Removing the Barriers to Love
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
-Rumi
The one thing we all have in common is the desire for love. Not just romantic love, but all love.
Love is why we live. It is the great motivator, the impulse that propels life’s movement.
We seek to find a partner we love, get a job we love, to create a home we love, to participate in activities we love. In an ideal world, we’d love every aspect of our lives in every moment.
Love is why we recognize beauty, it is why we are capable of compassion, it is why we are curious to learn and eager to experience more.
So why in the world do we build barriers against love?
The answer is fear.
We fear the pain of love lost, we fear the pain of love never received, we fear the pain of love with nowhere to go.
These fears are all based on the illusion of separation.
Related: Life Beyond Fear
The assumption is that because love is the source of connection and relationship, it must link two objects in order to exist.
But what we fail to remember is that love is all encompassing.
It the very source of all that is, including both the objects and the links between them.
We try to pick and choose the parts of love that we find favorable, yet love cannot be broken apart. The only things that can be lost are the incomplete images we mistake for the totality of love.
Related: How to Let Go — The Power of Surrender
Love is the force of life, and if the nature of life is change, (which it is,) then the nature of love must also be change.
So if you want to love life, then you must open yourself up to all of the ever-changing manifestations of love, too. But to open yourself up, you first have to recognize the barriers you’ve built within yourself against it.
How can you find your barriers to love?
You can recognize the barriers that you’ve built within yourself through your suffering.
It might be as subtle as a tight sensation in your shoulders, chest, or stomach. It might be a destructive behavior or thought pattern you’ve noticed yourself repeating. It might be anxiety, depression, frustration, jealousy, or restlessness.
Anytime you close your heart off, you suffer. You wouldn’t suffer if your heart were open.
Related: 10 Science-Backed Strategies to Help You Manage Anxiety Holistically
When you live life open-heartedly, on the other hand, even pain doesn’t cause you to suffer.
You are able to see beauty in even the most difficult experiences and embrace them as part of life’s great unfolding. As a result, you don’t just feel better yourself, you’re also able to shine your light more brightly on others, too.
Related: How to Transcend the Ego and Find Peace Now
When you discover a place in which you’re blocked, the task is not to fight against it.
Anything you push against within yourself will only push back and become stronger. Even the barriers to love must be loved, or you’ll just be building another barrier.
When you notice a barrier to love within yourself, your task is to soften around it.
When you do this, you may feel a great pressure building up inside of you. As much as you can, love that too. Soften into it. Let it be present within you and welcome it in.
That pressure is life-force energy pushing its way through your barriers.
When you let yourself to sit in this pressure, without indulging it or fighting against it, you open yourself up to allow love to flow through you.
Like water breaking through a dam, and little by little, the barriers to love are then allowed to morph into something new.
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