Engaging with Love
Love is the essence of all living things. It permeates all levels of our being and flows through every cell in our body. Love is the force that unites every being at the deepest soul level of life. It is the fuel for our transformation.
There is an enormous amount of power in the essence of love. No one can agree on what love is yet we all know it exists, and we feel it when we are in its presence. When we are open to the essence of love, we are open to the universal energy of creation.
If you have participated in an artistic endeavor such as creating a painting, a sculpture or a written piece, you will understand that the essence of love is not something you can limit or control. It’s a force that arises without expectation. It’s a vibrational essence that you engage with.
Love is a mystery. We have no power over love. Love must always be free.
Even though the term unconditional love is widely used in our culture, it is greatly misunderstood. Most often we are attracted to someone because they offer us something we want: companionship, happiness, money, opportunity or pleasure. Usually, what we want is something we feel we don’t have, or don’t have enough of. Yet to unconditionally love another, is to fully accept the relationship, not based on what we need or what we want to receive, but based on what the relationship innately provides.
When we unconditionally love another we want whatever it is that fulfills their soul’s purpose, even if it provides us with nothing. In the same way, when we unconditionally love ourselves, we do not let another person prevent us from the fulfillment of our own soul purpose. This type of mutual agreement requires a conscious commitment to engage with the essence of love.
When we are drawn to another, our soul is remembering the higher purpose of our meeting. People that come into our lives provide us with the experience we need for our evolution. If we enter the relationship with this understanding, we will feel gratitude for what is being offered, both pleasant and difficult. By fully embracing this engagement with love, we have the potential to become transformed.
The essence of love flows through every cell of our being yet when we fear not being loved, we diminish its frequency. The more fear we hold, the more difficult it is to reside in love’s vibration. The primary reason we embody this fear is because we look to others to love us instead of learning to love ourselves.
As an infant we depend on our parents for our survival. We associate their care for us as love. As we become older and enter new relationships, we project our childhood experience of love onto our partner, determining the ways they need to care for us in order to feel loved.
When our partner is unable to care for us in the way we expect, we feel unloved. When we are not aware of these projections, we create relationships that are based on condition, and that prevent us from residing in the essence of love.
We can spend our lives yearning for love, trying to secure it when we have it, and looking for ways to get it when we don’t. Yet the moment we place expectations on love, we have diminished our capacity to experience the pure love that we yearn for.
It is not until we learn how to love ourselves that we can understand what it means to engage with the essence of love. The deep knowing of who we are, and the complete acceptance of how we have been shaped in this lifetime by our experiences – is love. The ability to practice this acceptance in the face of a collective that is wildly transforming – is also love.
There are billions of people in the world, but think about the small amount of people that reach us in a deeper way, and how these relationships are transforming. Even when we are in conflict with others and they cause us pain, we still receive something valuable from the interaction. How these special people appear in our lives and what they offer us – is love.
When we consciously show up to engage with the essence of love, we create relationships that are timeless, deeply meaningful and transformative. To know how to effortlessly reside in the essence of love is the ultimate accomplishment of life.
Photograph by Sharon Mccutcheon
