The trail of posts here haunts me. Love. Self-love. Just love yourself. It’s within you. Lah lah lah…
Is it that simple? If so, why don’t we all melt daily in an overflowing resonating feast fest of the love we are? Besides the daily dauntings of demand, we have things to heal. How? Just fix it? Just grab the ole wrench and give it a twist. Careful there as you hold the mirror AND hold the wrench AND read the manual AND pull back the layer of soul AND finish the homework AND prepare dinner for…
I love this quote. It’s a bit clinical sounding but it reaches into the truth of it all…
“Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn’t fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone’s relationships today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child’s mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.”
A General Theory of Love – Lewis, M.D., Amini, M.D., Lannon, M.D.
Limbic connection…neural patterns. Blah. And yet, not blah. It’s about the organism that is person and comprises the brain’s historical collections and circuits. And it’s all connected to…now. I look on this and on love and on healing and recognize, today especially, that without the kind of resonance that draws me away from self-hatred, away from self-sabotage, I can only continue along the same patterns. Duh, right? But it’s intense work. It’s not what happens when you stay in one place and hold to the same influences. You have to reach out and grab hold of someone who can allow your clinging to the leg a bit, to the standard of something less hurtful than anything you’ve known before. Maybe even a bond revolutionary. (And yes, it, too, can be done while holding to the world of people you’ve always known but prepare yourself for the total shift!)
We get to that love within by finding connection(s) that draw us up and out of our usual understanding of love, of life and of self.
The problem with therapy is the $$ required to get there. That’s why I find myself confident the Universe is love. Life has a way of sending people to continue the work started by those I simply cannot afford (quite literally!) to know. One person and then another, all a song of healing for the open heart (or even just slightly ajar…). It’s possible, as we realize this work of healing is the essential wholly legitimate business of our lives, life will persistently send just the right “limbic bonds” to help us along, to move us into new territory without total terrifying warfare (or WITH IT but also with support!).
I ramble…but the point is love. It ain’t simple. It ain’t easy but it sure is worth it. Here’s to those who add to the process of growth and change…to the work/rest of accessing the love within…
J. Ruth Kelly 
nothing is easy,
everything is perception,
as in the eye of the beholder,
real love is hard to find,and keep.
I know that I am a lucky one!
I really enjoy your writing 🙂 Thanks!
Peace to you,
Laz
something i’ve certainly come to recognize is the difficulty of many things and yet. there can be a tremendous internal ease and grace, softening the hardship of any worthwhile endeavor. especially the work/rest of love.
ah. you stepped in the perception zone. now you’ve done it. i’ll have something to say. 🙂 i can only agree that perception is powerful. however, the frog who perceives only a slight increase in temp as the water slowly, very slowly heats up will, all perceptions aside, most assuredly die. and death is no perception for the body, this (at least) we can be sure of. there is, as it turns out, a way to boil a frog: the perception trap supreme. it turns out there is, after all, a stove, a force controlling the temperature under the pot and a fragility to the wellness of the frog. maybe the insane would say said frog is only perceived to be dead. maybe the frog’s spirit is eternal. but her body is definitely a goner if she sticks with her perception of a minor increase in temperature. perception is, at least, the difference (for some situations) between life and death. or maybe between half-life and half-death. 🙂 the frog in me awakened one day, perceptions melted away and i saw the stove, the pot and the wicked chef. i took a flying leap and…(well, now i’m trying to get out of the fire but i hear fried frog legs are grand! oiy!)
all perceptions aside, this is a certainty: it is a comfort to simply experience the truth that love is, isn’t it? because of love, i am. my children are. and it’s a beautiful thing.
thanks for such kind words and presence.
I say yes it is that simple.
and I say, yea woman, that the universe is love. I also believe that it is in a constant state of dynamic diffusion. This to me means that the dynamism of love is fused throughout the whole and it is a matter of latching onto that “universal” love and alowwing it be absorbed into one’s own heart or soul.
The more it is diffused the stronger it becomes and therein lies the paradox. As each person absorbs it into themselves. it causes its own regeneration and is refelected back out into the world for others to observe and attach themselves to it.
I experience a both/and world. It is both that simple and yet it is that difficult, that complicated when we’re healing layers of soul and trying to give ourselves to life/love. When we experience loss with others and within our own work of healing, it’s difficult. We are torn. We are bereft. We are hurt when a love venture, of any kind, becomes difficult or fails to measure up to our expectations, even when we know we are connected and absorbing love into our own hearts and souls.
So glad to hear from you…keep on lovin’ . . .
God, God, God. I needed this. You make me smile so big and recognize the “angels” life has sent me in lieu of my therapist which I can no longer afford either….or whose high fees I’m choosing to spend elsewhere at the moment! It really is a lovely journey, isn’t it? I forget that sometimes….how very LOVED and CARED FOR we are. THANK YOU Angelic Woman! Big Hugs and Cheers and Namaste. 🙂
It certainly can be a lovely journey and that much richer for releasing our resistance to the ups and downs of it all. We may not get the “ideal” we feel is supreme but … we get love/loved anyway. Great stuff. Peace…
Life has a way of meeting us where we are if we keep looking for it. Catharsis around every corner. Simple, no – worthwhile…absolutely.
well said. it can be such a rich journey. i love how we have the power to redeem the losses. we can’t bring some things back but we sure can learn, make meaning.