They say you can’t really love someone else until you learn to love yourself.
Self Love
We read self-help books, we go to therapy, we dance, and we learn to accept our self. One fine day, we can tolerate a little alone time, giggle at our neuroses, and wonder, “Hey, maybe I can love myself now!” We give a nickel to a bum on the street. Surprised with our own generosity, we think, “Hey, maybe I can love the world too!” At a safe distance, we love him generously, and we feel even better about ourselves. Loving other, we feel accomplished, as if we are finishing the long road to self-love. And then along comes a lover. We love beautifully, perfectly, and then, all of a sudden, our lover gets too close. Our fantasy crumbles. Lover painfully shows us the last frontier of things not yet loved, the dumping ground for orphaned parts of self.
The lover is close enough to identify with, and this intense identification begets love. But the lover is also far enough away to safely project all the remaining skeletons in our closet. Sometimes, we treat the lover like the bum, a recipient of our idealizations, safely loved at a distance. But when this same lover comes close, identification can make the darkness unbearable. We reject in the lover what we can’t bear to see in ourselves. Lover becomes the victim of our most desperate fears. Taking on our deepest unresolved work, lover becomes our favorite whipping boy. Our neuroses flee safely outwards, cast into dialogue, cemented into nagging or complaints. Projecting inner dissension outwards, we avoid the fire inside.
Learning to Heal
We are presented with an incredible opportunity to learn. But in this tender space of inflamed self, learning is painful. Instead, we are tempted to “take space” or break up or cheat. We might even feel empowered by proclaiming indifference or playing hard to get. We say to ourselves, “I didn’t like you that much anyway” or out loud, “I don’t think it’s going to work out.” We create the familiar samsaric yo-yo of human relationship, pathologizing our “fear of intimacy” so we can feign helplessness.
Real power does not come from indifference or distance. It comes from a faith that everything will be alright. A courage to continually surrender and enter the crucible of learning. A belief that if we fall on our face, the earth mother will pick us up again. A belief that the universe supports us.
When we enter love, we enter a solemn healing relationship, not bound in space and time. We remain psychically bound, our memories and bodies holding the other, even if we decide never to see each other again. As lovers, we invoke demons, and inspire angels. We stir up trauma, we catalyze learning, we provoke healing. We cannot help but hold our lover’s karma, flowing through our hands like wisps of hair in the throes of passion. But how do we square the boundless nature of love with advice to “establish healthy boundaries”?
Psychobabble
Psychologists coach us to figure out “what’s mine” and “what’s yours” and thereby avoid dealing with “the other person’s shit”. We are asked to “own” something or ask our love to “own up” to something. We learn to have discussions about “having our needs met”. Clearly this advice is a useful intermediate step towards contact, safety, and integrity. Instead of getting lost in another person’s psyche, we focus energy on our own familiar problems. Through repetition, we start to see ourselves better, we see others better, and in seeing there is acceptance. But as we get bigger, more capacious, we must expect more of ourselves. We must recognize the larger web of interconnectedness we inhabit. I believe that the spiritual call to love is quite different than the psychological one.
Into the Dark
We are called to hold on to the darkest things we see in our love. In this acute darkness, we find the discarded parts of self we separated from and projected onto bums. We find the disgusting parts of the world we could not accept. Holding on to the dark doesn’t mean we disqualify our needs, or hold on to a physical relationship at all costs. It doesn’t even mean that we try to ‘help’ our lover, as that can be counterproductive or even misguided. It means that we cease to differentiate, categorize, label, and assign. Our inner psychologist complains, “But this is NOT me!” But on a closer look, maybe it is us. An orphaned desire, a repressed shadow, or a part of humankind that desperately needs our compassion. Keeping our hearts stubbornly open, we recognize that we are all traveling together and our destiny is shared. We reach the finish line together. We hold onto the dark in ourselves, our lovers, our world, so that we can play ourselves awake.
New Love
In cosmic love, we say to our lover, for the first time ever, “I believe in you.” Our belief is strong, because we are suddenly holding everything in our relationship, without conditions. Fiercely holding our lover’s delicate present and wildest potential, we are forced to release expectations, knowing they derive not from our lover, but our own life experience. We thereby recognize disappointment of expectation as our own.
Disappointment is a signal for us to take care of ourselves, to mourn with great intensity, with the single-minded goal of returning cleansed. We aim to say again to our lover, without hesitation, “I believe in you.”
In cosmic love, we speak dangerous words like these, “There is nothing I need from you, nothing in particular I desire, except your everything. I affirm that there is a love beyond expectation, a love beyond possession. I will wait lifetimes, if need be, for your flower to bloom. Until then, our love mingles in the earth and the stars.”
