Lisa’s Love Bomb

You just knew that I was going to take advantage of Valentines Day to write about LOVE, right?  I love writing about love, it’s really my favorite topic ever, even better then sex, coffee or chocolate. In fact I think that sex, coffee and chocolate are feeble attempts to stimulate that brain into feeling something love-like. The only craving we all have is for love anyways.  Everything else is just a substitute.

Shakespeare said, “Love is a many splendored thing.” Maybe he was lucky in love since mostly love just kicks my ass. And confuses the heck out of me.   I just went through teaching two weekends of heart chakra at the School. Teaching easy topics, like love, intimacy and forgiveness.  I always feel like a bit of hypocrite on these weekends since I am not sure I understand those things at all.

Love is so mysterious. It drives us from deep inside us.  We long for it, desire it more greatly then anything and so often we either don’t recognize it when we have it. Or when we catch a glimpse of it, we run screaming as fast as we can.

What the heck is love?

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.” — Woody Allen

These days, a new experience of love is creeping into my consciousness.  Love is a not something to you do to someone else, like meet all their needs and then hope they appreciate you enough to meet your needs.

Love is not something you get from someone else either. It’s really a state of being. It’s not something you do, it’s something you are.

Don Migel Ruiz says so in his fabulous book “The Mastery of Love,” which if you have never read, you really should!  He says love is life itself and when we love, we feel life flowing through us.  Love is the language of our soul and when we love, we are actually feeling our soul pop through the mask of our personality to feed us life force energy.

We have a river of love flowing through us all the time. It really has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s our natural state of being.  It fills us, connects us to ourselves and everything else too, especially God.  It’s that state of being embodied so easily by the very young child, who is delighted by everything and everyone, especially themselves.

When our hearts are really open that is how love feels. There is no need. No attachment, dependency or jealousy. It’s just a pure stream of love upwelling and pouring out of us. It doesn’t even matter if there is anyone else there to take it, see it or receive it.

This is that spinning, flowing sensation, a feeling of surrender that we call falling in love. When we fall in love, we relinquish control,  we are surrendering into love. We could feel that way all the time, if we really opened our hearts.

The problem comes when we fall in love, we become convinced that someone else MADE us feel that way. We attach it to a particular person and then get hooked and dependent on that person to provide us with that feeling again.  No one can make you feel that way because what you are feeling is actually YOU, the energy of your own soul.

And then we suffer greatly when that person is not available to give us our hit of love. That suffering is part of the illusion we buy into that our feeling of love has anything to do with another person.  Someone else can be a trigger to help us open our hearts, but that is our love, our soul.   That person helps us tap into our own river of love and if you take their face off it, you can actually access that love anytime you want.

“Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life”.- Leo Buscaglia

What Love Isn’t

I do know a lot about what love isn’t. Of course I have learned all this stuff the hard way since I believe relationships are the biggest teachers we have and it’s really all research anyways.

I know love is not something you GET from other people.  We try this trick a lot. For most people the quest for love involves getting someone to act just right so you don’t feel that great big, sucky, black hole inside you. (You know the one I am talking about.) We want to be filled with love from the outside.

This kind of “love” revolves around getting someone to meet your needs in all kinds of sneaky ways. This is the illusion of love and it really has other names like DEPENDANCY, NEED, ADDICTION, LUST and  ATTACHMENT.

Is that really love? Nope.  But so many of us experience love as that black hole-filling energy we try and get from someone else. This was really a great shock to me, to think that all those years I thought I was loving someone, I was actually just trying to get them to meet my needs, no holds barred, with all the wiles, manipulation and seduction I possess. (Which is considerable.) Yuck.

This is the lower self, the ego, trying really hard to get its needs met.  And it will do ANYTHING to accomplish its goal.  It’s the Lego version of relationship. I am empty, and you must fill me. (You complete me!) We romanticize this with lots of talk about soul mates, but that is not real love. And annoyingly enough your soul mates are much more likely to push all  your buttons then magically meet all  your needs anways . My theory of relationships, is that they are designed to dig up all your shit and put it in your face.  Yikes!

“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.”– Helen Keller

I know I have been in the midst of a massive heart expansion, and almost all  my life lessons right now are all about teaching me this new crazy kind of love. Sometimes, it feels wonderful and amazing. Sometimes it’s really ouchy and tender. Frequently it has me right at my edge, wondering what the heck I have signed on for here.

I know it’s all part of The Plan and I can feel this deep welling up of my soul, who is obviously laughing its ass off.

“Yeah, let’s have a life where we learn all about love!  We’ll start with the first forty years experimenting with what love ISN’T and then after she is nice and broken in, we’ll get onto the what love is stuff. What a hoot that will be!”

“There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy. Her heart.” – Melanie Griffith

The truth is, you could feel that way about everyone and everything all the time. I have moments when I actually get this. I feel complete love pouring out of my heart with no OBJECT to pin it to and therefore no need to suffer. This kind of love actually feel like ecstasy and it is the most amazing experience in the world.  When I lose it and my heart shuts down again, it’s very painful.

All the things in my life that I can’t change, that are hard coded in my life are there to teach me this lesson. To love without attachment.  The pain comes when I feel attachment and become aware of my ego’s agenda, it’s a tricky, sneaky manipulative little monster too, that ego. It doesn’t want to let go of the old way of seeing love.  And so often when I have a chance to feel real love I am met by my own resistance to change and to love.  And so love kicks my ass.

“I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.” Spike- From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I feel my own resistance to love as a deep urge to RUN AWAY. This is the lesson of The Too Small House. My house is very small and rather humble. I bought it just after my divorce, it was the only house I could afford in the town I wanted to live in and I was very proud of it, since I bought it myself. It might have been fine for me and my three kids and then my husband and his kid moved in and it’s very small indeed.

There is nowhere to go in my house where there are not five other people. Really. And all those kids and their crazy kid energy wears on me. I want to escape.  My resistance would have me move out, or get my own office, or disappear into my work rather then engage with the kids. But I can’t. I can’t move, or sell the house. (Believe me, I have tried!)

Me, the Great Manifestor, can’t change this house!  And this forces me to deal with and engage with my kids. Argh! And yey! And there is the lesson of love. Resistance is futile and when I surrender to this and actually engage,  my heart opens and I feel more love.  (I can thank my hubby for leading the way on this one!) Sometimes, it is the hardest thing I can do, to let go of the urge to run away and just show up and be with the kids, but it is also so sweet and tender too.

Such is the lesson of The Too Small House.

The deep longing we have for union, for love, is the deepest driving force inside us.  And this is totally real, we just sometimes get mixed up about the point of this drive. It is not to find your perfect other to complete you.  The longing is really for union with yourself and with the divine. Someone else can open that portal in your heart for you, but recognizing that as an opportunity to reunite with yourself and God is the real lesson.

Isn’t this just what happens when love affairs fail and love collapses? God knows, grief, loss and heartbreak are the true heart openers and when love dies, we have this magical chance to find ourselves again.  Oh goodie! This is what I mean when I say that love kicks my ass. But boy, what a wild ride it is.

“And in the end The love you take Is equal to the love you make.”- The Beatles

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