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Cultivate Life!

SPECIAL EDITION

April 29th, 2008

Special Edition: What is Love?

Today's Cultivate Life! contains a feature article by Wallace Huey about the insights he has obtained from Sai Baba's teachings on Love, followed by the launch of a new raft of Heart to Heart services focused on 'What is Love?' The Begin Here section explains what these services are. We feature a meditative poem by Wallace, in the Inspiration for Your Soul series, and Peter Shepherd has sought out a range of helpful trans4mind resources in Get Help :: Take Action. Wallace is back this week with the regular Heart to Heart Coaching slot which features a reader's question to do with finding the path of Love in her life. The second half of the magazine contains several articles which explore 'What is Love?' with considerable insight and depth.

We hope this Special Edition is one you'll return to, as you refer to the resources and continue to expand and shine ever more brightly the beacon of Love that is your nature.

Quotes of the Week

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity." --Henry Van Dyke

"Love is unconditional acceptance. It is love of parents for child; also the non-possessive love of partners; also the caring love between all people that enables forgiveness. It's above energy, though it may be expressed energetically. It's our essential nature: Spirit itself, the quality we share with God. And it is the binding force of the Universe, inherent in all that is." --Peter Shepherd

"Truly loving another means letting go of all expectations. It means full acceptance, even celebration of another's personhood." --Karen Casey

"It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving." --Mother Teresa

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." --Albert Schweitzer

Expansion is Life, is Love

Since love and its dissemination is the favorite subject of my teacher in India, the Avatar Sai Baba, and since Sai Baba is my source of inspiration, I decided to use a series of quotes from Him as the foundation of this article. So what is love and how can each of us have more of it in our lives?

"Man in his ignorance, asserts that he lives for himself alone, eats and drinks to appease his hunger and thirst, and looks after his health and comforts only. But the truth is quite different! This selfish attitude which curbs and curtails man's interests to himself and his aggrandizement is really "death." Contraction is extinction. Expansion is life. There is happiness only in the vast, the limitless, the huge: not in the little, the small, the limited. Love leads to expansion; hatred leads to contraction and death."

"When a lamp is lit from another, there are two where there was but one. The first one did not stop emitting light. You can light a million lamps from one, yet the first will not suffer a jot! Love too is like this. Share it with a million, it will still be as bright as when it was alone."

Physical power is limited to the strength of our limbs, mental power is limited to the power of our brain to solve problems but spiritual power, which comes from the heart and is based on our capacity to share love, is unlimited. In fact the more we share love, the more we experience love and the more love we have to share!

"Broadening your heart and making it bigger and bigger, you should make it as big as God Himself. If you look at a balloon, in the initial stage it is flat. If you go on blowing air into it, it will get bigger and bigger, and at one stage it will burst. Though beginning with the ideas of "I" and "Mine", if you ultimately move onto the place where "all are mine," "all are one," gradually you will become broader in your vision and you burst and merge in God, who is omnipresent."

"This creation is like the bridge which connects man with God. "I" is one hill. "God" is another hill. The bridge between the two is the aspect of creation. If you break and destroy the bridge, you can never reach the destination. I am hoping that you plunge into society and do service to society and thereby use the bridge to reach God."

In some countries many people still lack the essentials of life - clean water, fresh food, education and healthcare - and in these countries such needs are an appropriate area of concern and corrective action. But in wealthier counties these needs are by and large met. The need here is to pour love into the lives of the depressed, distressed, suicidal and downhearted. Cities that are awash with money are still starved of love. Think of the prostitution, drug addiction, broken homes and crime that are the under-bed of such wealthy places. People engaging in such activities are lost for the want of someone to show them some love. Such love, delivered at the grass roots, is transformative and healing. In such instances love is the crying need and the only solution.

"Expansion is love, is life. Contraction is death, is hate. Pray for the good of all, crave for the prosperity of all, not of one person or party or nation. The craving for power, if it afflicts any one person, degenerates into a mania and brings in its wake great confusion and calamity."

