PERMISSION TO KNOW LOVE

We all want the same things. We want to be loved as we are. We want to belong, and feel that who we are is valuable…that our presence is enough. We want to love. We long for security, that inner knowing that we can trust ourselves to create and maintain the foundation of shelter, food and contact with others that feels like home base.   When we give ourselves permission to love whatever and whomever we love, our lives become richer, easier, healthier.

 

I’m not talking about sick dysfunctional stalker love, or the longing to be ‘completed’ by a ‘soul mate’….That crap has nothing, and I mean NOTHING to do with love. At the core, love is acceptance of what is. Right then and there in the moment.  This is what we experience when we cuddle with the dog or cat after it has torn up the pillow or puked on the bed. We don’t hold grudges, we clean it up then open our arms and get back to love.

 

What if you saw your mistakes and broken promises and torn up relationships and puked on opportunities as something to just clean up, accept and then get back to love? What if you gave yourself permission to treat yourself with the kind of loving attention and kindness you wished your parents had given you, or you keep hoping will come from someone else?  How would your life be different?  How would your conversations be different? 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love Romantic love with all the giddy nervous exciting sexy magnetic sensations that comes with the package…and yet…without the inner core of stable, grounded, accepting, sure fire permission to Know Love within ourselves , we automatically start looking for that feeling of belonging, of home, of happiness to come from someone else. We often mistakenly hook our happiness on how (or whether ) someone (some special someone) loves us, and can ignore all the love coming to us.  When we are ‘in love’ we are flooded with sensation…with chemistry…with that feel good, “I am connected to the Universe and everything is brighter and full of light” awareness. 

Start there. What if love is always what we are in. Actually in. Not the romantic kind that we ‘fall in’ as a way to make babies and form bonds…but the deeper wider Love that surrounds and penetrates us all day every day. The  Big Love that our minds dim down so we can see where we’re going. What if we gave ourselves Permission to touch, feel and know that love whenever we wanted to?  Oh Yeah, then we’d have something wild to bring to the party when romantic love came along…we’d also be able to shine that love on anyone or in any situation. Hmmmm…

 

The ecstasy and rapture of Love spoken of in poems is always just under the surface of our awareness…it’ there when we smell a newborn’s fuzzy head, it’s there in the wonder we feel gazing at glittering stars in the night sky,  it’s there in that electric thrill we feel when listening to extraordinary music that sweeps us away.  When we come to our senses…we find love. When we examine love in our minds, we wall ourselves off from its brilliance and power.  And that’s the practice, right there. Stop thinking, take a breath…feel…notice, open to the moment…and give yourself Permission to know love in all its forms.