Rediscovering Love

From the moment we emerge into the world our experience of life becomes a desperate search to fulfill our needs. The experience of being in the womb is one of unconditional love. It is a place of warmth, comfort, silence and deep fulfilment. All our needs are met without question and we evolve and grow unimpeded by any lack of nourishment or fear. Yet the moment of birth, is the first and most traumatic moment of our lives. As we emerge from the quiet unconditional protection of the womb into a cold, vast and confusing world we experience that first gut-wrenching feeling of primal fear that will set the stage for the experience of the rest of our lives.

In our infancy we soon begin to realize that the reality of this world is very different from the one from which we have just emerged. In this world, lack is a reality we must all experience. Needs cannot always be met. As we cry for our mothers to feed us, to clean us, to soothe us we realize more and more that we must rely on another being to take care of our needs. It doesn't just happen on its own. More importantly we become aware of the distance both physical and emotional between ourselves and those around us. How the love and affection of others is not always and easily available. A deep sense of isolation and disconnect slowly begins to creep into the fabric of our self-identities and we begin to crave more and more what we find we cannot have.

An Existence based on Need

And so it continues into childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Some of us experience family lives full of laughter, love and acceptance. Some of us experience childhoods filled with drama, heartbreak and confusion. Still others have experiences of violence, hatred and abuse. While the upbringing we've had holds a strong bearing on how we evolve as individuals and with regards to our future relationships, our family experience is only a single slice of the pie. As we grow older our relationships within school, high school, college and further into society play a large part in influencing how we evolve in our self-perception, our perceptions of others and how we come to perceive Love.

Each one of you will have experienced rejection, chastisement, humiliation, alienation, aggression, hatred and even violence. If you didn't experience it at home, you have at school or at camp or college or work or in a number of other societal interactions. And every one of those experiences is a harsh reminder of that singular moment of intense trauma you once experienced, that moment of birth when your entire world was taken away from you and you were delivered into the desolation that is this reality. And although those memories are locked away deep within your subconscious, you experience that trauma over and over again every day.

And still we find ourselves motivated by a strange, even irrational drive. It is the hope that somewhere and somehow we will find completion; that we can become whole again. This drive also emerges from the subconscious need to return to that state of perfect contentment we once experienced while within the womb. After all if we had never experienced such wholeness before, how would we even know to look for it? We may not be completely conscious of it but that is the overarching need that drives us.

This need is evident everywhere you look around you. It shows itself in the drive of the young salesman, in the ambition of the athlete, in the aspirations of the school girl, in the greed of the businessman, in the lust of the adulterer, in the practice of the disciple, in the actions of a thief, in the loneliness of the unwed 30-something yr. old, in the quiet desperation of the unhappy stay at home mom, in the perversion of the sex offender. Different degrees, different flavors, with different impacts and different consequences, some more destructive than others. Yet they all stem from the same one need - the deep subconscious need to be whole again. After all each one of these people started the same way as an infant that emerged from the womb. Not one of these individuals sat up all night plotting away within the placenta on how they were going to grow up to become a salesperson, an athlete, a drama queen or a mass murderer. Every life begins in pure innocence. Yet with the first shocking breath of oxygen and exposure to the elements, something fractures within the psyche. For some that fracture remains relatively small and more manageable, for a few it is severe and can become further aggravated by circumstance.

Yet, regardless of how large the fracture, it happens to all of us. And in that no one is unique.   

The Quest for Completion

The search for wholeness, to become complete, is really a search for the conditions we once experienced within the womb. It is the search for unconditional Love. What we perceive as love in our society today is that elusive image that is perpetuated by our driving need and feelings of lack. It doesn't help that this is constantly reiterated, revalidated and reflected back to us in the media. We as a species have misunderstood what Love is all about.

Think for a moment on what your first experience of Love was. It was when you, as an infant, turned to your mother or father to feed you, to keep you warm, to protect you, to give you security. Love became immediately synonymous with Need at that point. You came to associate loving those whom you perceived as being attentive to what you needed. And even though those needs couldn’t be met a hundred per cent of the time, through perfecting the sophisticated art of crying, cooing and tantrums you learned how to sufficiently manipulate your environment and your caregivers into maximizing their attention, both physical and emotional.

Fast-forward to adulthood and our perceptions of Love as a society are not very different. When searching for a mate or companion we have a tendency to approach people we meet with a preconceived list in mind of what we would want our perfect mate to look like: their physical appearance, their personality traits, their sense of humour, the sexual chemistry, the financial security, the potential for variety and adventure, the emotional maturity, the willingness to communicate or whatever criteria that we believe will fulfil us. And while we may be able to skillfully rationalize to ourselves that we are looking for an experience to "share" our lives with someone, what we are really looking for is someone who will take care of our needs. And in return we may even be willing to take care of some of theirs if necessary.

