Love in its smallest measure

“What the world generally refers to as love is an intense emotional condition, combining physical attraction, possessiveness, control, addiction, eroticism, and novelty. It’s usually fragile and fluctuating, waxing and waning with varying conditions. When frustrated, this emotion often reveals an underlying anger and dependency that it had masked. That love can turn to hate is a common perception, but here, an addictive sentimentality is likely what’s being spoken about, rather than Love; there probably never was actual Love in such a relationship, for hate stems from pride, not Love.

Real Love* is characterized by the development of a Love that is unconditional, unchanging, and permanent. It doesn’t fluctuate – its source isn’t dependant on external factors. Loving is a state of being. It’s a forgiving, nurturing, and supportive way of relating to the world. Love isn’t intellectual and doesn’t proceed from the mind; Love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of it’s purity of motive.

The capacity to discern essence becomes predominant; the core of an issue becomes the center of focus. As reason is bypassed, there arises the capacity for instantaneous recognition of the totality of a problem and a major expansion of context, especially regarding time and process. Reason deals only with particulars, whereas Love deals with entireties. This ability, often ascribed to intuition, is the capacity for instantaneous understanding without resorting to sequential symbol processing. This apparently abstract phenomenon is, in fact, quite concrete; it’s accompanied by a measurable release of endorphins in the brain.

Love takes no position, and thus is global, rising above separation. It’s then possible to be “one with another” for there are no longer any barriers. Love is therefore inclusive and expands the sense of self progressively. Love focuses on the goodness of life in all its expressions and augments that which is positive – it dissolves negativity by recontextualizing it, rather than by attacking it.

This is the *Love of true happiness, but although the world is fascinated with the subject of Love, * only 0.4 percent of the world’s population ever reach this level of evolution of consciousness.”

Dr. David R. Hawkins M.D. PhD - Power VS Force

You may wonder why I started out with this big long quote. Well I’ll tell you, it’s been a hell of a year for me, a lot of my friends, and my family. I want to be perfectly clear about the business at hand. Several friends have gone through some serious upheavals through the flood in many ways. One friend was about to get married to her long time love, sold her condo (on the river) and was in the process of moving her things to her intended’s condo. During his own stressful moments, he called off the wedding, left her in the middle of a flooded building trying to unpack/pack, and make new evacuation arrangements. She was devastated, but not destroyed. Today, she is able to see this same man, smile, wave, and wish him well in his new life, 13 weeks later.

The capacity to Love unconditionally is foreign to most people. As well as being an alien emotion in its purest form, it frightens most human beings senseless. Where they commit acts of desperation to contain it or distance themselves from it. The common form of love wears many masks, and many of those masks only have layers of opaque glass to see through. Often times we look through these myopic tunnels and swear we know who or what is in front of us, all the while swearing fealty to someone we barely know anything about.

There are few among us who can look back at our past and say we truly Loved. I believe when you truly experience unconditional love you take on a greater understanding of human nature and your capacity to forgive even the most heinous of indiscretions.

No matter what the crime, if you love unconditionally, you forgive. In any case you should always forgive as withholding that is akin to holding yourself hostage until you let it go. Lets be smart here, forgiveness is not weak or asking for trouble. You can most certainly forgive someone for not being who you want them to be. Essentially that’s the bottom line here. People are who they are. If they don’t conform to your expectations than perhaps you viewed them from your foggy glass masks. Forgiving is setting yourself free. After all, they have to live with themselves, but you do not. That is the key to forgiveness. You are free to forgive, and you are also free to walk away and wave and smile from a distance.

As a child, I went to church on Sunday, learned the valuable lesson of how to turn the other cheek and forgive. The missing link in that lesson is to turn the other cheek, forgive, and then back out of reach and stay out of reach. You can still love anyone unconditionally without putting yourself in harm’s way.

One of my older neighbors, from next door, called me up a few weeks in to the fray. She had been staying with her son and daughter-in-law. Her tears were flowing long before I arrived at the parking lot of the Starbucks in our neighborhood. Her daughter-in-law had asked her for money for groceries. She had given it to her right away, only to overhear the girl complain to her husband that she thinks his mother had stolen the money off the kitchen counter. There were other issues, too horrible to regurgitate here, but she cried on my shoulder for two hours. It was hard to see, this lovely grandmother broken down and rejected by the people that had given her shelter in the wake of Canada’s biggest natural disaster. In a time when she needed to feel safe, protected, and welcomed, she was chided when they grew tired of having a guest, they made fun of her if she mistakenly asked about a location on the news, and worse than anything, she felt in the way. We all found weakness in each other during this flood, and there were those that didn’t have any serious disruption to their lives who showed their truest weakness as selfishness.

From the people I train with to the neighbors in my building, we have all shared stories of the Great Flood and how it’s changed the dynamics of everything for most of us.

This flood has seen the attrition of short term acquaintances and has strengthened the bonds of many years of shared experiences with the deep understanding of true friends. These are friends we all have known for many years. Friends to whom time and distance became irrelevant. The flood made more changes in all of us than we cared to mention in public.

Patience in most has waned since June. They have less tolerance for emotional stinginess in close circles. When times were tough and they needed real emotional support, it came from the most remote areas of their lives that they had never counted on, and then some of the people closest to them were emotionally unavailable and their concern was strongly for themselves. I watched the appearance of close knit circles melt away and what we were all left with was a much smaller, tighter group. All of us having faced the demons of hardship and remembering each other before ourselves, we bonded together and formed a deeper bond in our shared tragedy.

Even in my weakest and darkest hour, I still Love unconditionally, those who were there and those who were not there. That was my lesson in all of this. I learned that regardless of how I see someone, I can still care about them, what happens to them, but I can care from a distance.

I remember when my ex-husband was being not so pleasant to me early on in our marriage and he asked with complete sham solemnity if I still loved him after what he had done. My reply was simple and made him laugh out loud. “of course I will always love you, but I just don’t like you very much right now”. Back then, I was never sure if it was actually true, what I had said. After this summer, I can honestly say yes, I can still unconditionally Love everyone.

Don’t forget to check your Compass!