Through such work, provided it is aligned with our hearts desire, we come finally into the reality of ourselves. Others may view our life as filled with work and dedication, but we experience it as simply having fun being the person we were born to be. Through our life of service we finally come home to ourselves - our magnificent, sensitive, empathic, Selves. We have finally found the love, wisdom and unity for which we have searched so long.

"Expand your heart. Enlarge your vision. Enlarge the circle of kinship and take more and more of your fellow beings into the tabernacle of your heart. Adore them in loving worship. Wisdom is only compassion at its highest, for through sympathy you enter the heart of another and understand him through and through. You go behind the veil of pretense and punditry, convention and custom, you go behind good manners and fashion that people put on to hide their agony and ignorance from the rest of the world. Finding unity in this diversity of roles is true wisdom."

Begin Here: What is Love?

It is recommended that you combine a number of the different approaches. Choose between these services the ones you feel drawn to work with. For example you may find it helpful to contemplate the poem in Inspiration for Your Soul, read other people's questions in Coach Yourself to Success, and at the same time do the Inner Guidance Training program...

• Inner Guidance Training: this is a training program that you can do as part of your normal day's activities. It trains you to discern your inner guidance. By listening to the help offered from your inner voice and following it through 4 clearly defined stages, you are supported in having profound insights into the meaning of Love in your life.

• Inspiration for Your Soul: a meditative poem to contemplate, on the subject of Love presented in 3 complementary ways for you to enjoy, as an attractive color poster, as an audio presentation with voiceover spoken by Jessica Coffey and music by Shirley Cason and as a video produced by Peter Shepherd. See the feature in this issue below.

• Quick Coach: articles written by our community of experts at Cultivate Life! magazine. These articles have been hand picked. Each one gives a different perspective and helpful advice on what love is.

• Conversations with Wallace: audio recording of Wallace and his friend Mike Costigan - who has love as the central inspiration behind the way he runs and develops his business in Dublin - as they discuss the question: What is Love?

• Coach Yourself to Success: this service lists questions that Wallace has received from people who are seeking insight into philosophical questions on Love.

• Unfold Your Wings: links to the parts of Wallace's book online that are directly relevant and helpful for you to understand more deeply the nature of love.

• Plus you are invited to Send Your Question to Wallace for a public response through Cultivate Life! or to apply for Confidential Coaching.

Inspiration for Your Soul...

~ What is Love? ~

Print-friendly version online + audio + video | More Inspiration for Your Soul

Heart to Heart Coaching

Do you ever wish you could have access to your own private coach free of charge, to get help with the challenging situations you face ... whenever you need inspiration, insight or advice? The Heart to Heart Coaching service empowers YOU to coach yourself on the issues that matter most.

I am greatly motivated by all things spiritual but have lost myself - what is the path of love that will fulfill me?

The questioner's philosophy: Grew up Catholic and still attend Catholic Church. Respect and am drawn to Buddhism.

The questioner's hopes and aspirations: I'm passionate about self-examination; I want to be able to discern my path and encourage people to be less materialistic, listen to their inner voice and make the best of their experience.

Question: I'm struggling with guidance overload. I seem to be greatly motivated by new things on a daily basis. I have a passion for all things spiritual, sign up for all metaphysical/spiritual seminars and order a book weekly. All of this keeps me busy and I seem to have lost myself. I became a dilettante instead of a seeker.

I'm graduating with a bachelor's in metaphysics within months and I'm afraid I won't put my degree to good enough work. How do I zero in on the path that will fulfill me?

There is a time for study and there is a time for applying what has been learned. It is not your inner guidance that causing you to be so fascinated by all things spiritual, it is an overly curious mind. You want to explore, learn, self-examine and study - but do you want to LIVE a spiritual life? Spiritual life is there to be LIVED - full on, without reservation.

It feels safe to explore, learn, self-examine and study because none of this is living. None of this requires you to change in a fundamental way. It is at its core all about "me" - the me that likes to be the centre of attention, the me that imagines it can be something great, the me that likes to compose wonderful arguments and theories about how things can or should be, the me that declares its self to be a problem to be understood and solved.

