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...on love



What a test it is always, to love another, especially when so many influences abound. From the moment we are born, we are completely taken over by society's definition of what love should be, affecting us on a visceral level as it often confuses us with its norms. 

Society says that we need one mate, that once we have this person we must be with him or her all the time, that space and mystery cannot possibly be a necessary ingredient to preserving love’s power, and that certainly love of one’s self must remain a secondary thing. 

Add to these already confusing mandates our personal questions and limitations, and love gets all tangled up in a wild and unforeseen web that manhandles and distorts it into something altogether unrecognizable.

Finding the Balance
How is it that this most precious thing has the power to torment us at the extreme? It holds us in the palm of ecstasy, keeps us awake at night wondering about it’s contradictory facets, and roots itself in the deepest place where it rests like a perfect unwavering jewel, or a lethal serpent waiting to bite. Where is the balance?

Finding balance in love seems easier with experience. It is then that we find that the healthy answer to love’s call is when we are in true communion with our selves; when we radiate out from a central point of balance to embrace the other without judgement, without expectation, and without demand. Careful to not give one’s self over to the other with too much romanticism, we can hold the truth of love and loving with a much greater sense of ease.

The sensation and illusion of merging through love is the intoxication.The power of sex is the highest example in that one moment of losing the self that we all yearn to prolong. 

Perhaps we can equate the idea of losing the self with dropping the ego. It is the ego, in reality, that causes us all the pain. Our ego needs to feel that we are number one and the only one. Our ego needs to keep a close grip, not permitting the necessary spaces in between to allow love to naturally ebb and flow. When we are not whole, all the good intentions in the world will fade before that one thing that holds us in its power, which is the ego, not love. 

When we are in balance, love liberates, love enlightens. It is love that fuels every moment and movement in life. When we drop our need, we let its full strength shine to heal us, rather than wound us. By dropping fear and attachment, we allow love to maintain its great mystery. Then when love comes knocking, one’s center is whole enough to be untroubled by its huge and miraculous dance. 

It is in this state where we feel at home inside ourselves enough to radiate and accept love without being thrown off by ego. Then, when that rare being arrives to trigger our hearts into action, and we feel that extraordinary bliss along with its heightened brightness coursing through us like an exquisite fever, we can bathe ourselves in its gorgeousness while staying present enough to know what it is... and what it isn’t.

Maybe this is love's job... to confuse and confound and alter and open and provoke, all in service to helping us cherish our essence while we explore the great and beautiful presence of its eternal mystery.

 http://www.lionesswomansclub.com/post/1096/

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