Loving Again.

Why we must look at hurt in the eye and drop the labels it brings with it.

Love is simple. You meet someone, you feel a connect. You spend time and you resonate with them. You feel powerful emotions, you want to spend more time with them. As you do, you understand each other, you develop your own special language of communicating with each other. You feel understood, nurtured and safe. You extend yourself to nurture and love the other. It is simple and joyful.

We walk into our first relationships knowing very little what to expect. When the frenzy has settled in due course, we discover the other and we discover ourselves. We extend and expand and stretch. We invest.

Sometimes we get hurt.

Each one of us responds differently to hurt. Loving another person involves setting aside one’s sense of self, being vulnerable to admit that you value the well-being of the other more than that of yourself. And if the other does not reciprocate in a manner where we feel nourished and safe, we suffer.

All of us have different ways of dealing with hurt. The mind gives us various reasons, perfectly logical ones at that. Sometimes, we go around collecting friends — being in a safe zone — near enough to find comfort and far enough to never be hurt again. The human experience seeks companionship, it seeks to be understood and to understand. Friendships come close but don’t suffice. Sometimes we go serial dating, only to be left feeling empty.

Sometimes, we recoil. We pull back. We refuse to let ourselves go all out — for the fear of being let down, being controlled, for being made to feel small or inadequate. We ask of ourselves, is it worth the pain?

We feel we are not good enough. We do not deserve love. And sometimes we are the perpetrators. We are unable to forgive ourselves for the hurt we caused others. It is perhaps a more difficult situation. As victims we can externalize, as perpetrators we carry guilt. Self-inflicted guilt which serves no one, not the one we hurt, not ourselves. It gives us a false feeling of balancing out our lack of judgment.

Either position is difficult to get out of. Getting out means breaking the molds we have cast for ourselves. Those molds, uncomfortable as they are, are our familiar resting place.

We are often hurt and angry with our past and those who have hurt us. But mostly we are angry and unforgiving of ourselves. Beneath the victimhood or the guilt, lies a deep anguish for having let ourselves down — for either having allowed others to hurt us or for having acted in ways which are not aligned to who we truly are.

Often if we have lived long enough, without having done the uncomfortable task of looking within, looking at our hurt in the eye — forgiving others and ourselves, we get used to it. We get used to the stories that we tell ourselves. Worse, we become the story. Stories that we are not good enough, that we don’t deserve love, that we have done things that call for punishment.

These are dangerous stories. Cloaked in the warmth of familiarity, these stories grow upon us till these are so true, that we lose the ability to see the present without the jaundiced lens of these stories. When we meet someone we judge them through the lens of our past experiences.

We look for behavior patterns that will confirm the worst fears in us — that they are manipulative, controlling, untrustworthy. The human mind is infinitely smart. We will eventually collect enough data, behavioural evidence for the mind to say to itself “I told you, I was right!”

If only we are able to let go of what has happened with the objectivity that it was a series of unfortunate experiences meant to help us grow stronger, life can take a different turn.

The past is no predictor for the future, unless we give it the power to do so. Each day is a new day. Each experience is a fresh one. Each love is a new one.

Nothing is ever perfect. Perhaps, we understand this intuitively. And that is the reason why we subconsciously weigh whether we are better off stuck in our stories of the past or whether we are open to taking a risk to create a future that will be more aligned to the joyful experiences we are meant to experience.

No one knows. Change is scary. It upsets the peace we have made with our stories. Strange as it sounds, we resist the very thing that we so deeply desire.

And yet, when we are ready, we chance upon people who speak to our heart making us feel we want to extend ourselves to them. Perhaps, if we are healed enough they turn out to be kindred spirits who nurture our soul and soothe our fears. The question is do we allow them to? Do we shut out our fear long enough to not look for evidence of them wanting to hurt us in a manner that we were hurt in the past or worse, in new ways? Can we suspend our doubt to see the present objectively and the future creatively, in its full glorious potential?

Perhaps, we can. We can then hold hands and laugh together. One day at a time, we can step out of our stories into the new stories that await for our arrival.

What stories are holding you ransom? Can you shake off guilt, betrayal, inadequacy as an experience meant to make you look within and realize that you are bigger than all of this labels? Can you see the present for what it is? Can you dream of a future, different from the past? Love is all around. Love is your true nature. When you are free from the lenses you hold unconsciously, you can receive and give love in its glorious joyful free flowing form. May you be free. May you find the love that nurtures you.

Related posts:

Her excited ears were listening, listening to the faintest sound, her heart beating faster, faster than ever before, her hands, trembling, a bit, but why won’t it, unfolding is something, that’s no…

When it comes to shipping and handling certain products, many people wonder how the logistics work for live animals like lobster and certain fish. If you have ever wondered how to ship a live…