What is Love?

Looking back through the years, I think every one of my clients have asked this question in different ways. They have wondered if they should love their spouses unconditionally like they love their children. They wondered if they were letting their partners take advantage of them or if they were letting them get away with something they shouldn’t. They wondered what was wrong with their relationship because their partner stopped courting them and things had gotten way too comfortable.

Any of this sound familiar, and do you know what all these things have in common?

They are all the result of a whole lot of thinking.

Thinking about how to protect themselves from hurt and keep their pride intact. Well, guess what? When any of us are immersed in fearful, anxious, insecure, stressful thinking we are not feeling love. Think about it – hasn’t that been your experience too?

Love is a Feeling

We feel it when our minds are clear of heavy thoughts that distract us from a nice feeling. We can only feel our own thinking, always, in every moment of our lives. Feeling anything out of our own thinking is impossible, whether we know that fact or not. Love is our default state when we’re not in our ego, worried about how we’re being perceived and how we should be treated.

·         Love is constant, it never goes anywhere, but our negative thinking will cover it up

·         We’re always either in a state of Love or Fear

·         People tend to treat us better when we’re in a state of Loving-kindness

·         People tend to treat us better when we’re not judging and criticizing them

·         Love is who we are at our core, our soul; our true nature is love, free of expectation, disappointment, criticism and judgment.

·         Love is pure consciousness uncontaminated by negative thinking

We always have thinking going on but when we’re having the feeling of love our thinking is more along the lines of gratitude, appreciation, contentment, fulfillment, and beauty.

How do I find love?

This is another question I hear quite often, in many ways. Couples ask how they can get their partner to pay more attention to them, to show more interest, to court them. Singles want to know how to meet the right partner.  

When people begin to understand that they already have what they seek they are more apt to express love more often to others. Guess what happens then? You guessed it, people are drawn to the energy of love, like a magnet. All that we need do is quiet our thinking down, not buy into it, not get attached to it, let it fall away, in one ear, out the other, so to speak; and voila, we’re in a state of love. It’s a matter of uncovering rather than getting.

We’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope expecting to experience what is on the other end; an impossible task. Positive changes occur naturally when people begin to see the fact of feelings coming from our own thinking; and remember – you don’t have to know what you’re thinking, you just have to know that your feelings are coming from you – not from someone or something out there.

Perhaps you have already noticed this phenomenon. Maybe after an argument with your partner and you’ve calmed down and your mind cleared, you may have felt a beautiful loving feeling return. You realize s/he’s not such an awful person; stubborn maybe, ornery perhaps, but deep down your partner is loveable, nonetheless. If you are single, perhaps you’ve noticed that when you’re not concerned about being single, you enjoy life more? It’s that simple. It’s been in front of our noses all along, we just need a pointer. The pointer was Mr. Sydney Banks for me.  What a game changer. It takes so much stress, anxiety and upset out of life – just wipes it away, when you really gain an understanding for where all of life’s experiences truly come from – within yourself.

There’s no one to blame then, not even yourself. Thoughts come to us freely – we don’t ask for them. But we have the gift of free will to decide if we want to make something of what we think or just let them go.

Personally, I would have saved myself many embarrassing moments had I learned about this sooner! You’ll hear many of them in weekly webinars on love and relationships if you become a student of the Principles here. 

What would it be like to love with gay abandon?

Just love, without a thought of what is being reciprocated, knowing that you have full capacity to express love and so does everyone. But most people don’t realize that, so they are in their personal thinking of insecurity, fear, criticism, judgment. Such a shame that they don’t realize what they have. They withhold and hold themselves back from experiencing the most wonderful feeling in the whole universe! But you don’t have to do that. The deeper you see this truth about love, the freer you will feel to express it with everyone you meet along the way.

It’s a game-changer

I’ve seen couples go from arguing about everything to listening deeply in order to understand why their partner sees things the way they do. I’ve seen single people relax their expectations and open themselves up more to meeting new people. 

Imagine a world in which everyone realized that there is nothing they can get from another person that they don’t already have:

·         They’d stop pressuring the other person who in turn would feel more relaxed.

·         They’d find greater contentment in life regardless of what was going on around them.

·         They’d spend less time thinking about what was wrong which in turn frees up more brain cells to come up with fresh, new ideas, creativity, and forward motion.

If you’d like to learn more, you can read or listen to more on the topic of what is love.