New Self
In cosmic love, we find in the fearless space of no expectation an unflinching love of ourselves, our lovers, and our world. We dissolve the distance once inserted between these kinds of love, finding that there is only one kind of love, one kind of lover, indeed, one kind of Self. We “respond to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were our own … attaining the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32 Bhagavad Gita). Each love, each lover, gives us a chance to knit our Self together, to beat a path back towards a universal human compassion. Once united, we can never again be torn apart.
Self Love
We read self-help books, we go to therapy, we dance, and we learn to accept our self. One fine day, we can tolerate a little alone time, giggle at our neuroses, and wonder, “Hey, maybe I can love myself now!” We give a nickel to a bum on the street. Surprised with our own generosity, we think, “Hey, maybe I can love the world too!” At a safe distance, we love him generously, and we feel even better about ourselves. Loving other, we feel accomplished, as if we are finishing the long road to self-love. And then along comes a lover. We love beautifully, perfectly, and then, all of a sudden, our lover gets too close. Our fantasy crumbles. Lover painfully shows us the last frontier of things not yet loved, the dumping ground for orphaned parts of self.
The lover is close enough to identify with, and this intense identification begets love. But the lover is also far enough away to safely project all the remaining skeletons in our closet. Sometimes, we treat the lover like the bum, a recipient of our idealizations, safely loved at a distance. But when this same lover comes close, identification can make the darkness unbearable. We reject in the lover what we can’t bear to see in ourselves. Lover becomes the victim of our most desperate fears. Taking on our deepest unresolved work, lover becomes our favorite whipping boy. Our neuroses flee safely outwards, cast into dialogue, cemented into nagging or complaints. Projecting inner dissension outwards, we avoid the fire inside.
Learning to Heal
We are presented with an incredible opportunity to learn. But in this tender space of inflamed self, learning is painful. Instead, we are tempted to “take space” or break up or cheat. We might even feel empowered by proclaiming indifference or playing hard to get. We say to ourselves, “I didn’t like you that much anyway” or out loud, “I don’t think it’s going to work out.” We create the familiar samsaric yo-yo of human relationship, pathologizing our “fear of intimacy” so we can feign helplessness.
Real power does not come from indifference or distance. It comes from a faith that everything will be alright. A courage to continually surrender and enter the crucible of learning. A belief that if we fall on our face, the earth mother will pick us up again. A belief that the universe supports us.
When we enter love, we enter a solemn healing relationship, not bound in space and time. We remain psychically bound, our memories and bodies holding the other, even if we decide never to see each other again. As lovers, we invoke demons, and inspire angels. We stir up trauma, we catalyze learning, we provoke healing. We cannot help but hold our lover’s karma, flowing through our hands like wisps of hair in the throes of passion. But how do we square the boundless nature of love with advice to “establish healthy boundaries”?
Psychobabble
Psychologists coach us to figure out “what’s mine” and “what’s yours” and thereby avoid dealing with “the other person’s shit”. We are asked to “own” something or ask our love to “own up” to something. We learn to have discussions about “having our needs met”. Clearly this advice is a useful intermediate step towards contact, safety, and integrity. Instead of getting lost in another person’s psyche, we focus energy on our own familiar problems. Through repetition, we start to see ourselves better, we see others better, and in seeing there is acceptance. But as we get bigger, more capacious, we must expect more of ourselves. We must recognize the larger web of interconnectedness we inhabit. I believe that the spiritual call to love is quite different than the psychological one.
Into the Dark
In cosmic love, we say to our lover, for the first time ever, “I believe in you.” Our belief is strong, because we are suddenly holding everything in our relationship, without conditions. Fiercely holding our lover’s delicate present and wildest potential, we are forced to release expectations, knowing they derive not from our lover, but our own life experience. We thereby recognize disappointment of expectation as our own.
Disappointment is a signal for us to take care of ourselves, to mourn with great intensity, with the single-minded goal of returning cleansed. We aim to say again to our lover, without hesitation, “I believe in you.”
In cosmic love, we speak dangerous words like these, “There is nothing I need from you, nothing in particular I desire, except your everything. I affirm that there is a love beyond expectation, a love beyond possession. I will wait lifetimes, if need be, for your flower to bloom. Until then, our love mingles in the earth and the stars.”
In cosmic love, we find in the fearless space of no expectation an unflinching love of ourselves, our lovers, and our world. We dissolve the distance once inserted between these kinds of love, finding that there is only one kind of love, one kind of lover, indeed, one kind of Self. We “respond to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were our own … attaining the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32 Bhagavad Gita). Each love, each lover, gives us a chance to knit our Self together, to beat a path back towards a universal human compassion. Once united, we can never again be torn apart.
