Part 2 - Crazy Little Thing Called Love...

Part 2 - Loving With An Open Heart....

For the beautiful gypsy lady....

In the first part I talked of love as a choice, in this part, I want to talk of love as a feeling. Loving with an open heart - unconditional love. Love is one of the most beautiful things in the world. When I say thing, I mean it in the sense that it is it’s own entity. It is not just a thought or a feeling, it’s an action, a living breathing embodiment of the self. It is everything and nothing. It is the be all and end all of all that is good in the world. It is the pure embodiment of unconditional giving, an expression of the soul, of all that we hold sacred in the world. It is the stuff that holds all the good in the world together. It has no boundaries, no expectations, it exists to be for the sake of being, to love for the sake of loving.

Now I may not strike many people as being the best person to be writing of such things, I, like most people, have had my fair share of broken hearts, my fair share of pain and falling off the proverbial bicycle, but I’ve come to realise that love is so much more than what we feel for a specific person. It is the greatest and highest thing we can feel for anything, anyone. It doesn’t take a special person to deserve all the love you have to give but it takes a great amount of courage to love wholly and soully and unconditionally. For all that I seem to have been hurt by love, it is not love that has hurt me, but myself viewing the situation as something that has hurt me. But turning it on it's head, love can't hurt me, it's not an object, it can't stab - it is only how I allow the situation to affect me that it appears to be hurting me. Love itself though? Ahhh love itself only ever feels good.

A very wise friend of mine once said that to love someone, you first have to love yourself. Never a truer thing has ever been said to me. It’s something that I’ve read a thousand times and I can see the wisdom in this. After all, how can you love someone else, let that person into your heart, if you cannot love yourself with the same kind of passion, with the same kind of unconditional giving we would give to another? You can’t. You can try, but ultimately without loving ourselves to begin with, we find that the love we give to another, has boundaries and rules, dictated by how much and how far we are willing to love ourselves.

It might sound strange but think of it this way. If you have a field, and in this field you have explored as far as the eye can see, what of the areas the eye can’t see? You can show another person as much of the field as you are willing to see yourself, but you can’t show them what is beyond, what is in the areas that you cannot see.
Loving yourself is like this, love for it's own sake is like this. If you are only willing to love yourself so far, then the person whom you are sharing your love with, can only see so far too – you’ve never experienced beyond the boundaries yourself, so how can you expect to show this other person what is beyond the boundaries? You must first explore further yourself, in order to show them more...

I’m not the greatest example of loving myself. I have my faults, I know I have my moments where I criticise myself but I strive to push myself beyond those boundaries, I strive to break those boundaires down and open up my heart up. I strive to love myself for all the things I criticise myself about because I know that only then can I open my heart fully and allow other people in. At the end of the day who I am is perfect as is and my likes and dislikes are just reflections, just opinions that don't reflect the true person that I am. If I start building walls about myself, then I trap the love, try and restrain it, shape it, make it something I can control. But the wonderful thing about love is that it knows no bounds.

But how do you love yourself? To me it seems a simple thing, though it seems to be a harder thing to master. It is easy to criticise yourself for what you perceive as being imperfections in yourself, but the reality is that we are perfect just as we are! To love yourself is to accept who you are as you are, to let go of any other feelings to the contrary. We see that there may be things that we wish to change but these things make us no less worthy of loving ourselves. We are who we are, love yourself for that reason alone - you need no other reason. We are each our own worst enemy in that way yet it is our choice to take our criticisms and turn them into love of ourselves. We CAN change, we are always changing, if we love ourselves for who we are, knowing we can change if what we see in ourselves is not as we wish to be, then we are a heart beat away from loving ourselves unconditionally, just for being who we are.

Love is an entity of it’s own. When freed with an open heart, it is this wondrous thing that let’s your soul, soar. It is a scary thing, an uncontrollable thing, a thing that frees us when we allow ourselves to open to it, to let it flow and flow with it. When we stop fearing love and start living love, life is unpredictable, our hearts are on our sleeves for all to share and it can be a scary thing to allow ourselves to ride along for the journey – we are out there in the front line and anything can happen. Love, when we feel it, when we experience it, feels safe and warm, effortless and natural – how can anything that feels so good just of it’s own accord, be bad for us?

I see fear as being love’s greatest enemy. Fear makes us close our hearts when we should let go of fear and soar. We are afraid that when we put ourselves out there we will be hurt, because by allowing love in, by letting love flow, by giving love back, we don’t know how the other person will react, we aren't in control of anything but how we put the love out there. We live love feeling this wondrous feeling that enlivens our being, that lifts us up - our hearts are alive and we feel alive.

But where does fear start? Fear usually starts with questions, with our thoughts, when we start questioning love, when we think we are unworthy of love, we allow fear into our hearts, we start placing walls. Love doesn’t want walls, it wants to be free! So we may not put boundaries on ourselves and the love we give, but we start putting expectations on the people we give our love to and that is like building walls in ourselves. We start trying to control love. We say to ourselves, I love this person, but the moment that person does something that hurts us, we pull back. We cut off the love, just a little, or we hold the love back with questions. We protect ourselves – we build walls in fear and it holds love back. Fear is what makes us fall out of love because it closes our hearts.

What if the answer was to love anyway? We know it feels great, this warm feeling in our hearts, our souls, that makes us happy. What if we said you know what? You appear to have hurt me, but I don’t care because pain is a momentary thing, I can let go of it, so I’m going to keep loving because that feels better than the hurt. If we can find it in ourselves to love the moment, for the sake of the moment, to love the person because they are who they are, you’ll find that the fear of being hurt becomes insignificant against the feeling of elation that love brings. If we choose love, we find that the people around us choose love too, we lead by example through the love we show ourselves. If we can let go, if we can show those people around us that we are willing to put ourselves out there, our hearts will open to love and we receive love in return. When we can find the courage and strength in ourselves to love ourselves always as we are and love everyone around us for being exactly as they are, then we become shining beacons of light and love. To do anything less is to put boundaries on our freedom, it restrains our souls when our soul wants to fly! When our souls want to feel the love and be energised by it!

When you think of pain and hurt, when it feels like love has let us down, be honest. Was it really the love that let us down or was it how we viewed the situation? Did the person hurt us or did we allow that person to hurt us? Regardless of how you feel now, did the feeling when you loved feel anything less than beautiful? Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

I’m a big believer in the laws of attraction and it seems to me that to bring love in, we need to let go of fear and send love out regardless - all the bad in the world stems from fear in one form or another so why give in to it? Love for the sake of loving! Love the moment, whatever the moment, love the situation whatever the situation, love yourself, love everyone and everything regardless and all else will pale in comparison, a shadow is only a shadow because the light doesn't shine there. Love is that light, shine it into the darkest moments and you find they are not so dark after all, love the moment for what it is and the darker feelings will not feel so dark. Let go of what you wish not to keep and hold on to what matters most. Hold on to love, open your heart and let go of fear and you'll realise what it is to be free! To live, to love unconditionally!

Maybe the hippies had it right when they said “choose love, choose life”. After all, when we choose love, we are choosing to live, without holding back! Is there a better alternative?