“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”- Rumi
We all desire love. Many of us desire an experience of life in which love flows effortlessly, without conditions or expectations. Unconditional love. Sometimes, we are able to experience the flow of unconditional love in moments of ceremony or deep meditation, and we long to experience that in our daily lives. And yet, this happens to be a reality for a few of us.
The truth is that many of us have a worthiness wound that runs deep. This programming of unworthiness keeps us seeking outside of ourselves to be deemed worthy of love. We often believe we have to go out and get love. To earn love. To create love. We carry our wounds around love in our hands, offering them up to our lovers, to our friends, our family, often in the same hand as we offer up our hearts.
We understand love by the way in which we interact with it. And we keep endlessly searching for something that we are already holding.
And so the real question becomes, not how can I find love? How do I get love? But rather, can I allow myself to receive love and to hold that in myself? Can I know myself as love? Can I experience my heart as a pure conduit of unconditional love?
To open to the Divine flow of unconditional love, we must start with ourselves and our own relationship with love, our own love towards ourselves. If I cannot love myself, then I cannot receive love, and the love that I give will be transactional. I cannot give or receive Divine, unconditional love if I cannot give it to and embody it myself.
There are three ways of being and understanding that can help us on this journey of love.
First, there is no love without acceptance. It could be said that when we talk about self love, we are also talking about self acceptance; accepting the parts of ourselves that have been deemed unlovable, unworthy, rejected, shamed and blamed. The parts that have been deemed unworthy of love. These parts of ourselves are often hard to see; they are painful to look at, and we have created many stories to shield them from our awareness. But if we can create for ourselves the space of safety that allows us to go deeply inward, to begin shedding the stories of our identities, then we can begin to see the layers underneath. And then we can ask ourselves, where do I still see myself as not enough? Where am I still afraid to be seen? What parts of me have I been told are unworthy of love?
As we face the answers to these questions, as we find these parts of ourselves, we can meet them with radical acceptance and with the understanding that everything has the right to exist. If I can accept all parts of myself, then I can accept everything.
Second, we are called to take responsibility for our entire experience of reality. Nothing I experience is separate from me. I cannot be a victim of the experience that I have created. That is alot to hold; the weight of our existence can be heavy. This can feel crushing, it can make us feel ashamed, it can turn us against ourselves. But, if we allow it to be, taking responsibility for our entire experience of reality is empowering to the highest degree. If our reality is our creation, then our reality can be anything we desire it to be. We have total and complete freedom.
When it comes to unconditional love, this means that whatever stories we have around love, we are invited to ask ourselves, what within me defined love in this way? Where am I still feeling unworthy which caused me to create this experience, or lack of experience, of unconditional love? The more responsibility we take for our own reality, the more we are able to expand. And what are we expanding into? Into love, into the Divine flow of love, that which we are.
Third, we are invited to be unconditional to ourselves. To show all parts of ourselves kindness, compassion, curiosity and love. Through this, we can start to model unconditional love to ourselves. Being unconditional is allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, what we truly feel, without judging ourselves, without reacting, without fixing. Being unconditional even means that we can sit with what we feel, whatever comes up, without the reaction of needing to heal it. This, too, is a judgment. Being unconditional means to accept and love our experience and ourselves right now, in this moment, as valid.
Unconditional love is a frequency. And so to receive it, we need to be in that frequency ourselves. And we do that through learning to love ourselves unconditionally. Every aspect of us is worthy of Divine love. Every aspect of us is the Divine. Every aspect of us is what makes us whole.
Opening to unconditional love is a spiral, a path, a journey. Grace, compassion and patience are required on this journey. We are learning and unlearning, and this is no easy task. So be gentle, be unconditional. There is no greater gift you can give yourself, and when you are in the frequency of unconditional love, then you not only receive unconditional love, you become it. You radiate it. You give it. You do all of this freely and effortlessly because it is who you are.
Chelsea Leigh