But the spiritual life is not about me - it's about others. It's about living a life of love directed outwardly for the benefit of our family, friends, colleagues, community and world. If it's only about me it's as dry as dust scholarship.

My advice to you is to take one insight you have gained about love from all your studies and APPLY IT in every area of your life. Do not consider this task small or unimportant. It is far better to apply one insight about love than to read 1,000 books on the subject. Nor will this task I have set you be easy - because it will challenge you to change fundamentally.

For example if you take the simple spiritual tenet at the foundation of the practical application of love - do unto others as you would have them do unto you - and frame this as a question... "Am I doing to this person in this situation what I would like them to do to me if the roles were reversed?" Then every time you are in relationship with others, before you take action, make a decision or say something, ask yourself this question and let it determine your response. Take this task and apply it to your relationships with your husband, family members, friends, tutors, fellow students, and possible soon to be employers. Especially remember to apply this question (or similar question of your own choice) at times of stress and conflict. Both you and your relationships will be transformed.

Once you have completed your studies, I encourage you to set aside all the complex arguments, seminars, books and dissertations and take a simple spiritual precept like this into the bosom of your heart and APPLY IT universally in your own life. Doing this will bring you down to earth, helping you descend from the rarified atmosphere of dissertation, and getting you in touch with the practical application of spiritual truth. If you apply this spiritual precept rigorously in every practical detail of your life, that profound commitment will, in and of itself, open your heart and put you in touch with inner guidance. Then you will be able, with some degree of authenticity, to help others find and listen to their inner voice.

See more Questions on this Topic | Print-friendly version + Send this Q&A to a friend

Get Help :: Take Action

If we grow to genuinely love and value ourselves, that will be the energy we put out into the world and it will be reflected back accordingly. Power is recognizing that you are the source of your life - that you create in your subjective reality (your beliefs) and this is mirrored in the physical world through the power of God, of which we are each a part. The vibration and energy of God's power is Love. If our creation is not of love then it comes back and hits us in the face and from that we learn... that's Karma, cause and effect. And so life is a learning experience, about Love. We are privileged.

As we have seen, Heart to Heart Coaching offers a great set of tools that help us understand the philosophical question, What is Love? In particular, the Inner Guidance Training Program is designed to reveal and make clear the spiritual nature of Love in your life and the program is both free and highly recommended.

Here is a selection of further resources from the trans4mind.com site as a whole, to help in your quest for understanding this central issue of our lives...

Relevant products

• The Insight Project home-study course. Not for the feint at heart, this is an intensive program of spiritual discovery, that has uniquely powerful methods (including with the aid of biofeedback monitoring) of getting to the truth that underlies our many layers of mental rationalizations and other kinds of defenses. Love is the light of truth; fear is the shadow of distortion. The truth is always then, ultimately, the same - love is the source, love is the way - but we have many years of conditioning (cultural, genetic, archetypal, and so on) that obscures this simplicity with a world of complex and conflicting beliefs and identifications. Unravelling this labyrinthine knot is the work of The Insight Project: "to go beyond our programming."

• The Magical Wizard Program, Draw Love Into Your Life helps you to obtain the right self-image - your state of being - so that you both attract more love and give more love, a widening upward spiral.

Useful articles

• The Spark of Love by Peter Shepherd. The constituent parts of love can be seen as communication, understanding and empathy - these enable us to fully "grok" a reality. They are also the constituents of relationship.

• Look in the Mirror (Lesson 24 of Positive Approach). We have much more power, in a spiritual sense, then is usually recognized. For example, if in your mind and heart you resolve an upset with a family member, e.g. you find understanding and acceptance where before you had none, that will be "picked up" by the other person and he or she will likely write or phone you, even if they hadn't for years before. They respond differently to you, not because they have changed, but because you have changed your outgoing vibration that attracts your experiences.

• Insightful articles about the nature of Love are presented in the Quick Coach selection for this topic.

Recommended books on this subject

• At each junction there are two ways we can go in life: the way of Love and its components - empathy, trust, certainty, confidence, understanding. Or, the way of Fear and its components - lies, refusal to understand, harmful acts, withheld communication. This corresponds to those archetypes: forces of the light and forces of the dark.

