Love Is!

Why, when Love is our birthright, do most of us live our lives separate from its healing presence? One of the main reasons is that we were conditioned when we were very young to regard ourselves through the eyes of non-Love. Love is accepting and honoring. It is allowing and understanding. It sees what is here without any need to change it, and its healing power is phenomenal. Most of us didn’t receive this kind of love when our view of ourselves was forming in childhood. Instead we experienced the kind that says, “I love you if you are…. and if you aren’t, I don’t love you.” 

When children are related to in this conditional way, they begin to believe that they need to be different than what they are to be okay. Can you feel the heartache of that?  For most of us, we have some level of this story going on in our heads. We focus on what needs to be different about ourselves (our weight, the amount of money we have, the size of our nose, how intelligent we are) rather than meeting ourselves in our hearts. This urge to be different in order to be okay is a big part of what I call the bubble of struggle and it keeps us cut off from the joy of being fully alive.

Matt Licata, psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, shares his profound wisdom about our deep fears and the healing power of Love (in italics):  

The despair in not being seen as you are. The shame in feeling that you are not enough and that something is fundamentally wrong with you. The hopelessness that you may always remain alone and misunderstood.

These are the great fears that come as you wake, as you dream, and as you wander along the path of the heart.

How would your life change if you recognized that Life loves you exactly as you are?  How would your inner conversation change if you realized that ‘getting it all together’ isn’t about being perfect?  In fact, imperfection is a necessary part of being a whole human being.  It is your humanness that opens you to the truth of Love, not your perfections. And how would your relationship with yourself change if you realized that everybody carries these same ideas that they need to be better or different than what they are? All you have to do is look at the famous people who have either killed themselves or succumbed to the world of alcohol and drugs. Even when you get adulation from the public, it is not enough if you still have these stories in your head that you are not okay as you are, stories that have been there since childhood. 

As you begin to open to the truth that you are okay exactly as you are (the mind is probably arguing with that!), there is another doorway you need to step through in order to know the Love that is your birthright. That is the doorway of letting go of being afraid of actually opening to Love. When you were young, Love may have hurt, confused, and abandoned you. So the stories in your head are afraid of opening to Love. But you are not a child anymore and the Love that is available to you right now in this living moment is your birthright to know and live. 

But perhaps the greatest fear of all is the fear of being loved, and the dissolving of the trance of unlove once and for all.

For when you are truly loved, when you are entirely seen, when you are fully held, it is the end of your world as you know it. Life is always seeing you in this way.

If you will allow this revelation in, you will never be the same again. You will no longer be able to pretend that you are other than radiant and whole as you are. In every relationship and through every circumstance, you will watch in astonishment as the spell of unworthiness is dissolved in front of your very eyes.

The unlovable one, the unworthy one, and the unseen one are arising now not as obstacles on the journey, but as portals into the intimacy, connection, and aliveness that is raging around you. Your inner family is gathering around you, longing for integration and to reorganize the world as you have come to know it.

To let in the implications of this is utterly exhilarating. And completely terrifying simultaneously. One world is ending so that the true world may appear from behind the veil. But somehow you know that you have come here to embody this.  ~ Matt Licata

So I invite you now to take a few minutes to open to the possibility that you are okay just the way you are and that everything in your life is perfect just the way it is. Let yourself open to unconditional Love and allow it to fill and surround you in this moment. For you are Love and you are loved. This is the truth, and this is your birthright.

Image by Heal and Be Healed by Flora Bowley  https://florabowley.com/

Check out Matt’s exquisite articles on his blog:  http://alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com/