In effect, what we are subconsciously striving for is that mate who will make us whole again, complete again - our soul mate, our white knight or princess who will give us that elusive ‘happily ever after’ that they always talk about in fairy tales. That happily ever after was what we experienced in the womb and even that didn’t last. It never does. Because there is no such thing as an "ever after", there is only ever this present moment and the reality that it brings with it.

In actuality, that entire journey of Life is really one of a personal deconstruction followed by a reintegration. That initial fracture that occurred in our psyches at childbirth forms more cracks and fissures as we grow and evolve through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. Yet there comes a point in our lives, when the collective weight of all these cumulative traumas begins to weigh unbearably on us. We come to see little by little, how every hope, every dream, every fantasy we have ever had about Life, Love and Peace was just our mind's way of coping with the unbearable trauma that was too difficult to see, too difficult to expose to the light of day.

Hiding our wounds behind protective armor doesn't help them to heal rather it causes them to fester. And yet, we are convinced that we must walk about in each other's company wearing our masks and armors of protection hoping that no one else will ever perceive how vulnerable and naked we really are beneath it all. All of this posing and posturing, role playing and power games we play with ourselves and others are nothing more than coping mechanisms to distract us from taking a closer look at ourselves, at those primal wounds that still exist unhealed and deeply painful. 

Reintegrating Our Selves

Our quest to find Love in truth is nothing more than the quest to heal, to become whole again. That can only begin when we are willing to turn our attention away from the world and from other people and take a deep, penetrating look within ourselves at all the ways we feel hurt, unfairly treated, unloved and unworthy. That is where the healing begins - with sincerity. Only by exposing your wounds to the sun can the wounds being to heal in its unconditional warmth. Judging your wounds through blame or guilt only aggravates them and prevents healing. The only way you can begin to experience the joy of unconditional Love again is to realize that the capacity for it lies deep within you. You are your own first candidate.  No one else can give you what you crave because they do not have it to give it. They are all, just like you, craving the same experience. One starving man cannot satisfy the hunger of another starving man.  Don’t be afraid to show your wounds to the world. It may be unnerving, frightening even but it is the most courageous choice you can ever make. It is your choice to be authentically you, without a costume and without your armour. Rest assured no matter how invincible or powerful those around you look, they are hurting and suffering underneath just the same as you.  Learn to look beneath the surface.

As this process of reintegration begins, you slowly begin to come together, piece by piece, healing one psychological fracture after the other. And as each fracture heals, simultaneously another lack is fulfilled. In its place instead is a feeling of abundance, of uncaused fulfillment. Yet in other areas, the lack persists and can and will disconcert you. You will experience fear many times as you go through this process and will relapse into old ways of thinking repeatedly. At times you will feel content and lacking nothing and at others you will feel desolate and needy. Each fissure must be sealed, each wound must be healed. But once the integration begins it cannot be stopped. It is a process that is beyond your control that will shape the very way you view yourself.

This is a journey back to Love.  Not the love of the fractured mind, the need based, conditional, contextual love that is here one day and gone the next when circumstances become less favorable. This is not the love that can be broken up, divorced, betrayed or forgotten. This is the Love that is whole and intact in and of itself because it emerges from a vast and infinite wellspring that is no one person’s property yet all of us are extensions of it. This is the Love of your own true Nature and it is unconditional and unsurpassable.

As you heal layer by layer, from the more surface wounds to those deep and dark almost undetectable primal wounds within your being you will feel more and more connected to and moved by a sense of this place of Love. Slowly you will witness a transformation in your attitudes, your thoughts, your words, your actions and your relationships. As you being to experience this Love that lies in the core of your being, so will you begin to express it and bring it into your Life.  There comes a point when the warmth of the love becomes so palpable and so present that it begins to dominate the experience of your Life. Then Love, not need, becomes the new backdrop of your story.

Your relationship with others: family, friends, children and your mate will transform because this is not a Love that seeks anything outside itself. It is abundant and already fulfilled. This is a Love that gives to any and all that need. It is the Love of unconditional acceptance - of yourself and of others.   The journey back to wholeness is complete. We have found once again what we have craved from the moment of birth, what we experienced within the womb. And yet what has taken the place of that simple innocence of being is a deep wisdom. It is the wisdom that recognizes that the contentment we felt in the womb always lay within us.