Love Within, published in "The Light" February 2004

After a season dedicated to wishing each other peace and joy, comes the holiday of love. What a delightful way to spend the winter months!

Up until pretty recently, I always thought that love was something that was given to me. If I were a good girl, I would be loved. When I was upset, people wouldn't¹t want to be around me. I figured out that I had to behave a certain way and that love was the reward. It was a very upsetting game, always having to figure out what to do and what to say in order to produce the desired outcome. I even had to behave a certain way for me to approve of myself or I would scold myself silently. I thought it was normal. I thought it was a good thing, and that it was showing me the consequences of my actions. I thought it was love.

And then, I remember reading for the first time "The Mastery of Love", by don Miguel Ruiz. A passage describing a relationship based on fear, anger and emotional bartering produced a funny feeling in my heart, as I recognized the underlying patterns of the seemingly loving relationship I was in. A few weeks later that relationship ended, along with many friendships and I was devastated, even though I was the one who left. Pain mingled with reward is addictive, and I had no clue how to love myself on my own. It is three years to the date today, and I feel so much compassion for all who were a part of this mini drama. To myself I send a silent message back in the past: "It's ok, you will discover love as you never thought possible. You are looking in the wrong place, it doesn't live outside of you. Look within, and you will feel it burning brightly underneath the fear and the sorrow. Love is your true essence." Cher's song was playing on the radio at that time, and her lyrics "I will love again, bigger and stronger than ever before" became my new mantra, although I didn't know at the time that it really meant that I would have to learn to become the recipient and the giver of self directed love.

For many years prior to that separation, I had been avoiding people who would throw me off balance. I was proud of the fact that my friends were only people who were on the exact same path. My circle of friend was of course, pretty small. How can you deal with impossible, mean spirited people? Best is to avoid them, or so I thought.

A workshop with Debbie Ford gave me a very simple tool to start identifying and embracing all the disowned parts of myself that I was rejecting in other people. Find the gift of the annoying people. They just reflect back to us which part we have rejected in ourselves. Learn to accept that part - et voila; the person is no longer annoying you. Their behavior actually changes towards you as well as you let go of the judgments you have about them.

As I continue to reclaim all disowned parts of myself, and deepen my surrender to the love within me, a miracle is starting to occur: Life becomes love in action. Love is in fact the true essence of life; it is who we truly are. All we have to do is to be aware of what is not love within us, and transform what you discover with acceptance, gratitude and forgiveness.

The temptation would be to push away what we discover, to deny the feelings of anger, jalousie etc. that arise. In fact, you can really love yourself only when you learn how to simply feel and embrace all feelings and behaviors within yourself. Who said that anger was bad? Who made you believe it? Most likely, sometime in your childhood you were taught that such a behavior was unacceptable, and you should remove yourself from polite society - aka: time-out - until you got a hold on your emotion. This is not to advocate blowing up and spewing your anger, judgments and other such emotional poison onto yourself or others. Not at all. I am not suggesting that you slap on a "love and compassion" band-aid onto whatever arises, congratulating yourself that you just don¹t get upset anymore. That¹s denial, and it produces legions of people with smiles pasted on their face, slightly condescending of their fellow humans who are just not as evolved as they are, or so they think.

I am just suggesting to simply allow yourself to feel the feeling that arises within you, feel the physical sensation of it, without judging it, commenting on it or pushing it away. Just feel it, and have love and compassion for yourself. Better yet, have fun with it; enjoy feeling the anger burning bright inside, without taking it out onto others or yourself. Some of the feelings labeled ³negative² are part of our human make up: fear, anger, grief ... can all be quite sweet if simply felt in our bodies, and detached from the running commentary of our minds.

The problem comes when we add on and believe all the reasons why we feel this feeling. ³I am angry because ...² It then becomes an emotional high, an addiction to generating and projecting these feelings. They feel yucky, and yet we crave them. Very much like the movie "Monsters, Inc." The Monsters scare the little children and use that energy of fear to power their cities. We make ourselves upset and use that energy to feed emotional junk food to ourselves. When some of the Monsters discover that there is another energy out there, the energy of love they encounter resistance. Fear and anger is what the monsters¹ city is accustomed to running on. It produces an emotional energy rush in your body, as the energy is instantly transferred to your arms to fight with or your legs to run away.

So are you ready to take on the Monsters' challenge? Love is more powerful and will feed your city, your body, more efficiently. It will not create power outages; it will not blow up your fuses. It will make you body hum, and your skin glow. When we choose to make the emotional conversion to love, we are still addicted to the junk food of working ourselves in an emotional frenzy. You will need to be very gentle with yourself as you go through the period of withdrawal from the addiction to emotional junk food. You will still seek to create emotional upsets in your life or that of others, because it will give something really good to complain about, to be mad about, and you will want to use that junk food to feed energy to your body. Have fun about it the next time you discover this tendency in yourself. Love yourself for sneaking some junk food, forgive yourself and move on. The power of love is stronger than anything else. It is stronger Than any fear you might experience, any doubts, regrets or self-judgments. This is the first step on the road to emotional recovery.