of duality... for every concept or thought that exists there also exists a shadow side or an opposite. Fifteen years ago if I had been asked to define the opposite of LOVE I would have quickly replied with the word hate... today I have a deeper understanding of LOVE and it's opposite, this understanding is rich with "heart" earned wisdom... the kind of wisdom only found when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and acknowledge that you yearn for understanding on a deeper level, a level only reached through the process of soul searching, falling down, standing back up and trying once again to move forward.
It was through the process of trying to understand the totality of LOVE that I came to know the shadow side of love is actually FEAR. When we are not in a state of LOVE we are in fact, in a state of fear - fear of what life looks like without the structure, security, validity and intimacy of love! This FEAR shows up in a variety of ways, just as LOVE does.... in primitive times being banished from the tribe literally meant death, simply due to the odds of survival on our own. In modern times FEAR appears wearing many masks... "I don't fit in", "I am not enough", "I am not worthy", " My family doesn't understand me", " I must be perfect to deserve love", " Why would anyone love someone like me", " No one gets me", and a bazillion other masks!
Behind the mask, fear tucks us in a box... a box that we believe will keep us safe and free from the vulnerability of LOVE. We build the walls of the box higher with our stories and justifications and when we get really scared we close the flaps, put on our mask- close out the world and crouch low in the box! We listen as our inner critic tells us the story that we have been repeating to ourselves and because this story is familiar - we believe it... and we stay small!!!
But what if our mission while on the earth is simple.... what if that purpose is simply to learn how to LOVE. LOVE unconditionally, LOVE completely, without judgment or comparison, without fear or reservation... just LOVE in the purest form possible in this existence.
If this were true, how would you measure up? Could you report that you WERE LOVE, that you had experienced LOVE and that you had given LOVE to others, unconditionally, without consequence, justification or attachment? I love to imagine a world where we let go of ego, materialism, the concepts of diversity, religion, race, wealth, economics, politics, and a myriad of other factors that we allow to divide us and instead put all of our effort into the process of acknowledging that LOVE is really all that there is.
In this world of my imagination we are one, we are truly cohesive and we individually accept our own divine power as a necessary and valid component of the whole. We don't give our power away to fear and shame and judgment, we instead hold tight to our divinity and our wholeness and the light within us, which is God.
God is LOVE, we are of God and so we too are LOVE. My challenge to you is to learn LOVE... learn how to give LOVE, how to receive LOVE, how to express LOVE and most importantly, learn how to BE LOVE!
Lonnie Taylor January 1, 2020