  Much of our upbringing is dominated by the basic survival needs and the fear of their lack. But to achieve our highest need, for self- realization, we need to align ourselves toward the light. Tim Ong's book, From Fear to Love - A Spiritual Journey, is a wonderful guide, both to understanding our situation and to transcending it, so that we can truly live our lives in the light of Love.

• A Letter of Love by Ken Jablonski is a free PDF download. We are eternal spiritual beings connected to each other and the Divine Source of all life. Accept and treasure every day's experience, serve others in kindness and Love, share your gifts, gratefully stay in the present moment and replace fear with Faith and Love. Happiness, Joy, Peace and "true Spiritual" growth will follow.

• Tim Stone's The Love - Evolution to Eternity is a free download off his complete book. 'The Love' attempts to answer some of the more challenging questions that confront humanity and therefore predict the prospects of future civilizations, and will also provide answers to the equation of evolution and trace our path from the beginning of time to the distant future. Subsequently we need to understand where are we from, what are we, who are we, why are we here and where are we going.

• Download a free sample chapter from Anodea Judith's book, Waking the Global Heart: Humanity's Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love. Will we survive into the next age? If so, what will it look like and what will it take for us to get there? For the first time since the planet cooled, five billion years ago, humanity is capable of influencing - for better or worse - the trajectory of evolution. This requires a tremendous responsibility and maturity of the heart, and in this revolutionary book, Anodea Judith charts the challenges and opportunities of our time. Only through a rite of passage will humanity shift from the love of power to the power of love.

Videos
Watch these videos online now for free...

• Dr. Michael Norwood: The 9 Insights of the Wealthy Soul
  Whether you desire to transform a dream into reality, failure into triumph, grief into grace, or a relationship breakdown into a bridge of love and higher understanding, these universal principles are the means you can naturally accomplish your goals.
• The Power of Love
  Three beautiful short videos from Veronica de Andres about how to apply the power of Love in your life.
• What is Love?"
  This beautiful movie is part of the 'Let Us Spread Love Wherever We Go!' project.
• I Choose Love
  This is a beautiful, transformative video about the choice for humanity: Love or Fear. What do you choose?
• Inspiration for Your Soul ~ What is Love?
  And of course our own short film: 5 minutes of beautiful images, music and inspiring words about Love.

Unconditional Love

The purpose of being human, as we shift into the New Reality, is to learn about heart-centered consciousness.

The Universe is, by its very design, filled with the love of the Original Creator. Universal love is the aspect of Original Consciousness which holds Creation together. In the Original Creation, Infinite Being divided its consciousness into two complementary aspects - thought and feeling - and then set them into motion.

The love of the Original Creator forms the very fabric of space. No material thing and no part of "empty" space is devoid of that love. Universal love is literally everywhere. However, the human condition is only affected by this love when it is channeled into the human realm through its use by humans.

We are here on Earth to learn how to translate universal love into human form.

Once universal love has been transformed through the consciousness of any individual human being, it enters the global mind atmosphere of Earth. We all share constant access to this global mind. While we initiate thoughts and feelings on our own, we also receive thoughts and feelings from the global mind. We sometimes alter these by our own thought, sometimes not, and then pass them back into the global mind. In an unconscious way, but not consciously, people are fully telepathic as they receive and transmit thoughts and feelings from and to the global mind atmosphere.

When a person experiences heart-centered consciousness, they radiate a type of consciousness which is very different to basic emotion. Heart-centered consciousness is a state of unconditional love. It is not a product of emotional like or dislike. Once started, nothing in physical reality affects the flow of unconditional love. It is something that just is, regardless of the circumstances.

Unconditional love is something that flows through your heart - when you reach up above day-to-day consciousness, then open your heart and just allow it. This heart-centered consciousness always sees the elegant solution to the sorrows that can arise from basic human emotions.

Unconditional love allows, accepts and supports. It is not something you try to do. It just flows when you allow it to enter your heart and take your consciousness above the cares of daily reality and into an expanded vista of awareness.

