Humans seek love.
It is a natural proclivity to want to be loved. But, as seekers of love and one who wants to be loved, there is something you must do to get it: you have to give pure conscious love. Gary Chapman, in The Five Love Languages, says there is a language to love. There are keys to keeping love alive. Even if you are starry-eyed in love in the beginning, pure conscious love is full of nuances, languages and complexities to discover.
Get the love you want, but it may not be easy. It is glamorous, even sensual, to believe that romance is easy. Poets write that it is. Singers sing that love is blind. Comedians make you laugh about love. Yet, compassionate love evolves and returns over and over again. That love cycle of evolution and return implies a sense of detachment which is oxymoronic to how one is conditioned to think about love. Love = attachment, oneness, togetherness; this is how romantic love is taught.
Love is a verb.
Dr. Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen Lakelly Hunt think love is a verb. “Love as a verb isn’t dependent on how you feel or even what you think. Instead you make an unconditional commitment to the other person” explains Harville Hendrix, PhD. These two successful marriage therapist authored Getting the Love You Want have unraveled the mystery of romantic attraction.
There is a biology to love. Each person is conditioned to identify a love mate either through biological or emotional senses. Couple therapists, such as Chapman or Hendrix and Hunt, believe lasting romantic attraction depends on pure conscious love which takes away the learned notion of dependency or conditionality. The paradox here is that adult pure conscious love is mostly about letting go of your leftover unmet childhood needs and committing to the safe care of the other person fully trusting that they too will meet your same need for safe, loving care.
At this point, pure consciousness has replaced romantic, dreamlike images of love. You are secure. Hendrix says, “Your survival is secured because when you surrender your focus on getting your own needs met, your relationship with your partner will change. It’s not manipulative—you’re genuinely caring for your partner, who knows it.”
Figure it out.
Pure conscious love starts with completeness. What do you love? Start there, ponder and write out what you love over and over again until you have distilled that need or want into a true definition of pure consciousness. Drill down, dip deep. Write your ” I love” statement from the perspective of survival; that’s what you ultimately want-you want a relationship love that survives.
I LOVE _________________
You fill in the blank.
What is it? What would it take for you to share what you love and trust that love to survive? Captioning what you love is not easy. You have to first sift through your past-past hurts, past mistakes, past unmet needs which soured your ability to trust and heal those wounds. Oftentimes, relationships start and eventually end because each person expected the other to complete them. You have to heal, mend and complete yourself first.
Take time to re-orient to what makes you smile. Set your compass to find again what is it that makes you shout or dance with passion. Feel again what is it that captures a special soul space which is just for you. Spend the time to figure out how you love.
We spend so much energy on daily tasks, appointments, meetings, travel, telephone, events, children, family, friends, and other attention grabbers that pausing to catch your breath becomes an exercise of pleasure. All good, but pure conscious love needs committed attention. Slow life down even more, penetrate even deeper, on love. Couples who last usually are not conventional in their love. They create the space for each other to live their love, let it evolve and then return again.
Julie Rainbow wrote Standing the Test of Time as a tribute to couples married fifty years or more. Sometime or another these couples, who tell their marriage story in the book, wrote their “I love” statement in their own way and survived the ephemeral romance of love.
Do the same, write a one line sentence–I love _________ –at whatever stage of love you are in–without attachment or past conditioning to get the pure conscious love that you want. There is a love language, it’s one you write for the other person and the one they write for you.
Marcus Aurelius:
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious
privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to
enjoy, to love.”
Anita Jefferson is a contributing blogger for JenningsWire, a blogging community created by Annie Jennings.
