Love Is a Way of Being

Love isn't something that someone causes us to feel, but a state of being that we experience whenever we are fully present in the moment to whatever or whomever is showing up. Love is our natural state, and we experience our natural state whenever the chattering mind is quiet or simply ignored. This state of being is one of peace, acceptance, and love. The only thing that can interfere with experiencing the love of our true nature is absorption in our thoughts and any feelings generated by those thoughts. When we are lost in our mental and emotional world, we miss out on reality, on the real experience of this moment. In our mental world, thoughts about life substitute for real life. When we drop out of these thoughts about ourselves and how our life is going, life can be experienced more purely, and when it is, love naturally flows to whatever or whomever we are experiencing.

Love is a way of being with others. When we are attentive, curious, and interested in others, love naturally flows to them from inside us. This outward flow of love is the experience of love. This flow of love is not dependent on who or what is in front of us, on what someone is doing, or on whether someone is being loving toward us, but on whether we are fully engaged with and accepting of that person and whatever is happening in the moment. Love is a state of being that is activated by giving attention to something or someone.

Many of us experience an absence or lack of love because we are giving our attention to thoughts about life instead of real life. When we give attention to our thoughts about life, we are loving our mental world, and that mental world isn't real, and it is very often a negative world, where nothing and no one is ever good enough. When we are invested in this mental world, our conditioned beliefs, judgments, fears, desires, and expectations seem really important, and these are what cause problems in our relationships. We think we need people to be a certain way for us to love them and be happy with them, but that just isn't true. It just seems true because we tend to choose to love (accept and give attention to) those who look and do things the way we want.

But love doesn't have to be limited in this way. We can choose to love even when others aren't meeting our desires or fitting our fantasies and expectations. Our conditioned ideas and desires are not more important than love, unless we allow them to be, which is a recipe for difficulty in relationship. When we can move beyond our desires, needs, expectations, fantasies, and judgments, then love is possible with anyone at any time. That doesn't mean you would choose to be in a relationship with just anyone, but it is possible to experience love in relating to anyone, since love comes from being interested in, attentive to, and accepting of someone, which is possible when we are not judging them or finding reasons to close our hearts to them and withdraw our interest and attention.

Love is something we have the power to experience because we have the power to give love. When we give love, we experience it; when we withhold it, we don't. The more we can overcome the judgments and other conditioning that cause us to withhold our love (i.e., our acceptance and attention) from others, the more we will experience love. It is as simple as that, but not necessarily easy to put into practice. We tend to really believe our judgments and other ideas that cause us to close our hearts to others, but we don't have to. We can say no to the judgments and other conditioning that interfere with love. When we do so, our experience of life is transformed. Love is readily available whenever we turn away from our judgments and negative conditioning and allow ourselves to be fully engaged with and interested in the real person in front of us.

Gina Lake is a spiritual teacher who is devoted to helping others awaken and live in the moment through her many books, online courses, and intensives. She is also a gifted intuitive with a master's degree in counseling psychology and over twenty years experience supporting people in their spiritual growth. Her website offers information about her books, free e-books, book excerpts, a free monthly newsletter, a blog, and audio and video recordings: http://www.radicalhappiness.com

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