“People say I love you all the time — when they say, ‘take an umbrella, it’s raining,’ or ‘hurry back,’ or even ‘watch out, you’ll break your neck.’ There are hundreds of ways of wording it — you just have to listen for it, my dear.”
—John Patrick
Last week I found a video my partner made for me a couple of years ago as a birthday present. Watching this video brought tears to my eyes and a warm feeling to my heart. It brought back some of the memories of the beginning of our relationship.
When expressing my gratitude to my partner I couldn’t help but to mention how I’d love if he did something romantic like that in the future as well.
Since I know how our experience of life is always uniquely created, what came to me in that moment was also to ask what he thought was romantic.
When I myself always considered expressions of love with words and flowers as something romantic, he’s answer completely surprised me.
In his point of view preparing me breakfast or taking me out to the cinema or a musical was romantic. And these were things that he was continuously offering to do and I had innocently been taking for granted, without recognizing they were his ways of expressing love.
It made me once again to wake up back to the reality how love is something that is always there present for us, if only we are able to go beyond our own limited way of seeing life and experience it.
When we feel like there’s something missing
This is something that I keep on seeing deeper and deeper when it comes to both my life and relationships.
Whenever we feel like there’s something missing, we are always caught up in our own limited thinking.
We may believe that in order for us to feel good and feel loved the other person needs to act in a certain way. They need to love us, be more romantic, show their appreciation or listen to us more.
However, whenever we think like that we don’t recognize what is the true source of the love that we want to experience.
We don’t recognize that love is not something that we can give or receive, but something that is already there for us to experience, regardless of the other person or our outside circumstances.
Love that is always there
Love is something that is already there. It is who we are from the essence of our being.
And as soon as our thinking calms down and we let go of our personal thinking in the moment, we are able to experience this love. We are able to experience our own true nature.
This is true for everyone of us and something that naturally happens when we first fall in love. When we are still learning to get to know the other person and we let go of our ideas and beliefs and become present, we experience love.
We experience the other person more for who they truly are.
Love simply is.
What stops us from experiencing love
What stops us from experiencing love is when we lose our awareness of what is. When we begin to live more in our heads instead of living in the present moment.
When we begin to believe that we already know the other person, and know what they are going to say before they even open up their mouths.
When we begin to listen more to our thoughts about the other person, instead of being present with them and listening to them.
When we stop being open to learn more about our partner, or life in general.
As soon as we leave the present moment and we get into our heads and don’t recognize what is going on, we lose our awareness of what is and stop experiencing love.
The love never disappears, but we can only ever lose our awareness of it.
Our way back to love
Our awareness is always our way back to love.
Recognizing how whenever we feel unloved or feel like there’s something missing, we are caught up in our own thinking and cannot see the present moment clearly.
Recognizing how behind every feeling, there’s a thought and how our experience is always thought created.
The more aware we can become of this, the less caught up we get in our heads and the more we are able to experience what is. The more we are able to experience love.
Still years after coming across this understanding it surprises me how our relationships can change in a heartbeat.
All we need is a shift in our understanding, and we can go from feeling unloved to experiencing the love that is already there.
Our understanding deepens, our relationships get affected and the love we get to experience reaches new dimensions.
Heidi Paavilainen
Sharing an understanding that allows us to connect more with that deeper part within us, so that we can find our own answers from within, find that greater sense of wellbeing and have relationships that feel good.
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