it. We might even be in a relationship with someone and block the love for them. So, easy to limit our love life because something blocks our love, a fear, a memory, a hope, an ambition, destiny, truth or whatever. So, we explore love here, and ask the question of ourselves; what blocks our love?
To begin, lets try to understand the paradigm that causes us to hold love to ransom. Take a flower, a rose for example and smell it, look at it, feel it, hold it, listen to it, and taste it. Delicious. Now take the rose and squash it.
Difficult? Why? Because it’s beautiful and we don’t want to spoil it. It’s a sort of built in mechanism in all of us to try to preserve all that is beautiful in the form we think is best. And this is one of the causes of blocked love in life. We get attached to a form, we hold onto that form, we can’t let go of that form, and suddenly we’re in the poo. Expectations block love.
So, our love becomes conditional. If you are 6 feet tall, gorgeous, wealthy, happy and blab, you’re lovable. If not, nice knowing you.
Love also becomes conditional on behaviour. If you are in a relationship with me, you’ll do this and this and this and this. And if you’re not in a relationship with me, I won’t love you.
Complex as it sounds – the solution to all this is surprisingly easy. Learn to separate love and relationship. We can put boundaries around our relationships and say, “if you do this I will be happier” that’s a boundary. But you can’t put boundary around your love. You can put boundaries around your business culture, if you do this, I will pay you, and if you don’t I won’t. But you can’t put boundaries around your service to others and your inspiration.
I run seminars and the ones I really enjoy are the ones in which people get a tactile experience. Like out in nature, or in a conference room with bits of nature as teachers. In Canada, I was really blessed with some great sponsors and they’d buy flowers for the programs because it was such a shock for people to see how attached they were to the form.
Is a flower, that is all squashed into bits still a flower? It’s not a flower in the form we knew it. It’s a flower in a new form, called squashed to bits. But is it still a flower? The answer is a resounding yes. So, people come in all shapes and sizes and religions and cultures. Christians say “if you don’t worship Jesus, you’re not holy” – just like the flower, they are so stuck in form, they can love anything other than the rose in it’s “perfect” shape.
In your relationship, partners shift shape allot. You have to learn how to shift your expectations. And if they cross your boundaries you might choose to break the relationship, but not the love. You might say “no matter what, richer or poorer, better or worse, sickness and health, I love you, BUT, if you break my heart, I will not be in a relationship with you”
This is a personal spirituality that makes the world a better place. Instead of broken hearted people looking for compensation in their next relationship, we get loving people, admitting how much they love their ex, and moving into the next relationship without blame and guilt and fear. We also get a more honest dynamic between people.
So many marriages are broken boundary marriages. The boundaries get broken, people compromise for the sake of not breaking up, and live a lifetime staring at the rose, but not feeling it, smelling it, touching it. Just wishing it would be different. Instead of love for that person, they just hope.
When you learn to separate relationship and love, you learn honesty. You can love many, but relationship with few. So, the last part of this short piece is about boundary – expectations. When someone crosses your boundaries you feel justified in being hurt, angry, disappointed, and emotionally defensive.
Boundaries are very complex things. They are our expectations of people. Constructed from our fears, wounds, education, information, social paradigms, guilt’s, and a nightmare of other things. Our expectations are our EGO. They can block our love by creating conditions for it. If you do this, I will love you. If you do that I will love you. I guess to a certain extent boundaries reveal our emotional truth.
If I have no boundaries, I have no SELF respect. You can walk all over me, treat me like a piece of dirt. If I have so many boundaries, then you can’t get close to me, because you have to fit through such a small keyhole to be accepted by me. No boundaries is a spiritual nirvana, where the ego has no affect on a person’s judgements. It’s a theoretical place, few human beings are ready to surrender to. It’s a place where money, wealth, family, friends, TV sets don’t exist. A person with no boundaries ends up with no money, relationship or home. And for them, who cares. They’ve got love.
People with lots of boundaries end up with lots of things. They end up with wealth, cars, relationships, homes, TV sets, jewels, business. And for them, this is nirvana. They got a life with everything they want. Except love and they get that through affairs, God worship and flirtation. So, you see there’s no perfect path and half way between the two is called the masses. Conventional living is the balance between all boundary, and all love.
So the conventional paradigm is finding the middle ground. Not quite the perfect love life, not quite the extreme material life. And so, with this you can see why the majority of people chase happiness, and never allow themselves to find it. Always compromised. Not strong enough to go for success at the cost of love, not strong enough to go for love at the cost of success. Stuck.
The key to all this is the ability to separate love from relationship. Or spirituality from materiality. That is the first key, and the second one is to know which is a priority.
You are sitting at the office, people aren’t working correctly, you love them, your heart feels good about them, but you need to get your business profit up, what are you going to do? What’s your priority?
You know someone, you love them deeply. You want a relationship but they don’t fit your expectations. What are you going to do, choose love or your boundaries for relationships? One is deep the other makes you happy day to day. You want the world to be a better place, you see polluters, armies, religions invading people’s boundaries. You want to change it, yet, you know that love is also important to you. What are you going to do, how can you change the situation while holding the idea that everybody deserves love? Love and boundaries can coexist when an individual decides their priorities.
Live with Spirit
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