Each time you radiate unconditional love into the global mind atmosphere, you upgrade the entire human experience, taking humanity yet one more step into the unfolding New Reality.

Owen Waters is editor and cofounder of Infinite Being LLC. He promotes a philosophy of spiritual empowerment through inner connection to the source of your ultimate potential. For more Spiritual Words of Empowerment subscribe to his free weekly newsletter. For the full picture, read Owen's book, The Shift: The Revolution in Human Consciousness and his new Discover Your Purpose in Life, which will take you on a voyage of inner discovery. On this journey, you will pass through the layers of what used to be unsolved mysteries. "At each step, we will go deeper still, always using the question 'why' to go deeper, until we reach the final layer and discover the answer to the ultimate mystery in life."

Fear... Not

Are you afraid? Oh, you might call it anxiety or jealousy or sadness or any number of other pseudonyms, but peel away the socially correct terms and it's all fear. Afraid of losing someone; afraid of being unworthy; afraid of rejection; afraid of looking ridiculous. We could go on - but why bother. It's all the same stuff.

I decided some time back that life made most sense when I recognized that the simple and the profound are usually one and the same. I saw that there were only two realities we live in life - Love or Fear. This unfussy notion gave me huge insight into our all-too human journey of bewildering emotions.

Imagine someone standing before you right now livid with anger...at you. How might you respond? Perhaps duck and cover? Maybe fight back? Both are primitive reactions of our age old fight-or-flight response instincts. But, there's something beyond the duality of fight back or run. It's to recognize anger, even rage, for what it truly is - fear.

Sure, it wears a scary face and has a loud voice. It doesn't look like scared at all, does it? If you disengage your own personal emotions from the moment and step back you'd see a different picture. You'd see someone afraid of not getting their way or losing control. But, in most societies, fear means weak and weakness is not an accepted position for adults.

This reluctance to show fear is instinctively shared by most animals – fear/weakness attracts predators. Fearful/weak animals are easy targets by predators and are quickly abandoned by their pack to preserve the safety of the group. Deep in our unthinking primitive instincts, we sense that to show fear is to risk being abandoned. So, we disguise our fear as anger, or some other socially acceptable emotion, and the world never knows our secret. Besides, fear makes us feel inferior and anger feels so much stronger.

Reconsider the person angry at you again. Is it possible for you to understand how their display of fury and hostility could be fear? When seen as anger you may get angry back. But, how do you tend to react when you know someone is afraid? With compassion; with gentleness, with empathy? With a desire to comfort or support? Notice how differently you feel inside when faced with that situation. You aren't fighting or fleeing - you want to help.

Whether the one before you is conscious enough to realize that their anger is really fear in disguise - you can know it. And your energy shift and non-confrontational response can diffuse their emotions like water on fire. They won't even know why they suddenly feel calmer. But, they will.

At the invisible energetic level, you've told them, "I'm not your enemy. I'm not here to hurt you. I understand." They'll begin to surface from their unconscious emotions and perceive the situation more clearly.

We get emotionally hijacked and insane with fear when we lose track of love's eternal truth. There is only love... and the fearful madness comes from forgetting who we really are and what is truth. Just as darkness is merely the absence of light, fear is the absence of love. But, not truly absence, since love never disappears. More correctly, fear is our absence from love. When we forget or turn away. When we feel unworthy or guilty. When we close our eyes and refuse to see.

Like the light illuminates darkness, love dispels fear. Love is our natural state - we only wander when we've forgotten the truth. Be compassionate with those who have forgotten - they are not themselves. They've been blinded by a lie. You can be the one who holds the light that illuminates their path home.

Karen is author of The Sequoia Seed: Remembering the Truth of Who You Are, a great read for anyone who is seeking understanding or guidance, inspiration or clarity in his or her life. Waking Up, the free bi-monthly ezine, was created to help you activate your natural motivation to move beyond mere existence and to really LIVE your dreams. Contact by tel: 509-633-2255 or email.

'Remembrance: Letters to My Soul' is the first of a new series of e-books by Karen... a profound journey through the challenges we all face with fear and doubt that brings us to the remembrance that we are safe, strong, and spiritually eternal. 54 pages of inspiration that will touch your heart and steady your path. For the true seeker. Normally it is $12.00 but Karen is kindly offering it freely to Cultivate Life! subscribers: Download here.

