August 9, 2006
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The Love Seeker
If I am looking for love by making demands on the other person, I am pushing love away. The harder I seek and the more I try to control, the more inaccessible I become to the presence of love.
The love seeker doesn’t know how to love because she goes into her head and closes down her heart. She is concerned with what she is getting. She doesn’t care to give. Yet until she gives love, she will be miserable. Love cannot be withheld without destroying the lover. And when the lover is destroyed, all that remains is the small-mindedness of the ego.
The question is will you go beyond selfish, conditional love, or will you continue to insist on a love that meets your ego’s needs? If you listen to your ego, you will meet love in vain. No matter how many partners you try, you won’t find one who will love you the way you want to be loved because all your seeking is a demand for the love you alone can give.
When it doesn’t feel that my partner is meeting my needs, I call myself back to the heart. And there I learn to see the sparkle in my beloved eyes that hides beneath his pain. He did not show me his pain at first, but I knew it was there. I knew it was there because it is there in me. It is there in you. It is there in everyone. And I am not surprise to find it in my beloved.
Look and see through the pain, to who your beloved really is and what s/he really wants. That is the true beloved, the one who can lead you home. Not the one who pretends to have no pain. Not the one who promise to love you perfectly. Look at the real person. The one who is vulnerable, who hurts, who asks for love in convoluted, neurotic, controlling ways. Look to him (or her) and hear the call for love behind the wound. That is the voice that will lead you home.
Comments (7)
Is the beloved really a “he” or is it really a “she”?
but thinking about the self is an embedded human flaw…….:)
I don’t know what to say trim. Definetly makes me think. I’ll have to let it sit there for awhile and meditate on it and see what happens.
Excellent post.
Very interesting. I have found this to be true in some ways, in some relationships but it can also be too hard to confront within the relationship. Sometimes the ability to see this truth is only found with the perspective distance brings.
HMMMMMMMMMM interesting…. the challenge is finding a healthy and positive perspective without losing your voice and hence your ability to communicate honestly and effectively- YET the ego, i.e. pride and self-centeredness get in the way….
You’re always so poetic in writing about love! I think Ron Rolheiser wrote that love is a place that feels like home. It’s not that wild roller coaster ride…that rush you get from a drug. It’s the harbor you sail into.