Do you think… this is love…?
My 9 year old twin girls were listening to a popular song on the radio, and asked if I can turn up the volume…”I’d catch a grenade for you…jump in front of a train for you..you know I’d do anything for you. I would go through all this pain. Take a bullet straight through my brain. Yes I would die for you, baby, but you won’t do the same.” I ask them ‘what do you think of these lyrics? Do you believe this is love — sacrificing yourself for someone?’ I hear myself go into lecture mode about what love really is..they say “it’s ok mom, we just like the music, we don’t listen to the words!”
Last week I flew down to Rachael Jayne Groover’s powerful event on feminine spirituality and leadership, check her out: www.theyinproject.com. On the plane I read Leo F. Buscaglia’s classic 1984 bestseller “Loving Each Other: The Challenge of Human Relationships”. Couldn’t put it down because I could not get over how so much wisdom in this book nearly 3 decades later is still missing in our closest relationships.
Here’s a nugget from his chapter on jealousy, which feeds into the underlying paradigm of how we can find ourselves criticizing, and judging others: “We forget that we cannot force anyone to meet our needs, to be what we want them to be, do what we want them to do, respond as we would have them respond or feel what we think they should feel. This is a human impossibility, an illusion, a fantasy. Even if the other person concedes to being ‘ours’, at best that is only a figure of speech. Perhaps we must finally accept the fact that we can never possess another human being…We must learn that loving others is to want them to be themselves – painful as it may be – with or without you. After all is said and done, what else can we do but wish them well? Perhaps the greatest love presupposes the greatest freedom.”
We believe others SHOULD be and do based on the ‘right’ way we see the world. We try to convince, change, correct and fix another, and make them wrong in the process for being who they are. Instead of sharing, caring, giving, enlightening with no attachment to being right. We stand in a space of superiority; this is what it is to judge another. Judgment is not about seeking your truth, instead we use discernment to determine whether someone is trustworthy or a priority for our time, and energy. Life is too short not to spend it with those who make you laugh, experience joy, and most of all grow. Isn’t the greatest freedom just being with someone who allows you to show up authentically exactly as you are? Someone who can see and hear the real you?
Here’s the catch. If someone is being destructive, unloving, unkind, selfish, greedy, judgmental i.e. not treating someone the way you want to be treated, you must choose to let go of this person or at the least distance yourself to avoid being drained by their negative energy. It feels heavy, and you won’t have the freedom to be who you are. It does not mean you condemn them for no one is better than anyone else – we are all human beings. They are being their best based on what they know, understand, and believe. No one chooses to be worse than who they are.
We can have a false sense of needing to belong (be owned by) someone including those who treat us unkind believing this is love. It comes from fear, and differs from wanting to be connected to others where we are all part of one collective consciousness. Only when we let go of our judgment does a space open for compassion, unconditional love, and forgiveness. This is where the miracle, and freedom of love is experienced.