Love's Simple Truths

Love is the order of the universe and we are its atoms.
It is the ocean and we are its drops
Through love the heavens are brilliant;
Without love even suns and moons are eclipsed

Love is as essential to us as air; a force that drives us all. It determines who we are, who we become, what we can achieve and, through this, how the world will evolve. It may even determine how long we live. Policy advisors to government now claim that the single strongest predictor of whether an individual will be alive in 10 years time is his answer now to the question: "Does somebody love you?"

Psychologists have found links between love and self-esteem, mental, emotional, and physical well-being, and freedom from stress and anxiety. By sad contrast, those working with Romanian orphans have also found that children who are denied love can develop a "virtual black hole" where the emotional centers of their brains should be. Because of this, they can never grow up to be "fully human."

Studies like these show us the importance of love. And yet, so many questions remain unanswered. How many of us can say, for example, what love really is, or how to find it, nurture it, and learn from it so it can feed and enrich our souls? How do we make our relationships work so that they - and we - are healthy, happy, and whole? These are questions which scientists cannot answer. For that we need a Master who can teach us love's simple truths and guide us onto the path of the heart.

Rumi: The Master of Love's Simple Truths
The year 2007 marked the 800th anniversary of one such Master. Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi was born on September 29 1207 in Eastern Persia. As a child he gained a reputation as a gifted spiritual teacher, and went on to establish the Sufi order of whirling dervishes known as "The Path of the Master."

During his life Rumi composed thousands of verses of mystical love poetry, the messages of which concern the notion of tahweed (unity), where, through love itself, we become one with "the Beloved": the divine spirit of love within all of us. For Rumi, we are all divine and there is no problem we can face which does not have a solution, no question we can ask which does not have an answer, as long as we remember who and what we are. What, after all, is impossible to God? And the essence of God is love.

To love well, therefore, may be our most important task as spiritual human beings, because only by this can we overcome our difficulties and distractions, and reconnect with our true selves. Through love we can make miracles.

To find love, however, we must surrender to love, knowing that our partners are reflections of ourselves and that we are both capable of the deepest, most soulful, and intoxicating of loves - if we choose to see things this way. But let us start at the beginning...

What Is Love Anyway?
The word "love" is nowadays poorly defined. It stands for so much yet can mean so little. Other ages and cultures were clearer, suggesting that they were more thoughtful about and respectful of it. The ancient Greeks, for example, had many different words for love, describing its various forms and how each feels, including eros (sensuality and passion), philo (the love between friends), and agape (the love of God, or, more generally, the kindness and compassion we show to all people when we recognize them as divine and special beings, just like us).

For Rumi, any (and all) of these forms of love is a gateway through which we can step to meet God. When we are loving and loved by another, our perceptions change and things become brighter, clearer, and more meaningful. We see the world as it really is: alive, intelligent, and benign. Even a gesture from our lovers can leave us swooning in sacred meaning. We wake up to the world and, through this awakening, we realize that everyone and all things are part of a single consciousness: We are One - and, more remarkable still: We are all God.

The problem for modern relationships is the pace of life. We do not have time to reflect on love, to experience it fully, or even to be in the company of our lovers as much as we would like. We are always wanted somewhere else. On top of this, in the modern age, we are all consumers and consumed. As consumers of a fast-food lifestyle, we have grown to expect instant answers and gratification; to simply be "in love" and our lovers to feel the same.

Love's confusions arise from this because love, despite the spin which makes it look so easy, is never really that simple. It requires that we look more deeply at ourselves and our lovers, who have been gifted to us by God for our mutual spiritual advancement, and not approach them just with expectations to be met.

If we accept love in this way, we will learn from it and grow; if we have demands and expectations, however, we will be disappointed and experience rejection and hurt when love does not go our way. These feelings click into our deepest wounds and lead to defensiveness and conflict - the opposite of love in any form.

