Love

Love: Why We Do What We Do

Originally posted at: http://hubpages.com/hub/Love-Why-We-Do-What-We-Do

When you look back on your life I am sure it is filled with a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant memories. There were times when you felt great love, anger, peace, hatred, laughter, resentment, joy and grief. There were times when people treated you in ways that exceeded your expectations and other times when you wished people treated you better. You may have often wondered at why people did what they did, what their motivation was to be so kind or so despicable.

As I was meditating last week a flood of memories pushed up from my subconscious. I remembered all kinds of interactions with people and the corresponding feelings from those moments past. A whirl of emotions ran through me. After they passed a realization dawned. Every experience I have had, no matter if I labeled it good or bad, was an act of love.

How can this be?! You might ask your self. I understand that all the good things I've experienced are an act of love, but how can the bad be love too? You might say. If you take the time to observe the interactions you have with people you might notice one familiar component. Almost everyone you interact with is gaining your attention or giving you attention.

How they do that is an individual preference based on how they were raised, taught to behave, and a little of their own experimentation in the process. Maybe they buy you flowers, clean the house before you get home, hit you, call you names, flatter you, give you a massage, cook you dinner, or undermine your confidence. Some are easier to digest, and some are perverted actions of the initial impulse. Many people are unconscious and do the nice things out of compulsion or fear because they don't want to lose you. Others act in menacing ways because they don't know any better. The point is, in any interaction there is an exchange of attention. It is attention that is love.

Many years ago I discovered that no matter what healing protocol I chose from, the force that empowered all healing was attention. The clearer my attention, the less of an agenda I had to disrupt my attention, the more authentic was the healing experience. The same holds true in all human interactions. The clearer and less distracted your attention is on the person in which you are interacting, the greater the love that is generated.

When you decide to give someone attention with conditions, you are giving conditional love, which may be helpful when certain conditions are met. You say, "I will give you love when you stop nagging me, or when you learn to appreciate how I'm different than you!" Then you wait for the love to be returned and they do the same, providing the same conditions. Really, if you are nagging a person to stop nagging you so that you can give them love, its the same thing.

They nag you because they want you to be different, because their mind impels them to think your life would be better if you were different. That's love. Why? Because the motivation behind it is your highest in best (as they see it). You hope they will be different because you really would like to spend some "quality time" (by your standards) with them without all the stress. That's love too.

Now back to my point. It may not be that people will give you love the way you want it, but they will give you love the way they know how. It may not be pleasant, but it is still love nonetheless. In unpleasant situations you don't always have to accept the conditional love you are being given. You can remove your self from the situation, and that is sometimes necessary and beneficial. However, if you decide to love without condition, which also means without expectations, you may catch a glimpse of real love at work within your relationships.

By expectations I mean that you do not expect the people in your life to be any different than they have proven to be in the past. When you can love them as they are, you in turn will set the example to be loved as you are. You will bring into the relationship a dynamic they have never experienced before: peace, acceptance, and no standards (unspoken or not) to live up to.

All of this begins with you and no one else. It is your responsibility, whether you want it or not. When you claim it for your self, you will find the strength of love in your life that you have been looking for all this time.

Sri Yukteswar - Selected Sayings
"Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love."

"The Virture of Love the Heart’s natural love is the principal requisite to attain a holy life. When this love, the heavenly gift of Nature, appears in the heart, it removes all causes of excitation from the system and cools it down to a perfectly normal state; and, invigorating the vital powers, expels all foreign matters- the germs of diseases-by natural ways (perspiration and so forth). It thereby makes man perfectly healthy in body and mind, And enables him to understand properly the guidance of Nature. "

" When this love becomes developed in man it makes him able to understand the real position of his own Self as well as of others surrounding him "

Best Wishes,
Ryan Kurczak