Saturday, July 25, 2015

Searching for Love

Hopefully this post won't come across as a sermon you would hear in a church. Often times I have epiphanies while in deep conversations with another person and one of these conversations occurred on Wednesday night. 

I am going to talk about the (11th) biblical commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you." (John 13:34). Back in 2011, I asked one of my sisters the following question: "How can I love others as God loves me if my perception of love is distorted?" She had replied something in the line of, "Perhaps the commandment should read: "The Greatest Sin is Not Loving Ourselves as God Loves Us," which sparked an entirely new journey for me. How many of us can actually say we know what the true essence of God's love is? GOD's love vs. HUMAN love?

Thus, I set out to find out what this essence of love was... as well as what I'd been missing. In my initial research, I found that we make conclusions/decisions about who we are as early as three years of age. We live our entire lives based on this conclusion. Indeed, I had concluded that I was not lovable and therefor did not deserve the best that life had to offer. I tried extra hard to prove that I was, which continuously backfired.

I absolutely LOVE Facebook... especially the times that messages I most needed to hear showed up on my feed. One day, a message came with a video on YouTube: The Miracle Of Human Creation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCbS2ybYvUc

I watched this video over and over again... asking the question... how could I have ever believed that I was not a miracle? How do any of us ever begin to believe we are not miracles? How could I have ever believed that I was not loved into existence?

With this new seed planted in my mind, a garden began to grow around me. I had gardens grow around me before, but with much smaller flowers. This time, each flower that bloomed was bigger and brighter as I walked on a new road to uncover yet another layer of who I really was. As my flowers grew taller and my love grew stronger (from within), many amazing people began to show up in my life to reflect the person I was growing to be. I saw many walls (ones I had built around my soul to protect myself from unknown threats) come tumbling down. 

Love is such an amazing thing when you begin to feel it to its fullest for the first time. I relate it to finally getting a hearing aid after a life time of being partially deaf... in which I can hear sounds I've never been able to hear before for the first time. All the Bible lessons, books I read, and spiritual teachers who told me how much God loved me, didn't do any good when I had no clue what this love felt like.

In the meantime, I was also learning about Law of Attraction... how you will attract what you focus on. Back to the conversation I had on Wednesday night. The morning after I told this person that what shifted in my life was learning how to focus differently, I realized it was much more than that. What shifted was my perception of love. As I began to feel a tremendous expansion of love from within my being, I seemed to begin attracting everything that is good and wonderful in my life.

The second missing link in my life was TRUST. While I do not declare myself as a Christian, many of the teachings of Jesus ring true to my soul... such as, "whatever you desire, when you pray, BELIEVE that you will receive them, and you shall have them". (Mark 11:24). I searched for most of my life in every religion and in every religious / spiritual book searching for the answers to questions I had. How many of you have done the same thing? What were you really searching for? Do you even know? It seemed that I had to find the essence of unconditional love before I could get to the point of believing... that is, believing that I deserved to have what I desired.

What did you start to believe when you were three years old? I just read another blog post written by a beautiful woman whose mother doesn't even remember the day she told her daughter that she had an ugly nose. Just one careless comment can scar you for life... unless in your seeking, you stumble upon the thing you were told, realize it wasn't true, and burst into love. For me, it happened that fast... the sensation of bursting from inside.

Within this essence of love, I find myself loving many people as if they are family, partners, and even my own children. It is a very different way of living. Perhaps before, I was merely existing. I wonder what life has in store for me now!