To avoid this, we must be clear on what "love" means to us, because when we know what we want there is less room for misunderstanding. We must also be willing to explore and release our feelings of rejection if and when they arise. By doing so, we free ourselves from hurt so that in future - and in Rumi's words - we "Do not revisit the past" because, "This fleeting moment must not be wasted."

Intimate relationships are our universities of the heart. In them we will find challenges and blessings, ecstasy and sorrows, and come to realize that our lovers are our mirrors and we are reflected in their eyes. If there is conflict in our relationships it is because we ourselves are in conflict; if there is joy and fulfillment it is because we have found peace within ourselves.

Love seeks balance, stability, and a subtle deepening. For it to evolve in a positive way, it is not necessary, therefore, to force things in our relationships or to worry that we are not doing enough or being as loving as we could; it is only necessary, as a first step, to Do No Harm. This is the first principle of love and Rumi urges us to use it to find our equilibrium:

If you are like the wind: sometimes hot, sometimes cold,
Find the place within you where heat and cold are no more
Then love can evolve naturally towards its perfection.

The relationship you have now, therefore, is perfect for who you are at this given time because you still have more to learn from it. But that doesn't mean that you or your lover cannot become more perfect still! Each passing second brings change, the possibility of healing, new insights, and new ways of being. Perfection is not an absolute, but a process of evolution. "In aiming for perfection," Rumi reminds us, "it is God that we become." As we become more loving, we attract more love to us.

Every relationship - even the most unsatisfactory - is part of this evolutionary process, giving us the opportunity to practice our love, to open our hearts, and create perfection in the moment. If we are wise to love we will learn from it and this will allow us to better understand ourselves and move forward.

To do so, we need to look at ourselves, at what motivates us or holds us back, and at where we must place more of our attention so we are balanced and whole. When we are perfect beings, perfection cannot help but flow towards us. Rumi's advice, then, is simple:

Keep company with Saints
And you will become a Saint!

Come, come, whoever you are!
Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire,
Come even though you have been broken a hundred times!
Come, and come again,
Ours is not a caravan of despair!

No relationship can "save" us from the problems we bring to it. Instead, it will magnify them so we see what needs to be healed and are given an opportunity to do so. If we find it hard to give love, for example, then it will be equally hard for love to find us, and this will be central to every relationship we have until we decide to heal it. Our relationships reveal these truths and this is our lover's gift.

It is clinging to hope and expectations - the "what could have beens" - that cause us pain when we absorb ourselves with relationships that have failed. When we learn from them and let go, however, our pain is released and we can greet new lovers with wisdom, dignity, and respect for ourselves and for them.

There is a simple law of the universe that embraces us in times of sorrow: Love seeks balance, and our pain now is equal in measure to the joy that will come. Trust that it will and allow yourself to be blessed for, as the Master of Love reminds us, "Peace always keeps company with troubles."

The important thing, then, is to know the unresolved issues in our hearts. In this we find freedom, not shame. By understanding our pains and fears, we and our lovers can find creative solutions so that love can flow once more. Knowing our answers, we can navigate our relationships so that, one step at a time, we give more of ourselves and open our hearts to love.

The person we are learning to love is always ourselves. When we understand this, our lover becomes our ally in helping us reconnect with our souls so that what is hidden becomes visible to us.

The mirror of my soul is your face, my love;
You reflect my perfect being

Fear closes us down and, since the world we create is the one we perceive, once we shut ourselves off from love, fear is all we know because it is all we see. To change this we must be courageous in love so that, through our example, those around us can also wake up to the truth. By acting from love - no matter what - we create a more loving world, free of the limitations we have known.

Leap into the fires of love
When you know ecstasy
You cannot live without the flames

The time for staying home is over.
It is time we entered the garden,
For the sun has risen on a new day of happiness:
Our day of vision and unity

Ross Heaven is a therapist, workshop leader, and the author of several books on shamanism and healing, including Darkness Visible, the best-selling Plant Spirit Shamanism, and Love's Simple Truths. His website is The Four Gates where you can also read how to join his sacred journeys to the shamans and healers of the Amazon.

See the following related pages at Trans4mind:
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