Love
- Three of Swords
I believe that one of the most asked about subjects when doing readings is Love. Typically regarding the romantic kind, love between two people with the hopes of having found a soul mate, someone that we will spend the rest of our days with at least in this lifetime.
Love.
Such a hugh thing for such as tiny little four letter word. Yes a four letter word! Well, I am not the type of person or reader who likes to sugar coat things, nor do I subscribe to the Disney version of life. It may not be pleasant and heavens knows I tremendously dislike being the one to occasionally have to point out that the “happy ever after” ending that we hope for, is anything but happy. Such is life. Love of course plays a huge rule in our pursuit of happiness. People love all kinds of things. They love money, they love careers, they love things, they love their mates, they love their families, they love themselves. Love, desire, attainment, owning, sometimes they are all part of the same thing. But what is love, or more so – what is love supposed to do for us? Is love really only about that happy ever ever ending, where we’ve attained our island of delight filled with contentment and security? Or is it is something more?
Love.
I’ve often said in readings to those who have been suffering at the hands of Love that to understand Love, we need to understand part of its purpose. Love in essence does two things and does them quite well. It teaches us sorrow and it teaches us compassion.
Sorrow through Loss.
The biggest dilemma is how we in Western society view happiness and suffering. One is to be strived for while the other is to be eradicated. One is perfection the other is anything but that. However, if one were to think closely upon all those times in which they can truly say they made their deepest levels of growth they would realize that it had its roots in times of pain and suffering. In our concern for understanding Love and its role in our lives we would have to rethink our fluffed up one sided version of why Love exists. We would need to acknowledge and accept Love’s dark side. It is very important to accept that Love and Happiness are not mutually exclusive! We can be in Love, but terribly unhappy or happy but not in Love. Fancy that!
If we want to truly accept that we are all in a process of spiritual growth and evolution or simply a period psychological growth then we have to consider that the pain that Love can cause is an aspect of Love from which we gain the most. That is not to say that Love is always a horrible, terrible, no good, thing and should be avoided at all costs! No quite the contrary! The essence of Love is like all things in the world – we must learn to accept all things that come to us, not simply the nice pleasant things – but all things. Life is hard despite all our efforts to deny it. We would be wasting our energy by putting all our efforts into creating artificial means to make it less so. We will never eradicate pain and suffering from life. To do so (if possible) would make Love and happiness quite meaningless. We love because on some fundamental level we know that we are imperfect and incomplete. We seek to rectify that and it is in this search that seek out things that fulfill our meaning of Love for us. A person, a thing, a place, it can be any aspect of living by which we do this. We may say that we “deserve” to have Love in our lives – and perhaps we do. However, we need also to acknowledge that if we deserve to have Love in our lives, than we must accept that we deserve the pain that may come from it when it eludes or leaves us. The gift at the depths of the abyss of pain that Love can leave us in, is where we will find our strengths, wisdom and evolution. It isn’t automatic. It isn’t guaranteed. It depends on our attitudes and approaches to how we work through unfortunately situations that this happen. It can be a mine field. That is why we have each other. To help each other through these mine fields. This is one aspect of reading for others.
In essence when we speak of Love we are also simultaneously speaking of Life. Life is about cycles and so is Love. Love has its spark, it’s growth and its all flaming consumption. Then it wanes, diminishes, withers and dies. Love is the cycle of Life and Life is the cycle of Love. Love, like Life is always reborn in some manner, and always manifests in ways that are unexpected and vastly different from what we knew it before. We often chase after Love, based on preconceived notions of what we believe it needs to be, rather than allowing Love to manifest in the way it needs to be. Doing so creates unnecessary pain. It also prevents us from recognizing true opportunities of Love, because we fail to recognize or accept a manifestation in any other way than one we are willing to accept.
Compassion through empathy.
When we feel compassion we are in co-passion or “passion with”. We are outside of ourselves and sharing in the depths of our humanity with others beyond our immediate social networks. Love of someone we know is a beautiful thing but self serving when limited to just those we know and hold dear. Compassion born of Love is a higher form of Love and is born from different circumstances. Empathy, the ability to feel and relate to an others pain by relating to their emotions and feelings is the first act in compassion. To have compassion we must be able to relate somehow to the circumstances of another and that is typically on an emotional level. It is through our emotions and the feelings that come with them that enable us to empathize with others. To empathize with others requires that we can feel love – love for our fellow human beings. This form of Love is sometimes more difficult for some to understand, especially for those who live life mostly for their own concerns. We are talking of feeling for a strangers pain.
To have empathy for a stranger’s pain is to relate to that pain. However, to have compassion for another’s pain is more complex then to feel that pain, it is also to suffer in time with them and also hopefully to move us to act in a way that is intended to ease their pain. To ease their pain, is to ease our pain. For we see ourselves in their pain. We understand that when someone else suffers, in some way so do we. Some would say that this is because we can see ourselves in a strangers predicament and are not truly empathizing with that strangers pain, but really the potential of our own pain. This might be true, but not in total. I see this as seeing ourselves in others in such a way that helps us recognize that we are all the same. That we all share in the harshness of Living and that as alone as we may actually be, we at least can share in that aloneness with one another, through our pain… and our joy!
