Sometimes we give the word love to a substitute for true love, labelling with that name something that makes us feel that we have "what we want". But what is love?
I find it curious that if I look up the definition of love in the dictionary, the first definition I get is: "Intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the encounter and union with another being". And the second: "Feeling towards another person that naturally attracts us and that, seeking reciprocity in the desire for union, completes us, makes us happy and gives us the energy to live together, communicate and create". Reading these definitions, all the alarm bells go off.
If we start from a sense of incompleteness, insufficiency or need, we begin by confusing love with something else.
Romantic love, toxic love, unconditional love and, like these, a thousand other categories of love, including healthy love or universal love. But how can we categorise love in so many ways? Love is love. All the labels we choose to put on it to define it is because we try to define successors of it, to the point of needing a label to define pure love, when it is love.
Labels aside, I would like to reflect on how to distinguish when it is love or when it is a substitute. And it is no easy task to try to intellectualise a feeling. Just as it is when you try to describe in an intellectualised way what consciousness is, a difficult task to put it into words, but when you live the experience of feeling it, you automatically know that it is consciousness. It is the same with love, it is a feeling, and when you feel it you automatically know that it is LOVE.
Love is an energy, a warm feeling in your chest that makes you open to give, to really listen, to help, to create.
Love is free and it is freedom. No conditioning, no demands, no expectations. You decide to share or help, not because you are going to get something in return, but just for the sake of sharing. And this, it is true that it can be perceived as selfish (but in a good way), because in reality when you create, share, help..., from love, it feels good in the body, it is so pleasant that you don't need anything in return. Just by doing that act (whatever it is) out of love, it fills you with a sense of joy.
It is important to love oneself and then to love. Again, this is where self-knowledge comes in, I'm not just talking about intellectual understanding of who I am, but empathically embracing all the parts of me, both the parts I like and the parts I don't want to identify with. Because by embracing all your layers, you begin to cultivate compassion, and compassion helps you to get one step closer to love.
Cook with love, love with love, create with love, help with love. And it is true, when we do things with love, they turn out differently, because we feel them differently. Imagine living in love. To live cultivating this feeling from yourself and then sharing it with the world, can there be anything more powerful?
With all the love in the world for Ego, because he has helped us on many occasions, however, he is one of the greatest exploiters and defamers of love. It is thanks to him that we fall into these substitutes for love: to love the other only when he gives us what we need, to help expecting something in return... It is very easy to love from a satisfied ego, but can you love equally when it goes against what that ego wants?
Love is cultivated and, when you are in love, love increases exponentially.
Discover the feeling of love and how to cultivate it. And the importance of boundaries with love. At Merak we accompany you on your journey of self-knowledge, creating that safe space of exploration where you can listen to yourself and get to know yourself. With love.
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