Jacques Lusseyran, a young blind French boy observes, "It is more than seeing, it is tuning in...allowing the current to connect...like electricity. To put it differently, this means an end of living in front of things and a beginning to live with them...for this is love."
In life coaching, people ask, "How do I love myself?" Yesterday I was having tea with an acquaintance. She was showing me photos of two beloveds -- a child who had passed and a beloved who had not. Then she told me of the "great love" she feels when looking at their pictures. Her eyes were alive when explaining that she now knows what true love really is. "I feel it." she exclaims. Earlier in the conversation, she revealed, "I can't feel love for myself.", then added a list of personal short-comings. Yet to her family, children, friends, and pet she is an ocean of caring.
Here, sitting across from me is a gifted, creative, intelligent person telling me that looking in the mirror, saying loving things to herself hasn't worked. She offers herself little compassion and scant understanding. And true, it is difficult to stimulate feelings of warmth and radiant acceptance about one's wrinkles, scars, or regrets. How many situations have I not been perfect in, how many mistakes do I make, how many of those geraniums have I neglected to water? Yet I am the love (as is everyone) that is doing the loving and through which this great river flows. Then little things get taken care of somehow and the big things release a larger understanding and compassion to this little ego-self called, me.
Responding to how she can love herself I observed, "When you look at those pictures on the coffee table, I feel that "great love" you mentioned coming from you not from their images. You are the one emitting that feeling in this room." I suggested she close her eyes, try to feel love (without the pictures or the good memories), wait, allow its warmth to expand in her chest. Continuing I added, "Let yourself down into it, feel it with your ears, your toes and with your breath -- it is you. There is no intermediary, no object outside yourself needed. Let the love that you are, love your wonderfully imperfect self, let it release its compassion, its larger understandings in you and for you -- allow it space, depth and place.
"Even if love is experienced as grief, a loss of a child or beloved, it is pure love and you are the one doing the loving. Once you wear the path here you will not need to love the self in the mirror, as you are part of the universe loving itself. Not separate but one, not outside or inside as ultimately there is no outside, inside. We are like mason jars full of ocean set in water with the tops off. Where does the ocean begin or end? Our hearts are every heart, even our own."
As the young blind boy so wisely observed when asked how he "sees" in order to maneuver his dark world, "It is more than seeing, it is tuning in...allowing the current to connect like electricity...(which) means an end of living in front of things..." And this is the love that keeps moving us back into wholeness, ....** Then like the boy, we stumble into undivided living and know we are, indeed, the lovers doing the loving.
** paraphase source, Mark Nepo
photo source: fotolia.com
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